GYULA KRÚDY’S WORLD

by
GYÖRGY SEBESTYÉN

In that year 1913 in which the 42 year old Marcel Proust published the first volume of his A la recherche du temps perdu at his own expense, after a long and vain search for a publisher, in that last year of peace, the first part of The Crimson Coach, a novel by the 3 5 year old Gyula Krúdy, appeared in Hungary. This coincidence seems strange today, and the inner relationship between Krúdy’s life’s work and Proust’s great novel is as difficult to understand, indeed to start with, it appears to defy explanation.

It is not the stories, the figures, the points of view or the way the two writers structure their work that are similar but the manic and fruitful poses they take up which are essential to their writing and which invite stylization and self-stylization, and then principally the way both men feel about time, the true subject of their epic. Both men liked to give the impression they were amateurs, and both experienced time in a sort of centripetal way, and not as a linear series, in the manner of earlier epic writers.

André Maurois tells that those who knew Proust welcomed the appearance of Swann’s Way with the question: “Marcel Proust? The little Proust from the Ritz?” Krúdy’s drinking companions and various large-hearted ladies asked similar questions whenever the subject was Krúdy’s literary activity. Both writers thought it unworthy of a gentleman to take part in the business of literary life; both needed the pose of the amateur as a stimulant which, given an extreme degree of concentration, ensured ease, and a state of extreme sensitiveness, in other words the ability to apperceive visions, to form them, and to formulate them. It seems to be the case that there is some sort of connection between this peculiar relationship to literature and a sovereign way of perceiving time, which is linked with the rhythm and inspiration of memory. “My book is perhaps a treatise on ‘novels of the unconscious’. I would not hesitate to call them ‘Bergsonian novels’ if I thought them that; but this would not be a precise description.” Proust said. And Krúdy noted on a piece of paper: “Our times are like a small railway station, in whose waiting-room, on a cold night, we, freezing, sick, leaning on each other for support, await a train that got stuck in a blizzard. And the train just doesn’t want to arrive... Why then should we write about this time spent half asleep, half dreaming, crowded together, and jostling for space? When the days will have long departed, and today’s calendars will have faded, present joys and sorrows will have become faint, then I too will surely find something among the withered flowers of these years, which I will pick up with awe, like an old love, and think about, as one falls into thought when one reads that someone is no more whom one has loved once, long ago. As the present turns into the past we shall even be able to count the buttons on a waistcoat better than now when we are tête-à-tête with its greedy, hungry bones,” (Krúdy világa, Krúdy’s world,” Budapest 1964 p. 214.)

Beginnings

Gyula Krúdy de Szécheny-Kovács, an advocate in Debrecen, member of a family which in 17th century documents is on occasion also called Crudi, fought in the Hungarian Honvéd army during the fight for freedom in 1848/49, was promoted to captain, and moved to nearby Nyíregyháza, where the former Honvéds of County Szabolcs chose him to be their chairman. His son, Gyula Krúdy, later advocate in Nyíregyháza, fell in love with his parents’ parlourmaid. Her name was Júlia Csákányi, and she was the daughter of a butcher, who did not even own his own shop let alone a family tree. The union of the young gentleman and the servant girl was, on October 21rst 1878, blessed by the arrival of a healthy male child, also named Gyula Krúdy, which was not altogether right, being illegitimate he should have borne his mother’s name, at least till 1895, when the couple were married after all. Nine more children had followed the birth of the first son, and this had persuaded the good advocate that his misalliance had a delicate permanence.

When Gyula Krúdy, the third of his name was born, Nyíregyháza had 24,102 inhabitants, a County Court, an Inspectorate of Taxes, an Office of the Tobacco Monopoly, and a Grammar School. The man who taught Hungarian literature at that institution also published a newspaper which, in 1892 printed a short-story “Why did Cain kill Abel,” by his talented pupil, and there was other evidence too, proving the extraordinary maturity of this fourteen year old lad. “At the time I loved those angellike creatures amongst women who did not have to be wooed too much. I was a hefty lad and already in my earliest youth I used to lay flat cooks who weighed a ton, to give them evidence of my devotion. A favourite passtime of mine was to lie in wait in woods and cane-brakes and ditches like some apprentice-highway man, and pounce on passing pettycoats, and on vagrant Gypsy women of whom there were still quite a few in the Nyír, in those days. On moonlit nights I used to climb into other people’s courtyards. There were some who were astonished that I wasn’t beaten to death” (Krúdy világa, p. 7.) Thus Krúdy wrote on his fiftieth birthday. He fought his first duel at the age of sixteen, against the Town Clerk of Nyíregyháza, who, at a dance had dared to make arrogant and tasteless remarks about the young man. That same year Krúdy sent a few short stories to a respected daily in Debrecen, who invited the author—the honourable chairman of veterans, they imagined—to contribute regularly. A beardless youth appeared instead of the ancient captain, but the newspaper world in those days had not yet succumbed to deadly seriousness, and thus the school-boy turned into a journalist. On the morning of his grammar-school leaving examination Krúdy returned to Nyíregyháza in a large peasant cart filled with boon companions, and there after passing his examination with C throughout, and a B in literature he was declared officially mature.[1] Shortly afterwards he worked for a paper in Nagyvárad (Oradea) which sent him to Budapest to report the Millenary festivities.

The eighteen year old lad trod the pavements of the Seat of Government and Royal Residence in the 1oooth year of Hungary’s existence, in the midst of romantic festivities, and that same year his first book appeared “Elopement from the barracks and other stories.” That’s if it ever appeared. Right to this day noone has been able to lay his hands on a single copy of this collection of stories, and a scholarly biography places it in the world of Krúdy legends. But the next year’s volume “The Nest is Empty and other stories,” was reviewed in a number of papers. 113 books followed. Many Krúdyologists claim to own 126 first editions. Sceptics like to mention 80. Krúdy, who raised Budapest gossip to the level of legend, of vision, of Dionysian literature became a legendary figure himself, thanks to Budapest gossip, this sweet and childishly allknowing chatter in a most resigned manner.

Around the time when Krúdy moved to Budapest the papers of the capital published a number of pretty short stories, signed Satanella, a young schoolmistress whose real name was Bella Spiegler, and who was not only well-educated, clever and charming, but also relatively small, dark, soft and plump. Krúdy stayed true to this type all his life. In 1899, aged 21 he married Bella Spiegler who was seven years older than he, thereupon his father disinherited him, but this did not in the least worry this selfconfident young man. He was getting good money for books for the young, and this made him feel all the surer of his worth as a writer and gentleman, “Gyula Krúdy is a modem writer, but in spite of his modernity he has acquired a large public and he is sure of the love of his readers,” a critic wrote in 1900, and another compared him to E. T. A. Hoffmann, when he was still only 25.

Visions speak with tongues of Angels

Krúdy was 6 ft 3 inches tall, slim and powerful, noticeably silent, he could hold his liquor, he was always well-groomed, often a spendthrift and even more often broke; he used to carry his head slightly inclined to one side; as mentioned he did not take part in literary life, first of all because though he was interested in books that he liked to read, especially Pushkin and Dickens, the same reason meant that he was well-educated, he nevertheless looked on his craft, writing, as a cumbersome means which served to formulate certain images so that the vision could so to speak be enjoyed with the palate, and then be sold for as high as possible a fee, and secondly because he was far more appreciative of a solid piece of beef, an understanding waiter, a quantity of wine of good quality, and especially the happiness, which ladies gladly keep ready for men with Krúdy’s capacities, than of soft sentiments, literary fashions of any sort, and all wordy male enthusing of a spiritual kind. Krúdy knew as little of true friendship and of the feeling of love in general as of an abstract humanism, and he was indifferent to the world as such. “He wanted to make money and he wrote masterpieces instead,” Antal Szerb noted in his History of Hungarian Literature and Krúdy himself put the following words into the mouth of one of the figures in The Crimson Coach.[2]

“Literature is a terrible poison. If men and women of the middle class taste it, they become syphilitic. Writers are all impostors. They proclaim their toil a royal profession, the most glorious of all. Yet strictly speaking no one needs literature. People would be far happier without it. They would go on getting bom and dying. Life, great and glorious, has nothing in common with small, serried rows of letters. Writers, like some secret conspiracy, have been poisoning the souls of people for centuries—so that they could make a living themselves. Their tales and songs are only fit to cause uneasiness and confusion in the human soul. And if the sweet poison of literature has invaded a family, unhappiness is sure to follow, the wives of writers are all unhappy women.”

He was not concerned with literature when he was not working, nor other abstract things. He played cards, he went racing, he payed court to women and even more often he let them pay court to him, he lived with an intensity that ate him up, he was linked to the world of things by an almost instinctive interest, he was uninhibited in arrogant observation and in action, and uninhibited in the way he put things into words.

Thanks to his extraordinary constitution Krúdy was capable of noting the most curious occurrences in hours of massive drunkenness, occurrences which moved on the borderline of reality and dream, but not only the visions, the process of work itself, the application and self-discipline without which that astounding life’s output could never have come into being were possessed by a mysterious demonology. Nietzsche’s words about the Dyonisian being the eternal and original power for art are confirmed by Krúdy’s example, but a sentence by the unjustly almost forgotten Johann Georg Hamann brings us closer to an understanding of the way Krúdy worked: “To speak is to translate from the tongue of angels into the tongue of men, that is thoughts into words, things into names, images into signs which can be poetic or curiologic, historic or hieroglyphic and philosophic or characteristic.” Krúdy who was free of any ties to a linear perception of time, at the centre of his experiences which mirage-like had taken off from the earth’s surface, so that, distorted into the magnificient, no longer subject to the force of gravity, they should float free as dreamscapes, as timeless worlds in which a romantic courtesy rules, and tragicomic figures blow about, who don’t feel wild pain or unrestrained joy, that Krúdy “translated” in precisely the sense meant by Hamann. In other words, his novels and tales don’t derive from any intention to proclaim anything in parables, let alone directly, nor do they follow aesthetic principles, or a will to compose. In Krúdy’s art there is a more direct connection between vision and form, which could only come about because the teller of tales left it to language, the only material of his craft.

Krúdy’s sentences are often incalculable adventures which are subjected only to the laws of syntax, the rhythm of speech, and free association. According to Antal Szerb, when Krúdy is off on a trip whose aim cannot be guessed by starting a sentence with for example: “So that—” the reader too is off on a journey in his own memories . Thus Krúdy begins to describe a lady, he reaches her eyes, and suddenly the sentence expands:

“A curious longing was in her eyes, as in those of a dreamy respectable housewife who, in her youth had been payed an unforgettable compliment by a drunken prince, who, exploiting her inexperience had suddenly embraced her in a funny way at midnight mass, stroked her and kissed her, and by the time the inexperienced spinster might have screamed because of the unexpected attack, only sleighbells could be heard from outside, where it was snowing.”[3]

Or, a self-absorbed melancoly couple in love, goes for a walk in a wintry landscape:

“Those days of love are the unforgettable ones when neither knows for sure what is happening right around them. Black hands on clocks move as fast as windmills on the horizon. One can see people only from afar, the way a librarian living amongst his folios in a medieval castle could see them through the leaded windows;—there is a fair somewhere and people hasten to the fair along the winding highway. Beggars in rags of many colours, rich gentlemen in fancy clothes: oil and wine merchants with their two-wheeled carts; fat, rouged women in coaches who with eyes befogged by desire and mouths dripping at the corners stare at a slim tightrope walker; horse dealers in velvet trousers and red waist-coats, swear and pour brandy into their miserable nags; an evil-eyed grey haired thief carries a large loaf of bread on his back; while a young

pickpocket, in particoloured trousers, strides along playing with the feather in his cap; young women lower their eyes as noisy soldiers pass, thinking thoughts, for which the friar would consider countless Our Fathers insufficient punishment.

Sometimes those in love see life this way, a long way from themselves, and it does not even occur to them that street urchins are making rude signs straight behind their backs.”[4]

It is truly not surprising that the historians of literature cannot classify Krúdy’s work. Attempts were made to compare him not only with Proust and E. T. A. Hoffmann, but also with Gogol, with impressionist painters, and lately also with Herzmanovsky-Orlando; he was called a precursor of Giraudoux, of Virginia Woolf, and of Julien Green; some time ago he was also considered a somewhat opinionated imitator of Kálmán Mikszáth. It is certainly true that Mikszáth, that sarcastic teller of anecdotes from the turn of the century whose bitterness shows through his cosiness, had an initial influence on Krúdy. But the angeltongue of his vision is audibly there in his first major novel: The Podolin Ghost, published in 1906.

Splendour and Misery

Five years later Nyugat (West), the publishing house linked with the respected literary journal of the same name, brought out the first volume of those stories which have Sindbad as their hero, the Arabian Nights’ seafarer, an adventurer in the Krúdy manner of course, who does not rove the high seas but the highways of a dreamt up stalwart philistine world, in coaches and on foot, who sighs and pants while he worships real and imagined women, who has a special liking for good cooking, who meditates on life at the tables of old inns, who acts foolishly, repents and then does it again, finally he parts from life, changes into a mistletoe and then, even from the hereafter, he visits various ladies.

If the bibliographers have not lost their way amongst the Krúdy legends then we must look on The Crimson Coach as Krúdy’s fiftieth work. He, who belonged to no literary clique, a rogue elephant who until then was considered as writing gentleman of some talent, an eccentric whose physical strength and syntax, whose ability to hold his drink and literary style, whose mastery of the art of love and epic talent, whose ability with a sword and feeling for language, all deserved recognition, was now enthusiastically welcomed by the new literature. Endre Ady, the lyric poet, whom much divided from Krúdy, wrote in Nyugat:

“What a lachrymose, dear, splendid book this is all the same, just as he wrote it, he who wrote it, a magnificent lyrical witness to the fact that dreams make a modern Casanova passive. And if it’s not a novel, well then it isn’t, but a brilliant X-ray of the psyche, taken at one of the most ornate stages of that illness which is called youth. A diagnosis of the soul of the artist, and a somewhat sweetish memory, full of the heart-ache of our lives in Budapest ten years ago, our emotionalism, and of the nights through which we dragged our youth. It is the work of an amorous, strong poet, whose nobility makes him stand out, and this alone ensures him a long life in the esteem of all those who want to find their vanished youth.” (Krúdy világa, p. 138.)

An understanding public shared the opinion of the critics, within a year 15,000 copies of the novel were sold and eight new editions have been published since. The second part of the work, An Autumn Journey in a Red Mail Coach was published in 1917, meanwhile Krúdy, who neither took part nor any interest in the war, but retired to the wine-cellars and his dreams, as an alleged war-correspondent, had published twenty more books, amongst them The City of Budapest in the year nineteen-fifteen whose title-page showed a one-legged invalid pursuing a lady with the help of his crutches. That year Krúdy received the Francis-Joseph Prize of the city which was the Seat of Government and the Royal Residence, which is only worth mentioning since it was not given to him to receive any further public honours, except the Baumgarten Prize, and the Grand Prix of the PEN Club, which were in the giving of writers, and given to someone who in those years was already mortally ill, and as poor as a church mouse. The Autumn Journey in a Red Mail Coach received just as much recognition as the first volume. “Periods and continents have no limits in Krúdy’s writing, everyone of his characters lived always, and everywhere” (Krúdy világa, p. 442.) was one opinion, but towards the end of the war the public was occupied with other and much more questionable things than ghosts, and love affairs, with murder and flight, with two revolutions which Krúdy observed with calm and occasionally active benevolence, a counterrevolution, the establishment of a new political order which led to the disappearance of the sets and costumes of the Krúdy small world-theatre. Krúdy took no notice. True he had finished the Autumn Journey in the Red Mail Coach but he continued to dream one or the other theme of the vision and, travelling along adventurous roads, he returned to some of the figures of The Crimson Coach, already in 1921, in a novel A nagy kópé (The big scoundrel), then also in Őszi versenyek (Autumn races) and another novel Az utolsó gavallér (The last beau) and finally, two years before his death in Hero of the blue ribbon.

Meanwhile the marriage with Satanella of exemplary suffering, which had long ago become hollow, rotten and nonexistent was formally dissolved too, and Krúdy had married again, a young and charming lady whom he had got to know already when he had wooed her mother in a tempestuous but not exactly sane manner. The young woman was touching and heroic, but to no avail. Krúdy habitually lived in a hotel. He stayed true to a way of life, and to a type of woman, but not to any one woman. Wine, solitude, the freedom of a robber-baron, the devotion of boon companions, and the certainty not to have to depend on anybody’s love, or friendship, or even gentleness, that’s what he needed for his work, besides his family had received their patent of nobility already from the kings of the House of Anjou. Three children stemmed from his first marriage, and the young woman too brought a child into the world. Krúdy who in those months temporarily lived with his wife on Margaret Island, in an old house which had once belonged to Archduke Joseph, and which was therefore considered a palace, drove to the hospital and then returned to the island. When he was asked the weight of the new born girl, he answered, sitting high in the hansom-cab “Four liters and three tenths.”[5] As befits a legendary figure. Nevertheless he wrote book after book in those years, amongst them strange and beautiful works. Hét bagoly (Seven owls), then Boldogult ifjúkoromban (In my late youth), and the beautiful stories in the volume Az élet álom (Life, a dream). A dream book also appeared, meant for practical use, completely useless, but formulated with accomplished poetic power, besides other, older books, again and again. They brought in some money. Krúdy badly needed it.

How he could lose his readers, of whom there had been so many ten years earlier, and with them the benevolence of publishers and editors, with such terrifying speed, how he was suddenly left alone, and not just as a writer, that is a question to which possible weaknesses in Krúdy’s work are not an adequate answer. They were not there, or rather they were visible only in occasional articles and children’s books prompted by the need for money, but not in the important works he wrote at that time. What is a more adequate explanation is that the sociological changes of the twenties produced new interests, and split the public in a bigger half, those who as part of the “neo-baroque” as the historian Gyula Szekfű called it, preferred rural and courtly idylls, and best-sellers imported from the West (which Hungary by the way avenged with many comedies written for export, and with the invasion of Hollywood), and a lesser half, which preferred modern writing, such as that which came into being in Hungary under the patronage of Nyugat, or which was imported with a fanciful conscientiousness. There was no room for Krúdy between Cronin and Gide, or between Herczeg and Babits.

Viennese Interlude and the End

There was still one period in his life when he had a good time: his sojourn in Vienna, in the Empress Elizabeth’s Villa Hermes, in the midst of the open woods of the Lainz nature reserve. Baron Lajos Hatvany, really a writer but more of a literary man, and man of the world, whose share of a sugar-refinery inherited from an earlier generation that had established it thanks to a tremendous effort of will, had made him more than independent financially, had emigrated to Vienna to escape the tasteless counter-revolution and had leased the Villa Hermes, to which he had invited Krúdy, out of friendship and because a patron is always conscious of his duty. Krúdy came. The Baron took Krúdy’s MSS to Paul Zsolnay, the publishers, who at first could not make up their mind to bring out the work. (Forty years have passed since then, and they have not been exactly hostile to Krúdy, as the appearance of The Crimson Coach appears to prove.) The Baron also payed the drink bills. He meant well. And it was the right thing to do. But it was simultaneously that famous drop which all of a sudden makes the cup overflow. Krúdy returned to Budapest after jolly days in Vienna, this time really to his wife, since he was ill. It is a matter of common experience that one cannot have visions without paying the penalty. They had been fetched from the Dionysian hereafter, and forced to appear in the clumsy, and common environment of human corporeality, so they took revenge and attacked the necromancer’s stomach and liver, and also his heart. Krúdy was forty-eight. There are secret reasons why that is the classical time of life when those who do not reach a great age begin to die. In the following year, 1927, a single small volume by this permanently indefatigable writer appeared, a new edition of a legend of that St Margaret who, in the 13th century, had founded a nunnery on that island on which the Krúdy family still lived in a fake palace. The times had gone when Krúdy said to a lady who was a cashier and an enthusiast and who therefore begged that her lover should spend at least a whole night with her, the times then when Krúdy took leave after an hour of love, with the following words: “A gentleman has business at night, in the Orpheum, for instance.” That’s when she jumped out of the window, the poor soul. Krúdy lay in hospital, was patched up somehow, two years later he had a stroke which led to hemiplegia, recovered and wrote and wrote. In 1931 he published his last volume, Az élet álom, he acted as his own publisher, and payed the printer who produced the thousand copies of the book with the sum of money which had been given to the sick Krúdy as the Prize of the Hungarian PEN Club in order to help him over his greatest financial needs. The money was supplied by that Lord Rothermere, who once upon a time had a Krúdy-like dream in which he became King of Hungary.

All the same Krúdy could not pay his lightbill on Margaret Island. He worked by the light of countless thin candles. Then he moved into a small house in Óbuda, and while there he payed regular visits to Kéhli’s, a simple restaurant familiar to him from earlier excursions. On May 11th 1933 the government press-chief asked him to call. That man, small also in body, upbraided him for having published an article “Race with the Moon” in an Hungarian language paper published in Prague. In the opinion of the government Krúdy had not acted as a patriot, the press-chief said, whereupon Krúdy, extremely agitated, stormed out of the room furnished with the childish good-taste demanded by protocol. That afternoon he went to bed. He still spent that evening at Kéhli’s. Before going home he asked them to fill a liter wine-bottle and then went to the lavatory, was woken by young Kéhli who kept sneezing powder for that purpose, took his bottle, reached his bed safely, and died. Young Kéhli who payed a call on the dead towards noon the next day, took a note that the bottle stood at the foot of the bed, empty.

At the funeral the Sárai Gypsy Band, played two tunes: “Lehullott a rezgőnyárfa ezüstszínű levele” (The aspen lost its leaf) and “A menyasszony selyemágyát most viszik” (They are carrying the bride’s silken bed). Krúdy’s mother, Júlia Csákányi, the butcher’s daughter and former servant girl, was present, she cried out loud, and cursed all women the world over, since it was women who had driven her handsome son to an early death. In addition to debts, Krúdy left the following items: “Two white linen suits made from sheets, a scarf, a silk handkerchief, a pair of white kid-gloves, one of a pair of grey spats, three pairs of buttoned boots with gussets in grey suede, six pairs of socks, a grey herringbone overcoat, two pairs of black striped trousers, a black jacket and waistcoat, a short sheep-skin waistcoat, brown pullover, six pairs of underpants, four night-shirts, nine handkerchiefs, a navy blue shirt, and a set of formal evening clothes.” They were the formal evening clothes which the pawn-brokers had refused to take because they were outsize. He was buried in them.

Art and Life

Since provided that we ignore the deceiving possibility of an hereafter which can still be grasped by human senses and which because of a surfeit of happiness may perhaps prove deadly on a second occasion, all that is human finds a comforting end in the grave, this attempt to characterize a gentleman whom I do not know with the help of his transmitted texts and sundry gossip that came my way, should now he concluded, but perhaps a reader who is so inclined may all the same discern the cold fork of lightning of pure envy in all this rapture which attempts to be objective but which can hardly be throttled. And the author of these lines must provide an explanation for this yellowish-blue light.

His somewhat enthusiastic admiration derives, one must say, from the fact that he does not know any writer—excepting Goethe —neither personally nor by repute, nor thorough reading his works, who has as fruitfully mastered the double task of living intensely and writing intensely, as Gyula Krúdy. There have been many wonderful writers who completely committed themselves to their calling, and who grew like Michelangelo who, balancing his slender body on unsafe planks, lying on his back, covering his curly beard in sticky colours, completed the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a fresco mind you, in other words with no possibility to correct anything later. And there have been men of the world, who wrote on the side, some very well, like our dear Oscar Wilde, of whom we don’t know to this day whether he perhaps only used the pose of a man of the world as a stimulus. But Krúdy managed to live and write, to be call and echo, shape and shadow, body and mirror-image. Here life is turned into art, and art into life again, a last and highest possibility of manly existence is intimated and a titanic standard set. We did not speak of “vision,” “the demonic,” “the titanic” and other such things because of laziness or a preference for the formulae used by times past, but because facts are involved which have not lost their validity though a Spartan silence may envelop metaphysics these days. A phenomenon like Zola, who writes books following patterns and who is stuck with the wish to be socially effective, or an occurrence like Walt Whitman can be grasped in the most touching way, but even reading these good writers one suspects that somewhere in the world where Mithras defeats the dark bull, there must be a second plane where the bright spirits meet. Gyula Krúdy is also amongst the illuminated like E. A. Poe, and Dostoevsky, like Proust and Kafka. He was favoured by the demons, a man who saw the Middle Kingdom, and who could describe, with an appearance of small-town philistine comfort, sometimes even gaily, what is present in all men beyond common experience and speculation, though they may not know it. The world in which Krúdy moved—not as a man since the corporeality from which he derived his joy in visions is transient—lies in distant heights, beyond what can be ordinarily sensed, and when Krúdy’s heroes get a piece of boiled beef between their teeth then angelic gourmets are chewing a metaphysical cow.

 



[1] The Grammar School leaving Certificate is called Certificate of Maturity in Hungary (The Editor).

[2] Cited from Gyula Krúdy: Tie Crimson Coach, translated by Paul Tábori, Corvina Press, Budapest (pp. 130.)

[3] Őszi utazás a vörös postakocsin (Autumn Journey in a Red Mail Coach) Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, Budapest 1963. p. 249-250.

[4] Őszi utazás a vörös postakocsin, pp. 353-354.

[5] Customary units when ordering wine (The Editor)

 

(The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1969/34. 83-91. p.)