Fighting the third death (dedikált példány) [antikvár]

ForewordQuite a few years agoI think is was the fifth, or perhaps the tenth anniversary of the death of Béla BartokI attended a Hungárián Bartok commemorative festival at the Town Hall of New York. The well-known writer Lajos Zilahy gave a reading obviously intended to be a eulogy. I do not remember anyone or anything else, any of the other participants or of the other parts of the program. Only the name of the concert pianisi, Miklós Schwalb, appears vaguely at the periphery of my memory. Zilahy read one of his short stories which made an unforgettable impression on me, although even today I can only guess what could ha ve been the connection between the substance of the story and the memory of Bartók, who was already at that time clearly destined for immortality. Perhaps Zilahy chose the subject pre-cisely because he found himself face to face with the question of immortality and presented the story as an example of its opposite.The story concerned a man, whose name I have forgottén. Zilahy may have chosen his name so that it should not be memorable. He tells the story of the man's life in such a way that we cannot remember anything about it. Absolutely nothing extraordinary happened to this man during his lifetime. I don't even remember what he did during or with his life. I think he remained unmarried; he had no friends, no relatives. His parents were dead. He died quite early himself. Nobody visited his grave. If he had any monument on his tomb, it had rotted away. Nobody erected a headstone for him. If he left behind letters or papers, they were destroyed or burnedit was as if a gust of wind had swept them into thegutter. From there on, this man "ceased toexist." He did not only die. He ceased to exist. (I believe it was George Orwell, the extraordinary English writer, who invented the idea of a nonper-sonof course, in a différent context). Allow me to repeat: János Kovács (let me cali him by this name) not only died, but ceased to exist. When the last person who knew your name, who remembered