Generation 1956: The Phenomenon of Ágota Kristóf

Abstract

In this article, the authors consider the work of Ágota Kristóf (1935–2011), a writer who fled from Hungary after the events of 1956 and began to write in French, as a cultural and literary phenomenon of Hungarian emigration, and, more particularly, the part of it that is directly related to the Budapest uprising and the reaction period that followed it. In addition, Kristóf’s famous trilogy about twins ( The Notebook , 1986; The Proof , 1988; The Third Lie , 1991), where politics and psychologism, history and auto-documentalism, acute social, existential, and philosophical aspects are organically intertwined, has all the signs of a European émigré novel of the twentieth century and correlates not only with the works of Hungarian émigré writers, but also with the literary heritage of the Russian, German, and Czech emigration of the twentieth century. The authors polemise with numerous statements by critics, literary critics and journalists, saying that Kristóf’s prose is deprived of a socio-political background, and the writer herself “turns her back upon reality”. The analysis of Kristóf’s three novels leads the authors to conclude that all the values that underlie her plot and compositional constructions have relevance to her only when they are placed against a background of a concrete, quite recognisable historical reality. Each novel has two substantial layers: psychological (philosophical) and socio-political. The first is deeper, more elaborate, but also more unstable, because it includes everything that is related to the sphere of feelings, thoughts, and emotions. The second layer is more external, directly related to the movement of historical time, but it is this layer that determines the types of the main characters, endows the mythological space of existential experiences with concrete recognisable features, and gives the books an inner backbone, making the fragile world of their storyline integral and quite stable.