Skylark

Начало книги

Everyone was born at that time: Joyce, Musil, Broch, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Einstein, Picasso, Wittgenstein. They were all there in their respective cradles, everyone who counted, le tout Paris. The Hungarian modern classics were there too: Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Gyula Krúdy, Zsigmond Móricz, Lajos Kassák, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály.

Everything came together rather nicely at the turn of the century, before the world collapsed. A spiritual golden age, in which one of the most important and glittering actors was Dezső Kosztolányi.

He was born in Szabadka (Subotica)[1] in 1885, in that (to use his words) poor, grey, boring, dusty, bored, comical, provincial town. Even if we don't believe literature to be a mirror, in which reality catches a terror-stricken glimpse of itself, we can still admit that whoever reads Skylark(and also The Golden Kite) can recognise in Sárszeg the Szabadka of the fin de siècle. The years of the fin de siècle are years of progress, of industrialisation; it is then that Budapest is born and at once becomes a genuine big city — even a little bigger than it really is.

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