Hungarian prose writer Péter Nádas, Nobel Prize candidate, dies. He abandoned journalism over August 1968 in Czechoslovakia

Hungarian prose writer, essayist and photographer Péter Nádas died on Wednesday at eight in the morning in his home in Gombosszeg, a village with several dozen inhabitants on the southwestern edge of Hungary. He was 83 years old; on October 14 he would have celebrated his 84th birthday. His literary agent Anett Oroszová confirmed his death to AFP, and his family announced it on the writer's Facebook page, asking readers and journalists to leave them in peace for now. La Libre ↗

Obituaries for him appeared in thirteen countries — from the Hungarian Telex and Index through the German Spiegel, Austrian Die Presse, Swiss NZZ, French Le Monde and Italian ANSA to the Swedish Dagens Nyheter, Spanish El Mundo, Croatian Novi list, Lithuanian LRT and Romanian HotNews. In Slovakia, three brief reports about him were published: coverage from Denník N and STVR and a news agency report from TASR, which was picked up by Pravda. Yet the turning point that led him to literature took place here, among us.

The Mirror in Which His Mother Showed Him a Jew

Nádas was born on October 14, 1942 in Budapest into a Jewish family. His mother Klára Tauberová was a worker, his father László Nádas was a telephone repairman. After the Arrow Cross came to power, his mother fled with her two-year-old son on false documents to Bačka and Novi Sad, but they returned before the siege of Budapest. They survived the siege in a relative's apartment among others in hiding, and a bomb fell on the building. Digital Literary Academy ↗

When he was eight years old, he announced to his mother that he hated Jews. She put him in front of a mirror and said: "Look carefully, here is a Jew, you can hate him peacefully." In interviews he emphasized that this was one of the few incidents in his books that actually happened exactly as he described it. Die Presse ↗

After the war, his parents advanced — his father became a high official of the Reparations Office, his mother a Budapest secretary of the Democratic Union of Hungarian Women. In the 1950s they fell out of favor. His father was suspended in 1953 on suspicion of embezzlement, the charges were dropped a few months later due to lack of evidence, but he remained in a lower position. His mother died on May 15, 1955 after a long illness, Nádas was twelve. During the 1956 uprising, his father was dismissed by a workers' council and someone made threatening phone calls to him, so he left the apartment with both sons. A labor court ultimately cleared him of all charges, and several days after the decision was delivered, on April 15, 1958, he committed suicide. Digital Literary Academy ↗

The Zurich daily NZZ recalled in its obituary what the brothers Péter and younger Pál learned from their father's farewell letter: that they were supposed to die with him before he finally decided to go alone. Nádas was fifteen at the time, and he later called the childhood trauma raw material from which he builds. NZZ ↗

He Renounced Journalism for August 1968

In summer 1958, at sixteen, he left school and went to apprentice as a photographer. From 1961, he worked as a photojournalism apprentice in the editorial office of the magazine Nők Lapja, completed a two-year journalism school, and after military service returned first to photojournalism and then to journalism. In summer 1968, he moved to the village of Kisoroszi at the northern tip of the Danube island near Szentendre and left journalism work in 1969. His first novel The End of a Family Saga was completed in August 1972, but censorship did not release it to the world until 1977. Digital Literary Academy ↗

He named the reason himself, and it was the occupation of Czechoslovakia. "In the sixties and seventies, Czech literature was not only important to me, but generally very important in Hungary. And Czech film too. In sixty-eight we tore Czech books from each other's hands; we couldn't even enter your cultural center to watch Czech films. In August 1968, thanks to that, I began learning Czech, but I had my last lesson on March 31, 1969," he recalled in an interview with MF Dnes. Seznam Zprávy ↗

The decision cost him his livelihood. "I could not continue to be a journalist, because I could not participate in what followed in any way. At the same time, it meant that from that moment on I was unemployed. My literary texts were not allowed to be published anyway, so essentially I voluntarily withdrew into complete isolation," he later told the newspaper Právo. Seznam Zprávy ↗

The Italian agency ANSA quotes a harsher version of the same decision: he turned his back on the system "to save my soul". From then on, according to his own words, he was strictly controlled. "They decided when I could publish, what, and in how many copies. They would only allow me to travel abroad if I accepted work as a secret agent, that is, if I spied and informed on my friends." ANSA ↗

The Czech influence in his life was not an episode. He dedicated the short story The Lamb in 1967 to Ladislav Fuchs, whose novel Variations for Dark Strings he cited as an example of why he too often told stories through a child's eyes. "It was a way to resist dictatorship. Under the apparent naivety of a child's perspective, many things could be hidden," he explained. In autumn 2003, he accepted the Franz Kafka Prize at the Prague Old Town Hall. Seznam Zprávy ↗

He Died Once and Wrote a Book About It

In 1990, he married Magda Salamonová, a journalist with whom he had lived since 1962. Three years later, he suffered a heart attack, survived clinical death, and doctors revived him. He processed the experience in the book My Own Death, which was published in 2004. "I love to live, but it was good to die too; I have never known such a peaceful state, such silence," he said in a television interview and added that the experience was beyond words. La Libre ↗

According to literary critic Csaba Károlyi, deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly Élet és Irodalom, this very experience determined Nádas's relationship with death. Károlyi spoke with him regularly throughout a year and published a book from it. "He died once already, so they brought him back," he told the portal Index. "From his own death on, he had a cool relationship with death, his own and others'." Károlyi himself added that the news of his death shocked him; he knew of no illness. Index.hu ↗

According to him, Nádas deliberately closed his oeuvre. The last book was Dead Friends from 2025, portraits of Miklós Mészöly, Alaine Polczová, and Péter Esterházy. "He did it so that it would be. And he did it. Thus the trajectory deliberately closes, because it is a closed work," Károlyi said. Index.hu ↗

The Austrian newspaper Die Presse put a sentence from one of his last interviews with the MTI agency in the headline: "Trees die standing, I while writing. Well, that would be a fine death." Die Presse ↗

Six Books in Slovak, Five Translators

Slovak has not forgotten Nádas. According to an overview by Denník N, the novels Book of Memory and Parallel Stories, translated by Juliana Szolnokiová, were published here; The End of a Family Saga was translated by Katarína Králová; My Own Death by Eva Andrejčáková; and the essays in the books Hamlet Is Free and The State of Things were translated by Peter Kováč and Renata Deáková. Denník N ↗

Both major novels were published by Bratislava's Kalligram. Book of Memory was published in Slovak in 2004; the three-volume Parallel Stories—Silent Country, In the Deepest Night, and The Breath of Freedom—in 2009, and together they have 1,280 pages. Artforum ↗

Book of Memory from 1986 is his international breakthrough. He began writing the first version in summer 1973, destroyed the manuscript in spring 1974, and started over, so he worked on the novel for over ten years. In the preface, he wrote that he wanted to write memories somewhat like Plutarch, "parallel memories of different people at different times, and those different people would all be me, without actually being that". NZZ ↗

This very book was called by American essayist Susan Sontag "the greatest novel written in our time," as the Romanian portal HotNews recalls with reference to the New York Times. HotNews ↗

Anna Valentová translated it into Czech and received the State Prize for Translation for Book of Memory. Besides her, a selection of short stories Mrs. Klára's House was published in Czech, and in 2014 the novel The End of a Saga. Seznam Zprávy ↗

Slovak media, however, remained with short formats on the day of his death. In the TASR agency report that Pravda reproduced, his main novel is listed as Parallel Short Stories, although it was published in Bratislava seventeen years ago as Parallel Stories. An obituary that would recall his Slovak translations as well as the Czechoslovak turning point of 1968 has not yet been published. Pravda ↗

The Nobel He Never Received

His Swedish publisher Eva Bonnierová said to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter: "He was one of Europe's great writers. The Nobel Prize was often mentioned in his case, and he never received it, and personally I find that very sad." Swedish translator of Book of Memory Ervin Rosenberg called it an almost perfect book. Dagens Nyheter ↗

The Nobel Prize for Literature was won last October by another Hungarian, László Krasznahorkai. Nobelprize.org ↗

Nádas had a full shelf of other awards: the Attila József Prize (1985), the Kossuth Prize (1992), the Austrian State Prize, the French prize for best foreign book of the year (1998), and the Prague Franz Kafka Prize (2003). In 2006 he was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, and in 2010 he became an honorary citizen of Budapest. Pravda ↗

He never abandoned photography. He donated his photographic work to the Swiss museum Kunsthaus Zug and exhibited there twice, most recently in 2018 under the title Author on the Road, where he combined older photographs with images taken on a mobile phone. SRF ↗ Digital Literary Academy ↗

He commented on politics judiciously, but not evasively. On Viktor Orbán in 2022, he said that "it's autocracy, he is the party," and he described his system as a kind of Eastern European mafia. La Libre also recalls his statement to the portal Litera: "Literature is a personal matter, not a communal or national one. But if no one cultivates it, the population will certainly grow dumb." La Libre ↗

In an interview with Dagens Nyheter in 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he summed up his own life like this: "I was born in dictatorship. Then came a short democratic pause after the war. Those four years of my childhood marked me. Then dictatorship again. Then twenty years of democracy. Wonderful. Then authoritarian rule once more." Dagens Nyheter ↗

Orbán lost the election on April 12 of this year. Nádas lived to see it four months later. According to NZZ, "he was part of it, did much to make it happen, and experienced it firsthand." NZZ ↗

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