The Sindbad stories, which both reflected and undermined these values, appeared in magazines and individual volumes between 1911 and 1917. By 1919 Sindbad’s Hungary was dead. Defeat in the First World War brought the dream-world to an end. In 1918, following that defeat, and the so-called Autumn Roses Revolution, a liberal — socialist coalition under Count Mihály Károlyi assumed control. Within a few months it had been ousted by the Communist Béla Kun and his Republic of Councils. Amid the chaos, to the incredulity of most Hungarians, the backward Romanian forces marched in, defeated the Hungarian Red Army and ransacked Budapest. This was an extraordinary trauma for the nation. When the Romanians withdrew, under allied pressure, it was only for the rightist forces of Admiral Horthy to take over. Horthy rode into Budapest on a white horse. Reprisals followed and many leftwing writers and politicians fled into exile. Krúdy, who had very little time for politics, was briefly in trouble because of some articles he had written defending the Republic of Councils.
For his country, worse was to follow: under the terms of the Treaties of Versailles and Trianon the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and the countries on Hungary’s borders, whose nationals made up most of Hungary’s ethnic minorities, were rewarded for their support of the entente with vast new tracts of land. Transylvania, so central to Hungarian history and containing some of the oldest Hungarian settlements, was given over to Romania; Pozsony, once capital of Hungary, was renamed Bratislava and is today the capital of Slovakia. Vast swathes of greater Hungary were swallowed up by Yugoslavia. Hungary lost one third of its population as well as two thirds of its territory. The world of Sindbad was truly finished: the country through which Sindbad had roamed was now relegated to works of fiction.
By the time he died in 1933 Krúdy had produced over fifty novels, some three thousand short stories, over a thousand articles and sketches and seven plays for the stage. As regards Krúdy’s fiction, his prose style is highly original. The nineteenth-century novelist Kálmán Mikszáth might be cited as an early influence but Mikszáth was a realist, as was the other major novelist of the time, Mór Jókai, and Krúdy’s bent was not for social realism but for a range of complex moods arising out of a state of melancholy. A highly literary kind of melancholy can be found in the Symbolist writers of the period. Sindbad himself is frequently in a melancholic condition, he listens to gypsy music, he watches the autumnal leaves swirl at his feet, hears the distant hoot of the train, the lapping of the river and admires the swirling of fog. He watches young skin dry and develop crow’s-feet, he watches his own hair turn silver. A rich strain of late nineteenth-century melancholy accompanies everything he thinks or does. At times the language seems doom-laden and over-ripe, over-repetitive in its use of ‘little’, ‘sad’, and, inevitably, ‘melancholy’ itself.
But the remarkable thing is that, for all its period melancholy, Sindbad is a modernist work. Like Prufrock, Sindbad has measured out his life with coffee spoons and walked amongst the lowest of the dead — in fact, for much of the book he is dead, a walking sentient ghost musing upon his own ghostliness — yet all the time the subversive force of irony is breaking things up, infusing the elegiac sadness with a welcome disruptive energy. In doing so it prefigures the stream of consciousness explored by Proust, Woolf and Joyce: an interesting point of correspondence with Joyce appears when Sindbad advises one of his lovers, ‘Monkey’, to read the works of Paul de Kock, a writer of erotic stories equally appreciated by Molly Bloom. Most remarkably, it anticipates the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende.
The Sindbad stories refer to real and possible metamorphoses: at one point Sindbad changes into a sprig of mistletoe and contemplates turning into a comb. This sense of shift is reflected in Krúdy’s syntax — something strange begins to happen to language and its relation to experience. Krúdy’s long rolling sentences are held together by sentiment, sensuality and dream, but for all their sense of gentle flux, something is breaking them up. They are open-ended affairs which begin in the ordinary way but fly off at specific points of association, constantly diverting the reader away from the linear syntactic flow of the narrative. Tenses change continually. The subject — verb — object structure is subverted, in much the same way as a hierarchy or social order might be, from within. Before the reader knows it, the language has come to pieces in his hands, leaving a curiously sweet erotic vacuum, like an ache without a centre. That ache is at the heart of Krúdy’s prose and particularly of the Sindbad stories.
It may be fanciful to see the breaking up of Hungary anticipated in the breaking up of Krúdy’s prose but it is tempting. There is something prophetic about the way the fiction works. It looks resolutely backwards for its ethos — Sindbad is, after all, over three hundred years old, if he is any age at all — and the effort of having to move the narrative forwards simply splinters the syntactic structure. If the prophetic power of literature lies in the imagination’s helpless sensitivity to currents of change, then Krúdy’s fiction is an outstanding illustration of that power. The elegant barque of his prose has already struck the rocks and every wave sends a few more beams and planks shivering into the water.
The very first paragraph of ‘Youth’, the first story in the book, serves as a model for what is to follow:
Once upon a damp and moonlit night a man with greying hair was watching the autumn mist form figures of chimney-sweeps on the rooftops. Somewhere in the monastery at Podolin, he was thinking, there is, or was, an old painting, showing a shaggy-haired figure with a wild upcurled moustache, a thick beard, red as a woman’s hair, two big round eyes with elongated pale blue pupils and a complexion as ruddy as the colour on a white tablecloth when light passes through a full wine glass on a sunny winter noon. This man was Prince Lubomirski.
The time is uncertain, the view mistily retrospective but the place is precise and the vision highly detailed. Chimney-sweeps appear then disappear along with the mist. The object of focus is not real life but a painting. As we look at the painting and note the wild ancestral figure we stare into his eyes and discover a beam of light passing through a wine glass on a white tablecloth on a sunny winter noon. Then the figure is named and we read seven paragraphs about him and his times before getting to the subject of the story which concerns an incident from Sindbad’s childhood — though we must remember it is the man with greying hair who is recalling it. The action of the story amounts to no more than a brief tragic anecdote about the death by drowning of a boy nicknamed Pope Gregory, an anecdote told lightly enough but constantly moving between light and darkness, hinting at the possibility of romance.
Prince Lubomirski, who does not appear to be an agent in the story, is an important symbolic figure, a seducer and ever-fertile father, the atavistic god to whom maidens are sacrificed. Róza, one of three sisters, and the romantic interest, is herself a kind of river goddess, who must be appeased, in her case with the unfortunate victim of the drowning. Prince Lubomirski and Róza are part of the landscape: they are emanations of the soil but are handled lightly, almost humorously. The manner of address is playful, presenting the incident as a sad funny story with a haunting erotic edge of sensuality. That haunting erotic edge is Sindbad’s medium: it is the god Krúdy serves.
The adventures of Sindbad consist of nothing but interrupted, extended, inconclusive anecdotes whose purpose is to conjure the god, not to satisfy notions of character and consequence. In this sense they are amoral. The drowning in the first story may be read as a highly unfair punishment for Pope Gregory’s unattractiveness: the boy’s hunch-back invites rejection by the god’s female aspect. But there is no time to pity Pope Gregory — now you see him, now you don’t and that is all there is to it. The story of the drowning is not the real issue, it is merely the occasion. Even when Krúdy embarks on a longer tale there is no real narrative consequence. One thing happens, then another, but ostensible events are mostly occasions for the hidden ‘real’ event, which is the death and resurrection of desire. Desire is the appropriate word. To call it love would be premature. Fidelity is what partners demand of each other, not what they grant. They feel intensely but their feelings are shallow and this does not bother them. Krúdy’s characters find the lightness of their being wholly bearable.