Pseudonym: Lili Csokonai. Born: Budapest, Hungary, 1 April 1950. Education: Studied mathematics at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, 1969-74. Military Service: Served in the army. Family: Married Gitti Reen in 1973; four children. Career: Began publishing in literary journals in the 1970s; works as an independent writer. Lives in Budapest, Hungary. Awards: Research fellow, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Kossuth prize (Hungary), 1996; Berliner Wissenschaftkolleg, 1996-97; Osterreichischen Staatspreis for European Literature, Vienna, 1999; Hungarian Literary award, 2001; Capo Circeo, Rome, 2001; Herder prize, Vienna, 2002. Member: Society of Digital Immortals (Hungary).
Publications
Collections
Bevezetes a szepirodalomba (novels). 1986.
A kitomott hattyu (essays). 1988.
Fiction
Fancsiko es Pinta. 1976.
Papai vizeken ne kalozkodj. 1977.
Termelesi regeny. 1979.
FUggo. 1981.
Ki szavatol a lady biztonsagaert?. 1982.
Agnes. 1982.
Fuharosok. 1983; as The Transporters, translated by Ferenc Takacs, in A Hungarian Quartet. 1991.
Kis magyarpornografia. 1983; as A Little Hungarian Pornography, translated by Judith Sollosy, 1995.
A sziv segedigei. 1985; as Helping Verbs of the Heart, translated by Michael Henry Heim, 1991.
Tizenhet hattyuk. 1986.
Hrabal konyve. 1990; as The Book of Hrabal, translated by Judith Sollosy, 1993.
Hahn-Hahn grofno pillantasa. 1991; as The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube), translated by Richard Aczel, 1994.
Bucsuszimfonia. 1994.
Ego no. 1995; as She Loves Me, translated by Judith Sollosy, 1997.
Harmonia Caelestis. 2000.
Other
”Investigating the Bath Tub” in Index on Censorship. 1988.
”On Laziness” translated by Zsuzsanna Ozvath and Martha Satz, in Partisan Review. 1989.
”God’s Hat” translated by Michael Henry Heim, in Partisan Review. 1990.
”Want to See Golden Budapest?” in Cross Currents. 1990.
”The Problem Facing the Writer Today” translated by Judith Sollosy, in Partisan Review. 1996.
Critical Studies:
”Mekhanizm literatury: Pushkin i Esterkhazi” by E. Boitar, translated by Nadezhda Nikulina, in Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol. 28, nos. 1-4, 1982; ”Peter Esterhazy” by Ferenc Takacs, in The Hungarian P.E.N./Le P.E.N. Hongrois, vol. 26, 1985; ”Torment and Sacrifice” by Miklos Gyorffy, in New Hungarian Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 97, 1985; ”(Selbstzensur) und (Textverderben): Konflikte und Losungen in den neuesten Schriften von Peter Esterhazy” by Tiborc Fazekas, in Festschrift fur Istvan Futaky, edited by Wolfgang Veenker and Tibor Kesztyus, 1986; ”Irasok” by Gyorgy Poszler, in Kortars: Irodalmi Es Kritikai Folyoirat, vol. 32, no. 7, 1988; ”Delicate Balance: Coherence and Mutual Knowledge in a Short Story” by Istvan Siklaki, in Poetics, vol. 17, nos. 4-5, 1988; ”Textualitat und Dialogizitat: Versuch der Wesensbestimmung der ‘Postmoderne’ bei P. Esterhazy” by Laszlo Onodi, in Neohelicon, vol. 16, no. 1, 1989; ”The Concealed Eye/The Elusive ‘I’: An Update on Peter Esterhazy” by Marianna D. Birnbaum, in Cross Currents, vol. 11, 1992; ”Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy und die deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter der Moderne und Postmoderne” by Arpad Bernath, in Neohelicon, vol. 20, no. 1, 1993; ”Peter Esterhazys ‘Hilfsverben des Herzens’ und Peter Handkes ‘Wunschloses Ungluck’: Ein komparatistischer Versuch” by Maria Kajtar, in Die Zeit und die Schrift: Osterreichische Literatur nach 1945, edited by Karlheinz Auckenthaler, 1993; ”Postmodernism in Hungary: The Example of Peter Esterhazy against the Background of Analysing John Barth’s Later Fiction” by Judit Friedrich, in Anachronist, 1996; ”Introducing Peter Esterhazy” in Hungarian Rhapsodies by Richard Teleky, 1997; ”Gender Benders: Naughtiness in the post-Communist World” by John Updike, in The New Yorker, 25 May 1998; ”Der religiose Horizont in den Romanen Peter Esterhazys” by Istvan Dobos, translated by Christina Kunze, in Epoche-Text-Modalitat: Diskurs der Moderne in der ungarischen Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Erno Kulcsar-Szabo and Mihaly Szegedy-Maszak, 1999; ”Configurations of Postcoloniality and National Identity: In-between Peripherally and Narratives of Change” by Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, in The Comparatist, vol. 23, 1999.
Peter Esterhazy is one of the most popular and successful writers in Hungary. Born a count, Esterhazy is the scion of one of the oldest noble Hungarian families. His relatives were patrons of Haydn and Liszt, while the Duke Pal Esterhazy (who died in 1713) is remembered for his sacred cantatas, collected as Harmonia Caelestis. Recently, Peter Esterhazy has himself used the title of his ancestor’s musical collection for a long narrative history of his family. Harmonia Caelestis, published in 2000, has been a bestseller in Hungary and in German translation as well.
Although Esterhazy has had great critical and commercial success in his native Hungary and is well-known throughout Europe, Anglophone critics’ response to Esterhazy’s works has been mixed. Only six of his novels have been translated into English, due perhaps in equal parts to the difficulty of Hungarian and of Esterhazy’s writing. Although he calls them ”novels,” Esterhazy does not write novels in the 19th century sense. He eschews linear plots and sustained character development, preferring instead shifting, discontinuous scenes and anonymous narrators. In addition, until 1989 Hungary was part of the USSR, and that cultural and political reality forms the background (and occasionally the foreground) of Esterhazy’s works. Termelesi regeny [Production Novel], a satire of socialist production, and Ki szavatol a lady biztonsagaert? [Who Does Guarantee the Lady's Security?], which is about transvestites, are in part a reaction against the Socialist Realism imposed by the Soviets. As a result, very little in Esterhazy’s writing could be termed realism, socialist or not.
In his defiance of the conventions of the traditional novel, Esterhazy’s works tend to be short (Termelesi regeny is about 50 pages) and combine various genres (historical drama, romance, psychological realism, verse, and travelogue) in an eclectic rhapsody. Yet the word ”postmodern,” often applied to his novels, misses the point. Esterhazy has said that Hungary never experienced modernism; therefore, his works may be termed ”pre-modern,” while true Hungarian modernism remains in the future. That being said, however, Esterhazy’s novels nonetheless share elements of postmodernism, including fractured narratives and relentless intertextuality. The author quotes from sources as diverse as contemporary journalism, American blues standards, German philosophy, and his favorite authors. In Kis magyar pornografia (A Little Hungarian Pornography), Esterhazy warns the reader, ”if you find an especially clever sentence in the book, the chances are better than even that it is a quote. If it is clever but you don’t know what it means, it is from Wittgenstein.” The narrator further explains that introducing a ”foreign text (body)” creates ”tension” between the various voices and points of view. Historical figures may also become characters to engage in impossible and anachronistic conversations; in Hrabal konyve (The Book of Hrabal), Charlie Parker teaches God (who has some attributes very similar to Esterhazy’s) to play the saxophone.
In A sziv segedigei (Helping Verbs of the Heart), the narrator mourns the death of his mother. To underscore the universal nature of grief, Esterhazy refers to the family members not by names, but by their relationship to the narrator: Mother, Father, Sister, Brother. The book consists of two parts: the first is the son’s narrative, while in the second half the mother discusses her life and her family. One critic interpreted the novel’s final sentence, ”Some day I’ll write about all this in more detail,” as the author’s admission of failing to convey the profundity of his subject; others contend that Esterhazy has already told all he could possibly say about death, leaving only the inexpressible for the readers to imagine for themselves.
European history is another topic for Esterhazy’s invention. His particular relationship to history goes against the conventions of dialectical Marxism: Esterhazy’s history is largely plotless and non-chronological—even anti-chronological. The incompleteness of the historical record prevents a deeper understanding of those events and their interrelatedness. Esterhazy recognizes this overvaluation of the importance and sanctity of fact, and presents events in his narratives outside their chronology and stripped of most of their specifying— and thus limiting—facts and dates. Anna, the heroine of The Book of Hrabal, realizes history’s deceptiveness when she confesses that she never really knew her mother. Her mother’s generation, born before World War II and the Communist takeover, had witnessed terrible destruction. When Anna was still a teenager, her mother criticized her boldness; only years later does Anna begin to understand her mother’s quiet will to survive. Boldness is not necessarily courage, and timidity is not necessarily cowardice. With this in mind, Anna redeems Bohumil Hrabal, the great Czech writer castigated for his allegiance to the Soviet Party’s 1975 congress. History is thus shown to obscure as much as it reveals.
By the same token, for readers who pick up Hahn-Hahn grofno pillantasa (The Glance of the Countess Hahn-Hahn) expecting a history lesson on East Central Europe or the political significance of the Danube, the author’s coyness with dates and facts can be frustrating. Yet what Esterhazy tries to achieve with his reordering of events is history as it is experienced subjectively. Even the map in the front of the book flouts convention; cities and rivers are marked, but although the names of countries appear on the map, their political boundaries are conspicuously absent. In other words, though geographic variations exist and people have come to identify with their regions, political borders are neither natural nor inevitable. Questioning the assumptions of unchallenged ethnic or national identity, the narrator asks, ”What does it mean to be Austrian?” His narrator records changes in his state of mind as he travels from the source of the Danube in the Black Forest to its mouth at the Black Sea. In Ulm, Germany, he feels one way, in Vienna, Austria, another; in his native Hungary, he thinks of himself differently, whereas in Romania the narrator modifies his behavior completely. Esterhazy would likely agree with Sander Gilman’s statement that identity is not who you are, but where you are.
In Ego no (She Loves Me), Esterhazy challenges ideas of romance and character development. The book consists of 97 chapters, some no more than a few sentences in length. Each chapter begins with some variant of ”There’s this woman, she loves me,” or ”she hates me,” although not all of the love objects are women. Esterhazy explores the variety of relationships covered by the umbrella term ”love,” a love that is sometimes indistinguishable from hate, and hatred that is occasionally indistinguishable from love. Ultimately the novel is not about the object of love, but love itself.
Peter Esterhazy continues to be prominent in Hungarian society. One of Esterhazy’s novels is the basis for the 1996 Hungarian film by Andras Solyom, Erzekek Iskolaja (School of Sensitivity). In 2001 Esterhazy supported France’s involvement in the fate of Roma refugees and he has been commended for his promotion of inter-ethnic relations in Europe.
