The Hungarian P.E.N.-Le P.E.N. Hongrois No. 9. [antikvár]

THE HUNGÁRIÁN P.E.N. LE P.E.N. HONGROIS N° 9 * 1968 GYULA ILLYÉS LAJOS NAGY About The Tenement House What makes Lajos Nagy a good socialist writer is not the fact that his writings unmask the absurdities of society, that most of his works present a sordid picture of the fate of people living in digs or tenement houses, that the ruling class is thoroughly mishandled in all his short stories, and that the writer's angle of vision points decidedly in the same direction as the labour movement or rather a political labour party. All this would make him, üke so very many lettered socialists, nothing more than a good socialist, or perhaps a suitable propagandist. An excellent writer and eloquent stylist even without any attribute, Lajos Nagy becomes a socialist writer on account of a specific instinct or method of observation, an interesting way of looking at things. It is this way of looking at things and not the description of physical and mentái misery which distin-guishes him notonlyfrom non-revolutionary writers who, after all, are alsó deal-ing with poor people and social injustice, but alsó from most socialist writers who, while writing about oppressed people, suggest at the same time the precise means for eliminating those injustices. This particular attitűdé leaps to the eye at the first reading of his shortest work. Lajos Nagy is not moved by misery and suffering: he is scandalized by it. Instead of caressing and consoling the sufferers, he reads them a hard lesson, at the least. The cruel morál blows he inflicts on the stupid rich, necessarily degenerate in their wealth, are not addressed to individuals, but through those individuals to humanity as a whole. "Shame on you!" can be heard from every side, whether he depicts a proletarian or a bourgeois. "Shame on you! And you should realize that you are not a man, but a beast, or not even that, or else you would be bold enough to follow one or two of your natural instincts. You are a thief, a bravó, who would not only sell your mother for five or a thousand