Books
Whilst Hungarian travelogues are relatively few and far between, there are plenty of books on the country’s history and politics, with some particularly fine accounts of the 1956 Uprising, and the changes of 1989. There are also several particularly memorable accounts of the Holocaust.
Hungary has a fabulously rich literary heritage, and approach to the genre has greatly improved in recent years, thanks in no small part to the success of authors such as the Nobel-prize-winning Imre Kertész, and the wider availability of translations of works by the likes of Antal Szerb, Sándor Márai and Péter Esterházy.
Worth consulting is the respected Hungarian Quarterly (www.hungarianquarterly.com), which features extensive translations of Hungarian fiction and poetry, while Hungarian Literature (Babel Guides) is an informative guide to the best Hungarian fiction, drama and poetry in translation, also with selected excerpts. Most of Budapest’s better bookshops have a good range and can take orders, whilst works by nineteenth-century authors such as Mór Jókai are most likely found in secondhand bookshops (see Budapest “Listings”).
Travel writing
Patrick Leigh Fermor A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. In 1934 the young Leigh Fermor started walking from Holland to Turkey, reaching Hungary in the closing chapter of A Time of Gifts. In Between the Woods and the Water the Gypsies and rusticated aristocrats of the Great Plain and Transylvania are superbly evoked. Lyrical and erudite.
Ruth Gruber Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Central and Eastern Europe. The most comprehensive guide to Jewish sights in Hungary (amongst other countries), as well as lively historical accounts of pre-World War II Jewish communities and cultures.
Brian Hall Stealing from a Deep Place. In 1982 Hall cycled through Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria and came up with this engaging portrayal of rural life in southeastern Europe. The account of the several months he spent in Budapest is particularly absorbing.
Gyula Illyés People of the Puszta. An unsentimental, sometimes horrifying, immersion in the life of the landless peasantry of prewar Hungary, mainly in Transdanubia. Illyés, one of Hungary’s greatest writers, was born into such a background, and the book breathes authenticity.
Claudio Magris Danube. Magris undertakes an epic voyage along the course of Europe’s most romantic river, blending travel narrative, history and anecdote to wonderful effect.
Walter Starkie Raggle-Taggle. The wanderings of a Dublin professor with a fiddle, who bummed around Budapest and the Plain in search of Gypsy music in the 1920s. First published in 1933 and last issued in 1973.
History, politics and society
Judit Frigyesi Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-century Budapest. Placing Bartók in his cultural milieu, this is an excellent account of the Hungarian intellectual world at the beginning of the twentieth century.
András Gero Modern Hungarian Society in the Making: The Unfinished Experience. A good collection of essays setting Hungary in the context of the Eastern European environment.
Jörg K Hoensch A History of Modern Hungary 1867–1994. A good history of the country on its way from tragedy to tragedy, but with a happy(ish) outcome.
László Kontler Millennium in Central Europe: A History of Hungary. Another very thorough and reliable history of the country, although its slightly archaic wording lets it down.
Paul Lendvai The Hungarians: 1000 Years of Victory in Defeat. Refreshing and authoritative book on Hungary’s complex history, with particularly stimulating accounts of the Treaty of Trianon and the subsequent Nazi and Communist tyrannies – fascinating pictures, too. Lendvai’s One Day that Shook the World is a superb, first-hand account of the 1956 Uprising.
Bill Lomax Hungary 1956. Still one of the best – and shortest – books on the Uprising, by an acknow-ledged expert. Lomax also edited Eyewitness in Hungary, an anthology of accounts by foreign Communists (most of them sympathetic to the Uprising) that vividly depicts the elation, confusion and tragedy of the events of October 1956.
John Lukács Budapest 1900. Excellent and very readable account of the politics and society of Budapest at the turn of the twentieth century, during a golden age that was shortly to end.
Jonathan Matthews Explosion –Hungarian Revolution. The author, a journalist with Radio Free Europe at the time, provides another illuminating ringside account of the revolution in this voluminous tome, which also features some excellent photos.
George Mikes A Study in Infamy. Better known in the West for his humorous writings, Mikes here exposes the activities of the secret police during the Rákosi era. Based on captured documents which explain their methods of surveillance and use of terror as a political weapon.
Miklós Molnár A Concise History of Hungary. Dry but comprehensive thousand-year history of Hungarian land, people, culture and economy, right up until the 1998 elections.
Victor Sebestyen Twelve Days. This fascinating, blow-by-blow account of those tumultuous days in 1956 is a lucid and engrossing read, with detailed background coverage of the events leading up to the Uprising as well as an in-depth look at its aftermath.
Michael Stewart The Time of the Gypsies. Based on anthropological research in a Gypsy community in Hungary, this superb book presents Gypsy culture as a culture, and not as a parasitic body on society, as it is widely perceived in Hungary and elsewhere.
Peter Sugar (ed) A History of Hungary. A useful, not too academic, survey of Hungarian history from pre-Conquest times to the close of the Kádár era, with a brief epilogue on the transition to democracy.
Literature
Anthologies
Loránt Czigány (ed) The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Present. Probably the most comprehensive collection in print to date. In chronological order, with good coverage of the political and social background.
György Gömöri (ed) The Colonnade of Teeth. A strange title, but a very satisfactory introduction to the work of the country’s finest twentieth-century poets.
Michael March (ed) Description of a Struggle. A collection of contemporary Eastern European prose, featuring four pieces by Hungarian writers including Nádas and Esterházy.
George Szirtes (ed) Leopard V: An Island of Sound. Superbly compiled anthology featuring the cream of Hungarian prose and poetry from the end of World War II through to 1989, including Márai, Esterházy and Nagy.
Poetry
Endre Ady Poems of Endre Ady. Arguably the finest Hungarian poet of the twentieth century, Ady’s allusive verses are notoriously difficult to translate, but here, the linguist and poet Anton Nyerges has succeeded brilliantly. Explosive Country is a collection of essays about his homeland.
George Faludy Selected Poems, 1933–80. Fiery, lyrical poetry by a victim of both Nazi and Soviet repression. Themes of political defiance, the nobility of the human spirit, and the struggle to preserve human values in the face of oppression predominate. The author’s cheerfully resigned biographical account of the 1940s and 1950s and the prison camps of the period, My Happy Days in Hell, is also worth reading.
Attila József Selected Poems. Alongside Ady, József remains Hungary’s most celebrated poet, as demonstrated here with a fine selection of hugely affecting poems by the tragic realist who committed suicide in 1937.
Ágnes Nemes Nagy The Night of Akhenaton: Selected Poems. Nagy is a major postwar poet, who often speculates on knowledge and the role of poetry in trying to impose order on the world. Fine translations by the ubiquitous George Szirtes.
Miklós Radnóti Under Gemini: the Selected Poems of Miklós Radnóti, with a Prose Memoir; Foamy Sky: the Major Poems. The two best collections of Radnóti’s sparse, anguished poetry. His final poems, found in his coat pocket after he had been shot on a forced march to a labour camp, are especially moving.
Fiction
Miklós Bánffy The Transylvanian Trilogy. Bánffy’s celebrated trilogy (They Were Found Wanting, They Were Divided, They Were Counted) is a vivid portrayal of the vanished world of pre-World War I Hungary as seen through the eyes of a pair of aristocratic Transylvanian cousins.
Géza Csáth The Magician’s Garden and Other Stories and Opium and Other Stories. Disturbing stories written in the magic realist genre. The author was tormented by insanity and opium addiction, finally killing his wife and then himself in 1918.
Péter Esterházy Celestial Harmonies. Written by a descendant of the famous aristocratic family, this dense, demanding novel chronicles the rise of the Esterházys during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their subsequent downfall under Communism. Other works include The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube), Helping Verbs of the Heart, A Little Hungarian Pornography and She Loves Me.
Tibor Fischer Under the Frog, A Black Comedy. The fictional adventures of two young Hungarian basketball players between the end of World War II and the 1956 Uprising, by the English-born son of Hungarian survivor émigrés. Witty and enjoyable.
Imre Kertész Fateless. Drawing from his own experiences as an Auschwitz survivor, this beautifully moving, Nobel-prize-winning book tells the tale of a young boy’s deportation to, and survival in, a concentration camp. Kertész also wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film version.
Dezso Kosztolányi Skylark. A short and tragic story of an old couple and their beloved child by one of Hungary’s top writers of the twentieth century, in a masterly translation by Richard Aczél and Anna Édes.
Gyula Krúdy Adventures of Sinbad. Stories about a gourmand and womanizer by a popular Hungarian author with similar interests to his hero. Good translation.
Sándor Márai Embers. Atmospheric and moving tale about friendship, love and betrayal by one of Hungary’s most respected pre-World War II writers. Esther’s Inheritance and The Rebels are equally beautiful reads.
Zsigmond Móricz Be Faithful Unto Death. This book, by a major figure in late nineteenth-century Hungarian literature, tells the tale of a young boy growing up in a boarding school in Debrecen, and is helpful in understanding the way Hungarians see themselves – both then and now.
Péter Nádas A Book of Memories. This novel about a novelist writing about a novel caused a sensation when it appeared in 1998. A Proustian account of bisexual relationships, Stalinist repression and modern-day Hungary in a brilliant translation by Iván Sanders.
Giorgio and Nicola Pressburger Homage to the Eighth District. Evocative tales of Jewish life in Budapest, before, during and after World War II, by twin brothers who fled Hungary in 1956.
Magda Szabó The Door. A beautiful and poignant story by one of Hungary’s foremost female writers, which tells of the deepening relationship between a writer and her housekeeper.
Antal Szerb Journey by Moonlight. This recently translated Hungarian classic, written in 1937, tells the story of a Hungarian businessman on honeymoon in Italy who embarks upon a mystical and dazzling journey through the country. Superbly translated by Len Rix, as is Szerb’s excellent Pendragon Legend, a mysterious, and often humorous, tale of a young Hungarian scholar’s involvement with an aristocratic family in North Wales.
Biography and autobiography
John Bierman The Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy: the Real English Patient. Engaging, if somewhat dry, portrayal of Laszlo Almasy, the enigmatic Hungarian explorer, soldier and spy. For most people, Almasy first came to light as the fictional character in Michael Ondaatje’s Booker-winning novel (and later an Oscar-winning film), The English Patient.
Magda Dénes Castles Burning: A Child’s Life in War. A moving biographical account of the Budapest ghetto and postwar escape to France, Cuba and the United States, seen through the eyes of a Jewish girl. The author died in December 1966, shortly before the book she always wanted to write was published.
Paul Hoffmann The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: the Story of Paul Erdöss and the Search for Mathematical Truth. The amazing story of a Hungarian-born mathematician who became a legend. Totally dedicated to his goal, he wandered from friend to friend with his possessions in a few carrier bags, concerned with nothing but mathematics. Affectionate, engaging account of this genius and his world.
Erno Szép The Smell of Humans. In this superb and harrowing memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary, the author reflects upon his time interned in a forced labour camp.
Marcus Tanner The Raven King. This compelling true story charts the deeds of the fifteenth-century Hungarian warrior-king and renowned bibliophile, Matthias Corvinus (aka the Raven King), and his attempt to amass one of the finest libraries in all of Europe. The library’s subsequent disappearance at the hands of the Ottomans led to an intriguing quest to rediscover it some time later. Superbly researched.
Béla Zsolt Nine Suitcases. Originally published in serial form in 1946, this recently translated English version of the author’s experiences in the ghetto of Nagyvárad and as a forced labourer in the Ukraine is one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Intriguingly, it was at Bergen-Belsen that the author met a young boy who would become the book’s translator, Ladislaus Lob.
Foreign writers on Hungary
Heinrich Böll And Where Were You, Adam. A superb short novel by one of the major postwar German novelists, consisting of loosely connected and semi-autobiographical short stories describing the panic-stricken retreat of Hitler’s forces from the puszta before the Red Army in 1944.
Hans Habe Black Earth. The story of a peasant’s commitment to the Communist underground and his disillusionment with the Party in power; a good read.
Cecilia Holland Rakossy and The Death of Attila. Two well-crafted historical romances: Rakossy is a bodice-ripping tale of a shy Austrian princess wed to an uncouth Magyar baron, braving Turkish hordes on the Hungarian marches; The Death of Attila evokes the Huns, Romans and Goths of the Dark Ages, pillaging around the Danube.
Miscellaneous
Györgyi Éri et al A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896–1914. Hungary’s Art Nouveau age in a beautiful coffee-table volume.
János Gerle et al Budapest: An Architectural Guide. The best guide to the city’s twentieth-century architecture, covering almost 300 buildings.
Gerard Gorman Birds of Hungary. The best book on the country’s ornithological picture by a resident expert. His Birding in Eastern Europe also has good coverage of Hungary’s birds.
Rogan Taylor & Klára Jamrich (eds) Puskás on Puskás. This marvellous book both depicts the life of one of the world’s greatest footballers, and gives a fascinating insight into postwar Communist Hungary.
Ray Keenoy Eminent Hungarians. Everything you need to know about Hungary’s most renowned historical and contemporary figures – from Lajos Kossuth to Harry Houdini.
Stephen Kirkland The Wines and Vines of Hungary. The definitive book on Hungarian wine.
George Lang The Cuisine of Hungary. A well-written and beautifully illustrated work on Hungarian cooking.
Dora Wieberson et al The Architecture of Historic Hungary. Comprehensive survey of Hungarian architecture through the ages.