Kosztolányi was perhaps the world's greatest rhymer, or master of rhyme. The Hungarian language is particularly well suited to this circus stunt, indeed it is hardly even a matter of bravado. Hungarian, unlike other languages, to this day treats rhyme, that cheap and dubious element, as a generally accepted and usable possibility.
I would even venture to say that it was Kosztolányi who did most to make the Hungarian language what it is today. To change a language visibly, perceptibly, at the everyday level, is something very few writers ever achieve. Kosztolányi changed the Hungarian sentence. The Hungarian language anyway stands in a dramatic relationship to the sentence. Our language, as Babits wrote, “doesn't roll along on such well-worn wheels, doesn't think in place of the writer. It lacks those solid, ready-made phrases, those tiny components of style on which the English or French writer can draw without so much as thinking.” In Hungarian there are no clearly defined prohibitions; in a certain sense everything is possible and everything has to be invented over and over again. Every single sentence is an individual achievement. This individuality is both good and bad.
Kosztolányi simplified the Hungarian sentence, made it shorter, purer. The nineteenth-century sentence was long-winded, the meaning wandering through long periodic structures, and in any case the Hungarian long sentence is a dubious formation because the words do not have genders and the subordinate clauses are more uncertainly connected to the main clauses than in the reassuring rigour of a Satzbau (German sentence construction). Such sentences totter along, uncertain even of themselves, stammer a little; in short, are extremely lovable.
These are our internal affairs, important internal affairs; let's look at what lies beyond the sentence.
First of all, in the spirit of Kosztolányi, we might say: nothing. Beyond language there is nothing. There are only words, and from these words the poet builds up everything, not just his books, his works, but ultimately he assembles himself and his own fate through words — his feelings, his father, his lovers. This is, of course, an exaggeration, even if it happens to be true. It is true because a writer — in the opinion of this present writer — should not have something to say, and an exaggeration because it would not be a good thing if his books didn't have anything to say either. If the writer speaks, that's pedantry; if the book keeps silent — then what's the point?
Kosztolányi's books, let's be precise here, speak about death, about play and about Kakania, or rather about the interweaving of all three, sometimes about their identity, about the confusion of twentieth-century man for whom life is a game, the whole world is a game, and this world is: death. But even this is not certain.
He writes in his diary:
I have always really been interested in just one thing: death. Nothing else. I became a human being when, at the age of ten, I saw my grandfather dead, whom at that time I probably loved more than anyone else.
It is only since then that I have been a poet, an artist, a thinker. The vast difference which divides the living from the dead, the silence of death, made me realise that I had to do something. I began to write poetry. […] For me, the only thing I have to say, however small an object I am able to grasp, is that I am dying. I have nothing but disdain for those writers who also have something else to say: about social problems, the relationship between men and women, the struggle between races, etc., etc. It sickens my stomach to think of their narrow-mindedness. What superficial work they do, poor things, and how proud they are of it.
Kosztolányi is stoical, but oddly so, one might even say insincerely so. His is the stoicism of a young man. Kosztolányi's every reflex is that of a young man. (He grew old hard, found it hard to grow old, like a beautiful woman.) He believed in nothing except style. Yet he wasn't a man of principle. He is characterised at once by a love of life and a terror of life. He has no magic potions, he says, nothing helps — but why should one be disappointed because of this? He raises the questions of a man of today, but not the questions of a disillusioned man. We hear the dignity, at times the desire to show off, of a man in the shadow of death.
He sets to work on Skylark in the spring of 1923. Szabadka already belongs to another country, our mothers and fathers belong to another country, they are just in the process of learning Serbian; everything is alien, once again our own past is disappearing. Kosztolányi looks back at a world he knew well, where he knew his way around as if at home, but without nostalgia. He knows how the story ends; he sits there in his own nothingness.
The time of the novel is 1899, the eternal present moment, a Faustian moment: in miniature, in a provincial setting. Kosztolányi shows us the margins of a world whose centre we know from Musil. We are in the borderlands of Kakania.
Kosztolányi's character as a prose writer does not, however, stand close to that of Musil, rather to that of Chekhov. He shares that same helpless fascination for the banal and trivial, for a drama-of-being which can be unravelled from a remote gesture, a twitch of the mouth, a dismissive wave of the hand, from lamplight and ugliness. A spider's web over a mine.
Skylark's ugliness is not a symbol. This ugliness is the unnameable anxiety which we would dearly love to forget, to dispel, but it is not possible, it always comes back, is always with us, relentless, just like a daughter with her father. Skylark's hideousness, her soft puffiness, dullness, aggressive goodness is: us. It is our lives that are so stiff, so predictable, so impersonal, so Hungarian. Skylark is eternal. There's no deliverance. Our little bird always flies home.
Kosztolányi's prose is quiet and sharp. Today our books are noisier and perhaps more blurred.
— PÉTER ESTERHÁZY
Skylark
I
in which the reader is introduced to an elderly couple and their daughter, the apple of their eye, and hears of complicated preparations for a trip to the plains
The dining-room sofa was strewn with strands of red, white and green cord, clippings of packing twine, shreds of wrapping paper and the scattered, crumpled pages of the local daily, the same fat letters at the top of each page: Sárszeg Gazette, 1899.
Beside the mirror on the wall, in a pool of bright sunlight, a calendar showed the day and the month: Friday I September.
And through the window of an elaborately carved wooden case, the sauntering brass hands of a grandfather clock, which sliced the seemingly endless day into tiny pieces, showed the time: half past twelve.
Mother and Father were busy packing.
They were wrestling with a worn, brown leather suitcase. When they had squeezed one last comb into the canvas pocket of the partition, they zipped it shut and lowered it to the floor.
There it stood, ready for the road, bursting at the seams, its bloated belly protruding on either side like that of a cat about to bear nine kittens.
The remaining bits and pieces they packed into a wicker travel basket: lace knickers, a blouse, a pair of felt slippers, a buttonhook and other oddments their daughter had carefully set aside.
“The toothbrush,” said Father.
“Heavens, the toothbrush!” nodded Mother. “We nearly forgot her toothbrush.”
Still shaking her head, she hurried out into the hall and from there to her daughter's room to fetch the toothbrush from the enamelled tin washbasin.
Father pressed down once more on his daughter's belongings, gently stroking them flat and smooth with his palm.
It was not the first time that his brother-in-law, Béla Bozsó, had invited them to spend the summer in Tarkő, to take a well-earned rest on his little plot.