Endre Ady

Early in 1906 there appeared a volume entitled New Poems written by a relatively unknown provincial journalist and poet, Endre Ady. New Poems was to cause the hottest of literary debates in Hungary, and impressed many as the greatest literary novelty yet; and it has been regarded ever since as the touchstone of modern Hungarian poetry. The event was truly unexpected, since Ady had done little previously to suggest that he was capable of such a literary novelty. Born on 22 November 1877 into a puritanic Calvinist hétszilvafás*Literally: ‘Seven-plum-treed’, a semi-pejorative term applied to the lower strata of nobility, meaning that their ‘estates’ were only large enough to have seven plum-trees planted on them. family of the lesser nobility at Érmindszent, Ady had a traditional upbringing which concluded with attendance at the law-school of Debrecen; he did not, however, graduate – his interest in journalism made him drift from one provincial newspaper to another. His first volume of poetry, Poems (Debrecen, 1899), contained near-sentimental platitudes and glibly expressed the patriotic impulses of other popular poets. The same is true of his next volume, Once More (Nagyvárad, 1903), which however displayed a militant attitude to conservative nationalism. This was a result of his stay at Nagyvárad, a bustling city with cultural aspirations on the borderland of Hungary proper and Transylvania, where Ady was serving on the staff of an opposition paper. It was also at Nagyvárad in 1903 that he fell in love with the wife of a local businessman; this tormenting love-affair triggered off an emotional reaction which in turn released his exceptional poetic qualities. Léda, to whom New Poems were dedicated, opened up a new world for the poet. Her sophisticated literary taste and complex personality fascinated Ady, and he followed her to Paris, where she and her husband spent most of their time. A convenient ménage à trois developed, and Ady, who was hardly familiar with the Budapest literary scene, became acquainted with French culture. The ménage à trois arrangement lasted for about ten years, but the relationship of Léda and Ady was anything but trouble-free. Nevertheless, having received the initial impetus from Léda, and further roused by the liberating experience of Paris, Ady’s personality was set on a course which was to develop its full possibilities.

Ady followed up the success of his New Poems with more volumes of poetry published in quick succession. Blood and Gold (1908), On the Chariot of Elijah (1909), Desire to be Loved (1910), Of All Mysteries (1911), This Fugitive Life (1912), Love of Ourselves (1913), Who Has Seen Me? (1914), Leading the Dead (1918), and a fragmentary novel in verse: Margita Wants to Live (1921, originally published in Nyugat 1912). His later poems were published posthumously: The Last Boats (1923). After the Léda affair, Ady, already gravely ill, married one of his admirers, Berta Boncza, (the Csinszka of his poems) in 1915, but he had only a few years to live, for he died on 27 January 1919, in a country ravaged by the lost war and subsequent revolutions. The revolutionaries celebrated him as their spiritual leader; Ady, however, in the last months of his life was more of a living corpse than a brilliant intellect. His faculties deteriorated day by day, and when he died he was already only a symbol of the apocalyptic times. The impact he made, however, hardly lessened with his death; he was in the centre of literary and political controversies for at least another quarter of a century.

The period of intensive productivity in Ady’s life occupied roughly the ten years immediately before the outbreak of World War I. Besides doing much journalistic work, mainly as a Paris correspondent of Budapest papers, and writing short stories (none of which were considered masterpieces by later critics), Ady created a poetic image which was as revolutionary as Petőfi’s, and which provoked violent reactions in friends and foes alike. Influenced by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and other French Symbolists, the perplexing complexity of Ady’s poetic world did not easily lend itself to straightforward appreciation, particularly by those whose ears were tuned to the ‘orderly world’ of the poets of national classicism. Although there could scarcely be any innovation in the choice of poetic themes, his approach to God, life, death, love, riches, and politics was radically new. His novelty was due primarily to the originality of his imagination, which produced a rich variety of associative references, but in almost equal measure to the duality of his ego, which reached out in opposite directions simultaneously in pursuit of the totality of experience; his imagination was supported by a brilliant intellect, which compelled him to realize the futility both of ambition and of resignation. His life seems to have been torn between sublime and divine aspirations, and infected and impure reality. Small wonder then that Ady was seen in turn as a metaphysical poet, but with a strong desire for sensual pleasures; as a national poet in the traditional sense, who was able to give poetic dignity to the political ideologies of his time, but whose narcissistic sensitiveness also earned him the label of exhibitionism; as a moralist who chastised his contemporaries with the wrath of the prophets of the Old Testament, yet also admitted to being a great sinner in the Dostoevskian sense; as a deeply religious poet whose pagan indifference shocked the Christians; and as a ‘gentleman’, who upheld the traditional gentry values, yet was a social revolutionary with radical views. All these facets of Ady’s poetry were indeed present in his fascinating, suggestive imagery, whose system of symbols puzzled and annoyed conservative taste, and whose novelty provided immense pleasure to the predominantly middle-class readership which rallied round Nyugat.

In a striking dedicatory note to New Poems, Ady claimed to have destroyed his verses ‘in the growing fever of his waning life’, having spared only a few for the sake of Léda, who inspired and cherished them. This is indeed a new attitude towards poetry and social commitment; the apparent whimsicality of the dedication brings the self into the foreground, rather than any of the causes a traditionally committed poet was wont to serve. This dedication, together with the programmatic introduction, the poem ‘Son of Gog and Magog’, in which Ady employs sharp contrasts, sets the tone of his poetry.

The volume is divided into four cycles: ‘Psalms for Léda’, ‘On the Hungarian Wasteland’, ‘Singing Paris’, and ‘Roaming Over Virgin Peaks’, each title denoting its theme very clearly. The individual poems are variations on the central theme of each cycle. This technique is used throughout all his volumes*Except for The Last Boats, which was not arranged by Ady., from cycle to cycle and book to book, most of which are preceded by a programmatic introductory poem. Consequently, his thousand-odd poems form a vast single work. To understand the consistent entity in the seemingly chaotic poetic world of Ady, the reader must be aware of this intricate inner structure. The main poetic devices employed in New Poems (besides contrasts, already referred to) are repetitions, either of particular adjectives, or of full lines; the changing of the semantic contents of words by using them in an unusual context; the making of certain nouns into symbols by capitalizing them; and the coining of new compound words, in so skilful a way that their novely still has not worn off.

Léda is the central figure in the cycles of ‘Psalms for Léda’, ‘Golden Statue of Léda’, and ‘Between Léda’s Lips’. Their love is a ‘happy shame’, a ‘sweet, holy torment’, or at best a ‘holy madness’, their love-making is ‘the battlefield of kisses’, it is good to torment Léda, even with ‘half-kissed kisses’. The symbols of their love are hawks or vultures, never doves or swans. Their affair is a desperate struggle under the black moon, shivering with cold and burning with consuming fire at the same time. There are no references to tenderness, for Ady always concentrates on what is excruciating in their relationship; a love affair as lacking in redeeming qualities as the Ady-Léda relationship had never yet been recorded in Hungarian literature. Yet in addition to the novelty of the startling imagery and eroticism, the Léda poems revealed Ady’s narcissistic sensitiveness, his inability to relate his ego to the object of his love. The theme of unsuccessful relationship, the ‘caged’ ego’s desire to establish meaningful relationships, is one of the leitmotivs of Ady’s poetry. At the same time, the Léda affair released the lock on Ady’s subconscious, with the result that he was able to project his ego into his poetry no matter what its actual theme was.

This is particularly apparent when Ady creates mythical figures like Lord Swine Head in New Poems, or the Ancient Demon Guile in Blood and Gold. Lord Swine Head is the primordial monster of greed whose eternally modern force causes anguish in the poet with his gold, when the poet caresses his fat, loathsome body. There is no escape, the poet’s head is cut open, Lord Swine Head looks into his brain and laughs. The omnipresence of material greed is brought home with penetrating force, the struggle continues for ever ‘on the thunderous shores of Life’. The Demon Guile, perhaps a complex symbolization of both Dionysos and Apollo, is a mysterious Eastern figure clad in purple robes who has come ‘at the ancient dawn of rhymes’ prompting the ecstasy of intoxication and demanding self-expression in art. Wrestling with Demon Guile is an exhausting business and, although he is ever ready to depart (ecstasy is but a fleeting moment), his renewed attacks are a matter of life and death. Ady successfully created a myth of the evanescent creative inspiration; in his mind love, ecstasy, and inspiration are all within easy reach of death and total annihilation. An instance of the primeval fear dwelling in the deeper layers of the self is beautifully captured in ‘Good Prince Silence’, a short poem in which the images of the self and the lurking Prince Silence lead the poet to a separate reality whose forces are beyond understanding. We know only that sanity, consciousness, and life are at stake. This is why he claims to be ‘The Kinsman of Death’ in the cycle containing the poem.

The ease with which Ady creates symbols and myths is also evident in his early political poetry. The traditional function of the national poet is donned as part of his ‘blown-up ego’. But unlike Petőfi, who was leading the people to a Canaan of social justice and equality, Ady is more of a furious prophet in the Old Testament sense. While preaching the futility of his own vocation he sees no sign pointing to salvation. Cursing the Hungarian wasteland, he finds no flower on the fallow (‘Hungarian Wasteland’), and Hungarian Messiahs, these mystic souls, can do very little since they are confronted with the indifference of society (‘Hungarian Messiahs’). Belonging to Hungary subjects one to a gravitational pull; indifference, indolence, slovenliness successfully counteract the vitality of any individual (‘The Poet of Hortobágy’, ‘Homesickness in Sunshine Country’). Yet Ady had no choice; the gravitational pull of his country forced him to be a reluctant ‘national poet’, adding one more cause to his self-torment.

Another theme in Ady’s early poetry is his obsession with money, epitomized by the struggle with Lord Swine Head. In Ady’s life money was a disturbing factor: his modest income from journalism had to be often supplemented by small loans from friends. Because of his preoccupation with money, his imagination commuted between the extremes: between wealth and poverty. In ‘Only One Moment’ Ady is content with the fleeting moment of plentifulness, in ‘Lazarus Before the Palace’ he fancies himself in the role of a singing beggar, weeping outside, and given an occasional morsel by the wealthy from among their riches. Or he takes pleasure in a Romantic flight into a nomadic, proto-Hungarian society where money is unknown (‘Flight From Worry’). The notion of the eastern origin of the Hungarians which was a constant preoccupation of the Romantics is ever present in Ady, but his yearnings are undecided; he could not work out a comforting solution to the dilemma of East versus West; his torment is relieved only intermittently, since the gravitational pull both of native Orientalism and of Paris, the quintessence of Occidentalism, acts in him simultaneously. As for riches, he finally prays in the mask of a monk of Mammon to have both riches and poverty.

The next volumes reveal Ady as a God-seeking poet, and at the same time, his political poetry also matured – the battle-cries of a fully-fledged revolutionary can now be heard. The basis of Ady’s religious experience is his recognition of the inner duality of man, the struggles arising out of which he so vividly visualized in his earlier poems. His relation to God is made up of reproach, remorse, and self-humiliation and his verses echo the istenes poems of Balassi, particularly their genuine Protestant inspiration and great anxiety. Calvinism was a decisive force in Ady’s traditional upbringing, and now Holy Scripture once more became his favourite reading; he constantly turns to the Bible for his imagery and references. In his agonizing search for God, Ady is struck by the discovery that God is not readily accessible for those who seek him: wailing ‘beneath Mount Sion’, in front of changing God-symbols, the poet frantically searches for the path leading to Him. In ‘Adam, Where Art Thou’ or ‘The Lord’s Arrival’ God is loving and protective, the source of benevolent power, while in ‘Scourge me, God’, a poem which shows an unmistakable Freudian influence, a father-figure chastises his son for his sins, for taking songs, ecstasy, and particularly women belonging to Him. But God is also a ‘mighty whale’, on whose slippery back Ady’s faith would attempt to get a foothold lest he slip helplessly into the void (‘To the Great Whale’). Self-humiliation and reconciliation are achieved in the cycle ‘All right, God!’ (Desire to be Loved); he is ready to be received on ‘the porch of death’. Posing as a medieval mystic, in the rarefied air of his atonement, brings about a short spell of inner peace, culminating in ‘I Thank, I Thank, I Thank’ (in the cycle ‘A Shadow Reclining on God’, This Fugitive Life), a poem pervaded by a sensation of ecstasy; Ady experiences God with all his senses: illumination is achieved, and this is the essence of his mystic experience.

Ady’s political poetry is marked by the same vehemence with which he approached all his themes. He was primarily a critic of Hungarian society and only secondarily did he preach revolution. He never fully embraced any of the fashionable socialist doctrines; his revolution was a vague revolt against hypocrisy, against the narrow confines of the prevailing attitudes to social and moral issues. This aspect of his poetry has more often than not been overstressed in recent literature, making Ady out to be a conscious revolutionary who used his poetry to fight for well-defined social goals. As a social critic, Ady first of all attacked class distinctions (‘Grandson of György Dózsa’*The leader of a peasant uprising in 1514., or ‘History Lesson for Boys’); he often associated himself with working-class aspirations, although in a somewhat Romantic fashion (‘Poem of a Proletarian Boy’), and he had the premonition of a coming revolution. Curiously enough, while Ady feverishly demanded change in all walks of life, being irritated by the backwardness of Hungarian society, he abhorred revolution: for him personally, revolution signalled the beginning of the end: death, cataclysm, and total annihilation. For him revolt and doom always appear side by side. Professional revolutionaries are apt to be absorbed in the detail of the new order which would arise out of the ashes of the old; Ady was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the coming upheaval – he prophesied the horrors of apocalyptic destruction – the Last Judgement (‘We Are Rushing Into Revolution’, 1913).

By the outbreak of World War I Ady’s vitality was on the wane; his terminal disease entered its last phase. The swift pace of life sapped the energies of his sick body. His burning passion for Léda gradually subsided; the affair was concluded with ‘A Message of Gentle Dismissal’ (1913). His poems written to Csinszka, whom he married in 1915, were the manifestation of his seeking a last refuge in the haven of marriage. The poetic imagery of the cycle ‘A Confession of Love’ (in Leading the Dead) is soft and warm, glowing with his newly found security in Csinszka’s devotion: ‘I do not know why and how long / I am going to remain with you / but I hold your hand / and guard your eyes.’ (‘Guarding your Eyes’.) The same subdued tone dominates his anti-war poems: the poet is muted by the horrors of the outside world (‘Man in Inhumanity’). His mood is often pensive; the coming war makes him notice strange signs or superstitions which are all omens, in his suggestive interpretation, of the fullness of time: the angel of destruction is about to descend to earth (‘Recollections of a Summer Night’, 1917).

About this time he was writing more ‘kuruc dialogues’. The fugitive kuruc who comments with bitter resignation on the affairs of the world to a fellow-expatriate had been a feature of his poetry from about 1909 (‘We Have Fought our Battles’). Ady loved to put on masks, and it was probably the Romantic cult of Rákóczi and his kuruc soldiers which prompted him to write his own kuruc poems, as a defiantly differing interpretation of the theme. These poems, slightly archaic in language, and closely resembling the originals, are few in number but they carry a significant message. While the official kuruc cult promoted the image of victorious soldiers clad in glittering uniform, Ady’s kurucs are the remnants of a beaten army, fugitives in disguise, expatriates in foreign lands, homeless tramps, or lonely wanderers. These haunting horsemen always ride in the semi-dark background, or sit next to ill-lit camp-fires; their talk is an inner voice in constant dialogue with Ady’s conscious thoughts. At the same time the kurucs talk symbolically about present social evils projected into the past. The scarcely audible dialogue continues all the time, gradually intermingling with the phantoms of Ady’s feverish nightmares, until his last great symbol, the Lost Horseman, emerges (‘The Lost Horseman’) in one of his visions:

You hear the hollow hoofbeats of

a horseman lost since long ago.

The shackled souls of ghosted woods

and ancient reedlands wake to woe.*Translated by Anton N. Nyerges.

The Lost Horseman is a prehistoric, timeless symbol; like the Demon Guile, he is the ‘fleeting life’ of Ady, already ‘leading the dead’ as the title of his last volume suggests. The final stages of Ady’s illness seemed to reflect the turbulence of a country on the brink of civil war. The newly established National Council, which had taken over power on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of October 1918, was not able to use Ady as a figurehead for its cause, since his mind was sinking into deeper and deeper layers of his own microcosmos, sending only ‘A Greeting to the Victorious …’ and it is doubtful in any case whether Ady would have been prepared to be the official ‘great man’ of any regime, whatever its nature.

The poems which Ady omitted from his Leading the Dead were published posthumously (The Last Boats, 1923). These poems hardly altered the general impression gained from his śuvre, the main feature of which was an inherent conflict; none of his contemporaries were more immune to self-deception than this poet who fought the phantoms of his own creation. For these phantoms which lurked on the horizon of his consciousness were not the products of a cult of illusion. Ady lived what he wrote; life and literature have rarely met so impressively as in his ‘bloody and true life’, as witnessed by his constant, feverish struggle against death, whose inevitable approach first fed and ultimately overstrained his excessive vitality. His poetry remains a monument to this struggle, and at the same time a sensitive probing of the political convulsions which have fundamentally shaken Hungarian society, not only by terminating the existence of ‘historical’ Hungary, but by subjecting the nation to traumatic experiences which in turn have determined the course of Hungarian history ever since.

The chief external reason for the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian state was undoubtedly the lost war. By early 1918 it was evident to everybody, except the blinkered nationalist, that the Central Powers, and thus Hungary, had lost. The war effort had totally exhausted both the country’s man-power and its economic resources. In 1918 mutiny and desertion in the armed forces were an everyday occurrence; men were tired, and regarded war as a senseless adventure. News of country-wide famine reached the trenches; the rank and file felt that their place was near their families and, in any case, they had never quite understood the meaning of the slogan ‘for King and Country’. The King was a foreigner residing in a foreign city; what interest could Hungary have in fighting in the Italian Alps? Furthermore all the latent social problems were brought to the surface by the war; the different nationalities revolted against the Hungarian rule, and fighting for the Empire was not their cause either; what they wanted was political union with their brothers outside the Empire. The socialists and the labour movement demanded human rights. Prisoners of war who returned from the newly established Soviet state preached the gospel of Communist takeover.

When King Charles IV surrendered his royal power in November 1918, it was a symbolic act only; the Habsburg Empire was already falling to pieces, Premier Tisza had been murdered by mutinous troops who saw in him the chief perpetrator of their sufferings, and the belated democratic experiment of the National Council, headed by Count Károlyi, was swept away by the tidal wave of the popular revolt. In March 1919 a Hungarian ‘Republic of Councils’ was proclaimed which made an abortive effort to introduce long overdue reforms and to set up a national Red Army, since Upper Hungary had already been seized by Czech troops who were determined to liberate the Slovaks from their thousand-year-old Hungarian yoke. In Transylvania the Romanian Army advanced towards the Tisza. In spite of their moderate success in fending off the invasion for a time, the 133 days of the Béla Kun regime are chiefly remembered for the ferocity with which the hastily – established Soviets usurped power. Since most of the leaders of the ‘Red Terror’, as their rule was called by their enemies, were Jews, their activity bred a degree of antisemitism never previously experienced in Hungary. In August the Romanian Army occupied Budapest, and in Szeged, with the assistance of the Allies, a provisional counter – revolutionary government was set up, headed by Admiral Miklós Horthy, a former aide-de-camp of the late Emperor Francis Joseph. The Horthy regime was determined to suppress ruthlessly any revolutionary movement, and the ensuing White Terror did not spare anyone who sympathized with the Béla Kun regime. A peace treaty was ratified with the Allies on 4 June 1920,*The Treaty of Trianon. So named after a chateau at Versailles where the main peace treaty between Germany and the Allies was concluded in 1919. by which Hungary was obliged to cede two-thirds of ‘the Lands of the Holy Crown’ to neighbouring countries, i.e. to Romania, and to the newly created states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The process of uniting the Slovaks of Hungary with the Czechs of Bohemia, and the Croats with the Serbs, and the cession of Transylvania to Romania, put more than three million Hungarians abroad in hostile states; it was a territorial rearrangement which sowed the seeds of future discord. Small wonder that the Horthy regime’s main objective in foreign policy was to regain the lost territories at any cost.

Much has been written lately, mainly in Hungarian, about the cultural achievements of the Béla Kun regime, in a futile attempt to whitewash the short-lived Republic of Councils, following the counter-revolutionary propaganda of the inter-war period. Although the Communist revolution opened the way to many talents in Hungarian cultural life, the impact of those 133 days when Hungary went red has been only an episode in Hungarian literature. No major socialist writer emerged either during the revolutions, or later among those who went into exile as a consequence of their participation in the events, with the possible exception of György Lukács; but then he was already a well-known intellectual before the war. Writers who went into exile often switched languages, and, like Béla Kun himself, disappeared in Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s if they were unwise enough to choose the Soviet Union as their adopted country. On the other hand, most of the established Hungarian writers of the Nyugat group paid lip-service to the Kun regime, a course which they regretted later; in fact none of these writers, including Móricz, Karinthy, Gyula Juhász, and perhaps Árpád Tóth, were revolutionary in the political sense of the word. Consequently, the significance of revolutionary Hungarian literature is overestimated in an effort to trace the origins of socialist-realism to the regime of Béla Kun.

The same cannot be said of the war experience, which left an indelible mark on the works of many writers, and at least one ‘war poet’ of considerable talent emerged. Géza Gyóni (1884-1917), who died as a prisoner of war in Russia, was a provincial journalist who wrote first in the traditional manner and later imitated Ady, particularly in his love-poetry. He was called up in 1914, and in the first year of the war praised martial virtues in poems using bold and effective imagery. The conservative literary camp, led by Jenő Rákosi, made great publicity out of the ‘brave soldier’ whose patriotic commitment stood in sharp contrast to the pacifist attitude of Ady, for whom the war appeared to be senseless bloodshed which would inevitably lead to catastrophe. Ironically enough, it was not for very long that Gyóni sang the praises of war, in verses which could be used for war-mongering. The poems written in the besieged Polish town of Przemyśl, where Gyóni had experienced all the horrors of war, gradually lost all false Romantic notions about war (By Campfire on the Fields of Poland, Przemyśl, 1914), and the complete truth was brought home to him when he was in the inferno of the trenches. His ‘Just for one single night …’ is perhaps the most outstanding example of Hungarian anti-war poetry; in it he managed to express with elemental force, and in bold images, the general outcry against war-profiteering. When Przemyśl fell, Gyóni was marched off to a camp in Krasnoyarsk; there his poetry reached profundity, contrasting the soft images of home life with the austere conditions of a prisoner-of-war camp (Letters from Calvary, 1916).

Aladár Kuncz (1886-1931) had come to Paris like myriads of other young writers and painters. When war was declared in 1914 he was holidaying in Brittany. Austria-Hungary was not yet at war with France, and her nationals were promised a safe passage to neutral Switzerland. Yet Kuncz and his compatriots were interned; they were kept first on the island of Noirmoutier, and later transferred to the Citadel of l’Île d’Yeu. The French were fighting for their lives; nobody of importance could be bothered with a herd of civilian prisoners marooned somewhere in an old island fortress. Captivity lasted for almost five full years for Kuncz. This was the central, terrible episode of his life, and he died immediately after completing his account of it in 1931.

This book, The Black Monastery (1931), is perhaps one of the great narratives of captivity in any language. It is the story, told with a profusion of minute details, of all those fellow-internees-schoolmasters, lawyers, engineers, cabinet-makers, philosophers, waiters, and sons of rich business men – who shared Kuncz’s fate during those long bleak years. The French officials were only tyrannical in petty ways; no spectacular cruelty was committed – it was only the endless, stifling boredom and discomfort which reduced the internees to a faceless crowd, some showing signs of unsuspected spiritual strength, some yielding and losing their sense of reality. Kuncz’s main virtue as a writer is his uncompromising honesty, his sober judgement, and his impassioned recording of the process of the complete rearrangement of values among the prisoners whose closed society turned around the everyday occurrences of intrigues, deaths, homosexual affairs, lice, latrines, or the meaninglessness of everything: ‘Sometimes one of us said something. He did not talk, only dropped a word or two like a fragment of some unconscious image-series: peasant-girl, strawberry, mill, milk, street, and we would ponder over it for a long time.’ When Kuncz returned home to find a ruined Hungary, a place oddly reminiscent of the one from which he had come, it is understandable that he never recovered. The story of the loss of everything that had meant living for this sensitive and gentle schoolmaster, who had been drawn to France by a passionate enthusiasm for French culture, is, however, both a moving human document and an artistic accomplishment: a record of lost souls in a cosmic nightmare.

The most successful war-novel came from the pen of an obscure Transylvanian journalist, Rodion Markovits (1884-1948), who recounted his experiences at the Eastern Front and in Russian captivity in Siberian Garrison (1927), a novel aptly subtitled ‘collective reportage’, for in it millions recognized the story of their own sufferings. It became a best-seller in many languages; in fact, it became in many respects a counterpart to E. M. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The public liked it immensely; here at last, in the flood of war-books, was one whose plot did not revolve around the infidelity of separated couples, or in which the war was not only a background to a romantic story of longing lovers. Markovits was a pacifist, and described the experiences of his generation effectively and with much self-irony. He followed up his success with Golden Train (1929), whose plot deals with the aftermath of the civil war in Russia; this novel, for all its closely-packed adventures, has however less authenticity than Siberian Garrison, and Markovits is chiefly remembered for his war epic; writers whose primary experience linked them to the great European conflagration were never able to recover wholly, or to move on to new subjects.