Within a few weeks of my arrival in Hungary earlier this year, a colleague at my host institute, an Italian literary scholar told me about his quirky connection with the Hungarian football team. He knew the person appointed to teach Hungarian to the Italian coach of the Hungarian team, Marco Rossi. The context of this conversation was my 11-year son’s obsession with football. He was going to arrive in a few weeks. Given the thrall European football had on his imagination, we thought there would be much for him to soak in here.

Turned out that my son, who had much to say about the French and German teams as well as the East European powerhouse, Croatia and its celebrated central midfielder, Luka Modrić, didn’t know anything about the Hungarian team, beyond that it was “very good”. I took him to the great football shrine in Budapest, the Ferenc Puskás stadium, where he delighted in the exhibits of the football-themed museum and the panoramic view from the stands. But even though he knew much about Pele, Maradona, Johan Cruyff, Lev Yashin, and many other footballers from long before his time, he hadn’t heard of the Hungarian legend, Ferenc Puskás, or even the dashing striker I remembered from our childhood, László Kiss. Between Croatia and France, Hungary had slipped through the cracks. 

Why do some names, phenomena, trends and traditions become popular and others remain unknown? This becomes a poignant question when the difference in quality between the major and the minor does not seem to add up to the difference in reputation, when the latter remains out of sync with the former. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that 'minority' and 'majority' are not necessarily demographic terms. If that were the case, a minority of European colonisers could not have dominated the majority of the world’s population for centuries. The domination of the 'majority' is the triumph of ideology, not just the brute force of numbers. Living in today’s India, where majoritarianism is also a powerful function of demography, the equally powerful force of ideology can sometimes slip under the radar, but it never should.

For me, the irony of the 'major' and the 'minor' became blatant in unexpected ways this year, which, in more ways than I had imagined, turned out to be the year of Hungary. 

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Less than three hours by train from Budapest is Vienna, the gateway to Western Europe. The seat of the great Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna is the city that the besieging Ottoman forces failed to bring down in spite of repeated attempts. Viennese resistance drew the frontier for the Turks and paved the ground for the decline of the great Ottoman Empire and the consequent dominance of Western Europe. Budapest, on the other hand, lived under Ottoman rule for over 150 years. Unsurprisingly, with its scattering of Turkish thermal baths and eclectic blend of art nouveau, gothic, baroque, and communist architecture, Budapest is far less of a Western city. It remains outside of Western Europe not only geographically (which must draw an arbitrary line somewhere) but also historically and culturally. But while it is touched by some of the major historical narratives of Eastern Europe, Budapest stays on their fringes too, as does Hungary on the whole. Lacerated by both Nazism and Communism, submitting to Hitler and “saved” by the Soviets, Hungary defines that space that is both misunderstood and hybridised – Central European.

It is not only for us here in India but for the world at large that some of the iconic markers of modernity are European, in other words, Western European. It is astonishing how many of them come from Vienna, the gateway to this modernity. Sigmund Freud’s house, now a museum, is the one where the father of psychoanalysis and the modern fragmented mind lived and had most of his dreams. Western classical music rises to its global crescendo in the Viennese Opera House, and the summer seat of the Hapsburg royalty, the Schönbrunn Palace, is still awash with the aura of a child prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 

While my literary consciousness is magnetised by the bizarre novelistic essayism of Robert Musil and the intoxicating existentialism of Franz Kafka whose daily walk from home to school is immortalised in Prague’s Kafka museum, Hungarian literature had scarcely a mark on me compared to the giant imprints of writing in German. If anything, the literary figure who loomed the largest was that of Sándor Petőfi, the Hungarian national poet, after whom the National Museum of Literature is named. Killed in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, his body never recovered, Petofi wrote the famous line, “On your feet, Magyar, the homeland calls”, that opened his iconic 'Nemzeti dai' or 'National Song', which became the patriotic war cry of the Magyars, Hungary’s dominant ethnic group, against the domination of the Habsburg Empire all the way to the crushed revolution of 1848.

This is the literary and linguistic nationalism now powerfully appropriated by the dominant right-wing in Hungary today led by its jingoistic prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has loudly declared his war on liberalism: “The new state we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”

Not only the nation, but a strident nationalism was written all over the Petofi museum of literature in Budapest, much of it only in Hungarian that did not even care to be translated for the non-Hungarian visitor. Strangely, it reinforced my first impression of the city with its key areas closed off to traffic on the occasion of the arrival of Orban’s close friend and ally, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, a war-criminal in most of Europe but welcomed in Hungary. For me, having just arrived in the country, it was an omen for my stint as a fellow at an institute supported by Orban’s arch-nemesis, the liberal investor and philanthropist George Soros – at a university that had been cast out of Hungary by the illiberal state, unironically, into faceless bank building in Vienna. 

§

Deeply Hungary, but without bright markers, no hint of nationhood of any stripe. Is that why the Hungarian-British novelist David Szalay’s strangely self-effacing novel, Flesh, appealed to me when a newspaper asked me to review it shortly after my return from Budapest? There was something was haunting about the novel that had just appeared on the Man Booker longlist. It was its deeply atmospheric quality, evoked without any reference to time or place. We are in an unnamed city in an unnamed country, and neither do we know when, beyond the fact that it’s a time that has flats and supermarkets and schools. All that come much later, haltingly, accidentally. I couldn’t help but wonder what Szalay was trying to do. To place his protagonist within a universal, existential condition, and his novel outside a particular culture? Flesh opens with the protagonist in the pronoun, in which he stays for half a page – “When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts at a new school.” Only at the bottom of the page we get his name, István, a common Hungarian name, a version of “Stephen” in that language .

Fresh from the loud music of Nemzet dai – nationalism in every utterance of Hungarian language and literature, I found this anonymity intriguing, and deeply political. The very first word that suggested context to me in this novel was “lángos”: “They eat lángos while they wait for the bus back to the town.” It is a uniquely Hungarian street food, a deep-fried bread that reminded me of the Indian bhature whenever I ate it in Hungary. In the novel, the eating of lángos is no special occasion – István  and his companion eat it “while they wait for the bus”. Indeed, the curiously vacant cultural confidence of this novel indicates places with colloquial ellipses. Such is how István suggests to Noémie, his cousin in whom he has an erotic interest, that they spend a day in “Balaton”, which is how a local would call what tourists are likely to call “Lake Balaton”, the largest natural lake in central Europe that is a major summer attraction. For me, this was the first firm indication of where the novel is set, quickly followed by the discovery of Hungarian metal tapes in the glove compartment, which also indicated a general frame of time.

But much like László Krasznahorkai’s Hungarian-language narrative, The Melancholy of Resistance, Szalay’s novel, which went on to win this year’s Man Booker Prize, attains universality through profound immersion in the life of an ordinary man. István is not distinguished in any way – rather by failure by most standards of bourgeois success. His life is neither striking nor adventurous, though towards the end, it is marked by a series of events, some outside his control, which makes it a tragic life. But this is not the classical tragedy of the exceptional protagonist but the modern, existential tragedy of the ordinary citizen. Not the grand cry of Aeschylus but the whimper of Kafka. 

A recently widowed woman in her fifties, Mrs Estzer is another everywoman character in The Melancholy of Resistance by Krasznahorkai, awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. With a self-destructive son who is a failure in life and whom she is keen to disown, Mrs Estzer could perhaps exist in any middle-class milieu anywhere in the world. But her anonymity hides a sinister determinacy that would soon threaten to change the fate of her town. Meanwhile, the long, breathless, stream-of-consciousness sentences in the novel weighs heavy on the reader with their deeply melancholic but intoxicating music. As we feel trapped in a suffocating atmosphere with which we fall in love, some of the greatest mysteries of life start to make sense, such as that the love-instinct is not fully separable from the death-drive. The packed train compartment early on in the novel could belong to many parts of the globe, north or the south, east or west, indicating Hungary’s liminal place in the world. Packed in the crowd, Mrs Estzer feels the calm and predatorial glance of a brutish man and feels discomfited by her bra, which she realises, has come unhooked under her blouse. But when she makes her way to the toilet in the train’s compartment to adjust her dress, she hears the predatorial man pounding on her door. He noticed her leaving for the toilet and misread it as an invitation to him to follow for stolen intimacy. The realism of that moment is brutal. Like in Flesh, we realise that the sensory reality of human life can be felt across subjectivities even when cultural markers are absent, perhaps most particularly in their gaping absence. 

Balázs Trencsényi, the renowned historian of totalitarianism in central and eastern Europe and the director of the institute which hosted me in Budapest, pointed me to the work of Peter Nadas, particularly to his revealing, 1000-page memoir in two volumes, Shimmering Details, published in Hungarian in 2017 and in English in 2023. Born in the dark year of 1942 when Hungary hung between the twin pincers of Soviet and Nazi dictatorship, Nadas creates a world where the painstaking ethnography of quotidian details recreates the nightmare of an oppressive Hungary that feels hallucinatory. It is easy to see why so many Hungarian writers embody the worldview of existentialism. Just as existentialism was a response to the dark futility of a world trapped in thickening totalitarianism between two world wars in Europe, a hundred years later, we are back in a world whose horizons are darkened by ethnocentric nationalisms for as long as our vision stretches. The fiction of namelessness is the best name for this terrifying reality that is far from fictional. Prizes can mean nothing or everything, or all that lie in between – but pointed recognition to Hungarian literature makes 2025 the year of Hungary for the World Republic of Letters.  

Saikat Majumdar is the author of five novels and three books of criticism, most recently, The Amateur and The Remains of the Body. He was a  Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest earlier this year.

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