In addition to his epochal great novels and excellent theatre pieces, György returns from time to time to what he calls the toughest genre, the short story. Spiró’s stories are dense texts whose perfection stems from their pithiness and structural precision. These are masterful examples of short prose forms that communicate exactly as much information as they refuse to disclose. They shape the essence. At the same time, however, the biographical basis, a strong personal presence enhanced by restraint, the fact that Spiró is both a narrator and a hero of particular stories, make this a carefully and artfully composed collection. We are able to follow the life of our hero from the moment of his conception: his discoveries, encounters, experiences, sorrows. In György Spiro’s opinion, “a good story needs to hit me on the head as I read it, and to stay inside me afterwards, so that I cannot get rid of it. To see a picture – namely, that the writer sees it as he writes the story, and that I get goosebumps, when it crops us again somewhere.” We see a picture here. And it hits us on the head. It’s fatal. It stays inside us.
Photo credit: Márton Merész
György Spiró was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1946. He studied Russian, Serbo-Croation and Hungarian literatures at ELTE, Budapest, with fellowships in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. In his career, he has worked as a journalist, editor, distinguished professor, dramaturg, artistic and managing director, visiting scholar, lecturer of drama, and translator. Since 1978 he has been a lecturer at the ELTE, Budapest University. His doctoral thesis titled East-Central European Drama from the Enlightenment to the First World War was published in 1986. So far, he has published 10 novels, 3 short-story collections, about 30 plays, a number of essays and monographies, and 6 film scripts. He is fluent in Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croation, Check, Slovak, and English, and he can read French, German, Italian, and Bulgarian. He is the recipient of more than 30 prestigious awards. He is Member of the Belle Lettre’s Union, and of Szechenyi Academy. He lives in Budapest.
Marko Čudic was born in 1978 in Senta, in a bilingual, Serbo-Hungarian family. He finished elementary school and high school in his hometown. He graduated from the Department of Hungarian Studies at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade in 2001. He received his master’s degree from the same faculty in 2005. In 2011, he received his doctorate with the thesis The Novel of Voyage in Hungarian Literature of the 20th Century. Since 2003, he has been employed at the Department of Hungarian Studies at the Faculty of Philology, and is currently an associate professor. His main areas of interest are Serbo-Hungarian literary and cultural ties and the theory and practice of literary translation. He is the author of four scientific monographs and about a hundred scientific papers, and he has also translated thirteen books from Hungarian into Serbian so far. For the translation of the book Megy a világ (Ide svet/The World Goes On) by László Krasznahorkai, he received the Miloš N. Đurić award for the best translation of prose in 2019. He lives and works in Belgrade.