
Stephen Vizinczey - the name is hard to pronounce
and hard to spell, but it is worth learning, because it belongs
to a master of our time." (Epoca) Born in 1933 in Hungary,
he was two years old when his father was assassinated by the Nazis;
later, his uncle was murdered by the communists. During his student
years he wrote poems and plays. Three of his plays reached production
stage but were banned by the communist regime. The second, The Last
Word, won the Attila József Prize, but the police came to
the theatre to stop the dress rehearsal and seized all the copies
of the script. His third play, Mama, also banned, was broadcast
on Radio Budapest 3 weeks before the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution
of 1956 and was scheduled in the National Theatre for the spring
of 1957, by which time he was sough for by soviet army security
and the communist secret police. (National Post - October 24, 2006;
The Herald - October 26, 2006).
He fought in the revolution and after its defeat he fled to the
West, speaking only about fifty words of English. Since then, "like
Conrad and Nabokov, he has risen to the ranks of those foreigners
who handle English in a way to make a native Anglophone pale with
jealousy" (Leslie Hanscom, New York Newsday), and "can
teach the English how to write English" (Anthony Burgess) He
learned the language writing scripts for the National Film Board
of Canada. Subsequently, he founded and edited the Canadian literary-political
magazine, Exchange, and joined CBC/Radio Canada as a writer and
producer.
In 1965 he quit his job, borrowed money to publish his first novel,
In Praise of Older Women, and distributed it by car and through
the post. Highly praised by Northrop Frye and the poet Earle Birney
as well as other writers and critics, it became the first and only
self-published novel to top the bestseller lists in the history
of Canadian publishing. Its subsequent publication and success in
Britain the following year drew worldwide attention and it became
an international bestseller. Ever since it has been regularly reissued
in some of the 21 countries where it appeared, often in new translations,
and in the past four decades has acquired a reputation as a modern
classic. In 2001, In Praise of Older Women was described by Pierre
Lepape in Le Monde as "a masterpiece
a dazzling novel
".
In 2004 it received the Elba Prize in Italy. It has been filmed
twice: the Canadian film starred Tom Berenger; the Spanish version
starred Faye Dunaway along with leading Spanish actors. The novel
is due to be reissued in the UK in the spring of 2010 as a Penguin
Modern Classic.
In Praise of Older Women and Vizinczey's second novel, An Innocent
Millionaire (1983), were welcomed by Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess,
among many other writers and critics. "I was entertained but
also deeply moved," wrote Anthony Burgess in his review. "Here
is a novel set bang in the middle of our decadent, polluted, corrupt
world that, in some curious way, breathes a kind of desperate hope."
Throughout the world Vizinczey has been compared to the great classic
novelists of the 19th century, notably Stendhal and Balzac. The
passing decades did not seem to diminish the novel's standing. "A
great contemporary writer," wrote Spain's Carles Barba, "the
passion for liberty, the passion for love, the passion to become
somebody marks the singularity of this author at every moment."
(La Vanguardia, 19 September, 2007)
He is also the author of the 1968 philosophical treatise, The Rules
of Chaos ("Power weakens as it grows.") an extension of
his 1967 article in The Spectator in which he listed the reasons
why the USA was bound to lose the war in Vietnam.
Truth and Lies in Literature (1986) is his collection of reviews
and essays, most of which originally appeared in The Times and The
Sunday Telegraph. Recent editions in French, German, Swedish, Spanish,
Portuguese and Italian include the essays which he has written since
the 1980's and which were published originally in The London Review
of Books,ABC Literario, 24 Ore, and Reforma. Used copies of the
original English editions may be found in some used books shops
and on the Internet..
Reviews of all these books are posted on this website.
His works have sold more than six million copies around the world
during the past 45 years, He is considered "one of the great
contemporary writers, who mkes the crucial themes of our time his
own and transforms them into the stuff of fiction with humour and
passion" (Sergio Vila-Sanjuan, La Vanguardia).
He is not so much a writer as a re-writer. He is working on the
last revisions of his new novel, 3 Wishes.
His e-mail
address is inforeauthor@gmail.com

A Novelist all on his
own
by Robert Fulford
The Toronto Star
Monday, July 12th, 1965


The Magnificant ego
of SV
by Robert Fulford
The Canadian
Saturday, December 6th, 1965


September 19, 2007
The Master of Active Passions
by Carles Barba, La Vanguardia (Barcelona)
(English translation of original Spanish text)
FICTION: “Thanks to their unfading freshness, readers can
now enjoy two great works of Stephen Vizinczey, rediscovered by
RBA...”



Interview
by Tom Juranka
Imprint (Toronto)
Friday, February 10th, 1984


When a boy loves a woman
by Stephen Vizinczey
National Post (The
Scotsman)
Wednesday, July 30th, 1997


La estética disidente
By Juan Domingo Arguelles
El Nacional (Mexico city)
November 1996



History’s surprises
by Stephen Vizinczey
National Post (Toronto)
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
How could
such a small nation as Hungary rebel against the Soviet Union, one
of the two superpowers and a ruthless oppressor?
Well,
for one thing, Hungarians knew the Soviet Union would eventually
collapse. We had been subjects of the Ottoman Empire from 1525 to
1700, when half the population died of starvation or the plague
and children were kidnapped to be brought up as soldiers of Allah.
There is still a Hungary, but where is the Ottoman Empire? We survived
the rapacious and murderous Habsburgs and the Third Reich. This
history of defeats and survival is a kind of religion with the Hungarians,
as it is with the Jews; our heads are full of the calamities that
failed to destroy us. Citizens of powerful nations and their leaders
tend to believe that power is eternal and victories are forever,
but Hungarians focus their minds on the decay of power, on the inevitable
fall of the victors and the resurgence of the vanquished. They think
in terms of millennia, to keep their self-respect and pride against
the deadly powers of the present. Their mindset includes the past
and the future. While millions of Americans seriously worried about
the Soviet Union taking over the United States, we had no doubt,
even under the watchful eyes of the security police, that the Soviet
Union would disappear, just like our oppressors before it. We didn't
know when, but we were waiting.
"No
one has done so much for freedom, democracy and civilization in
recent history as the Hungarians," wrote Camus on the occasion
of the 20th anniversary of the '56 revolution, and his comment is
still valid. 1956 was the last revolution in which people fought
and died for liberal Western values. That's the thing about revolutions:
Only those who are willing to die can play.
Of course, it is a long process. I cannot imagine a Hungarian suicide
bomber. None of us wanted to die just to kill a few innocent people.
Even after the Soviet Army re-entered Budapest on Nov. 4 to crush
the revolution, our ambulances picked up, along with wounded rebels,
wounded Soviet soldiers. (After the Soviet Army regained control,
they were ordered to comb hospitals and shoot wounded male Hungarians.)
I feel insulted when the rabble who lynched secret policemen are
referred to as rebels; these were people who hid in basements during
the fighting. Few who have actually faced death in battle have a
desire for lynching.
Revolutions erupt for many reasons, some historical some practical,
some totally non-political. In this case, at the previous World
Cup final, Hungary's magnificent team including Puskas (one of the
best goal scorers in soccer history), Kocsis and Grosics, seemed
certain to win against West Germany. In the first minutes of the
game, when the ball was in another part of the field, a German player
walked up to Puskas and kicked him so hard that his leg was broken.
That outraged millions of Hungarians. For the first time under the
communist dictatorship, which forbade gatherings unless the party
ordered them, there were huge demonstrations all over the country,
without the permission or blessing of the security police. These
spontaneous demonstrations turned out to be the dress rehearsals
for the outbreak of Oct. 23. People tasted the pleasure, the relief
of going on the streets and expressing anger -- and they weren't
punished for it.
Still, the revolution might never have happened, but for the regime's
blunders. After Stalin's death in 1953, his successors instituted
some mild liberalization throughout the empire. Imre Nagy, a communist
with no blood on his hands, was appointed prime minister of Hungary,
and he managed to abolish torture and forced labour and to free
the political prisoners, but he was soon dismissed for being a dangerous
liberal. The Stalinists came back to power, but during Nagy's brief
tenure several top secret policemen were tried and imprisoned for
their crimes. It was one of the regime's irreversible mistakes.
Thugs, many of them former Nazis, who had tortured or killed whomever
they were told to, lost their zeal for carrying out atrocities.
If their bosses were going to prosecute them tomorrow for what they
were ordered to do today, they preferred to do as little as possible.
I remember on an almost empty tram one morning two people were openly
abusing the regime. One of the other passengers was a captain in
the blue uniform of the AVO, the security police. A year earlier,
the two complainers would not have said anything; even if they had,
he would have arrested them. Instead the AVO officer sat as if he
had heard nothing and got off at the next stop.
The functionaries didn't know whether they were coming or going.
A year earlier, I won a prize for a play about a communist journalist
who killed himself. We got to dress rehearsals before the AVO arrived,
banned the play and collected all the copies. But when I was called
to the Ministry of Culture to be told why my play questioning the
party's authority could not be performed, I was given a grant to
write another play. I used the grant to write a play about a young
man who sees no future for himself in Hungary and escapes to the
West, as I did a few months later -- although I then had no intention
of doing so. This one was also banned, but Radio Budapest broadcast
it on Oct. 6 and the National Theatre accepted it for spring, 1957.
People in authority began to make their own decisions, and not just
in the cultural field, without waiting for orders or approval from
higher-ups.
Another fatal blunder of the regime was giving military training
to university students. Every summer we had to spend a month, and
after graduation three months, in military training, graduating
as reserve officers of the Hungarian Red Army. Students learned
there -- those who still had any doubts -- how vile our rulers were.
We were taught that during an attack we, as officers, should stay
behind our troops and if any of our soldiers men were halted by
enemy fire, we should start shooting them in the back, so that under
fire both from the front and the back they would be more likely
to advance than retreat. The result of this training was that we
decided that in case of conflict with NATO the first thing to do
was to shoot our superiors and the Soviet officers attached to our
units. And we also learned to handle Soviet arms. After the defeat
of the revolution the first thing the Soviets did was to abolish
military service for university students. During the revolution,
my group took over a press building where we started a newspaper
called Igazsag with the help of a cameraman newly graduated from
the Moscow Theatre and Film Academy. He received his summer military
training in Russia and came home as a fully trained Red Army tank
officer. When we managed to get a tank, the Soviet troops found
one of their own tanks firing at them. They must have been surprised.
This is the way history happens: one surprise after another, for
everybody. I was certainly surprised finding myself fighting in
a revolution. I was a founding member of the Petofi Circle, a group
of students, young artists and intellectuals who were later credited
with starting it all. On the morning of Oct. 23, six of us had the
task of meeting three tractors from the country and pulling down
the statue of Stalin with steel cables. The dead tyrant, already
denounced by Moscow as a monster, still dominated Budapest, a symbol
of our status as a suppressed nation. I was as close as anybody
could be to what was to follow, yet I had a movie date for nine
in the evening. I imagined that by then we would have Imre Nagy
back as prime minister, and we could go to the movie.
The Stalin Square was empty when we got there, and a single policeman
could have picked us off with a handgun. A couple of us got into
taxis and went to different parts of the city, stopping when we
saw small crowds to ask them whether they had heard that people
are bringing down the Stalin statue. By the time we got back to
the square, it was packed by thousands of spectators who provided
a protective shield. The AVO could not have possibly dislodged us.
We had no technical knowledge and hoped to pull down the colossal
bronze statue with steel cables tied to the tractors. We were surprised
that the cables snapped. But eventually someone with a blow torch
came around and cut off Stalin's feet at the boots. A crowd is always
noisy, but when the bronze colossus hit the pavement, there was
total silence; I could hear thousands of people breathing. I looked
at my watch. I wanted to remember the exact time that marked the
beginning of the end for the Soviet Union and its empire. It was
9.30 pm.
The silence was followed by the sound of machine guns. We heard
that the AVO was shooting at people at the radio building. The war
began, so we fought. Many of us thought of Count Zrinyi, who held
up the Turks for years at his small castle of Szigetvar. Finally,
in 1566, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Sultan, came to crush
this "anthill" with an army a hundred thousand strong.
Zrinyi and his soldiers resisted until they ran out of food and
ammunition. Then they dressed up in their parade uniforms, put gold
coins in their pockets for the soldiers of the Sultan who would
be men enough to kill them, and rode out from the ruins of the castle
in a desperate cavalry charge. They got near to Suleiman before
they were cut down. Shocked by the unexpected assault, the Sultan
collapsed and died of apoplexy during the struggle around his tent.
The Turkish army withdrew and the resulting power struggle for the
Ottoman throne gave Hungary several years of respite. Zrinyi's grandson
wrote a valiant epic poem about the siege, so he continued to lead
his cavalry charge in our imagination, teaching us that even the
few can inflict deadly blows on the many, even on the greatest powers.
And that's what we did.

- Stephen Vizinczey fought in the Hungarian revolution and came
to Canada in 1957. He worked for the NFB and the CBC, and edited
the literary political magazine Exchange. His books, including
In Praise of Older Women, have sold five million copies
in 22 languages. He is finishing a new novel, Wishes.
©
National Post 2006

The lesson of 1956: value freedom more than life
by Harry Reid
The Herald (Glasgow)
October 26, 2006

© Newsquest (Herald & Times) Ltd. 2007

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