A Case Study on Trianon

Part IV

The Settlement and Its Repercussions

Ivan Sanders

Hungarian literature was more consciously Western oriented in the early twentieth century than during any other period in its history. The most important periodical of the age was called, significantly, Nyugat (West, established in 1908). The Western orientation in literature, which began in the final decades of the nineteenth century and gained momentum in the early years of the twentieth, was symptomatic of the modernizing, liberalizing forces that were making inroads in an essentially traditionalist, backward society. While Hungarian poets and novelists associated with Nyugat eagerly responded to modern literary movements such as impressionism and symbolism, enlightened social scientists and political reformers propagated the ideals of new social systems. Budapest became an important culture center during the first two decades of the twentieth century, though much of the impetus for change came from abroad.

When Laszlo Nemeth burst on the literary scene with a prizewinning short story in 1925, most of the early modernists, the founders of Nyugat, were still active, but the optimism, the innovative spirit of the pre-war years, was gone. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the trauma of successive revolutions and defeats, the loss of about two-thirds of Hungary's territory as a result of the Treaty of Trianon, the installation of an ultraconservative regime in 1920, left the country reeling and many of its intellectuals despondent and rudderless. The spiritual malaise lasted well into the twenties. and those young writers who were groping for new values, uniquely Hungarian solutions for the nation's problems, raised questions about the Western tradition and about the efficacy of "borrowed" ideologies. Laszlo Nemeth was born in 1901 in the town of Nagybanya, and although he grew up in an urban setting, in Budapest, his father, who was a teacher in a Gymnasium, came from a well-to-do family, and the young Nemeth spent his summers in

Szilasbalhas, a village in Western Hungary. His early interest in foreign culture landscapes notwithstanding, Nemeth was committed from the beginning of his career to an exploration, a redefinition-in criticism as well as in fiction-of the Hungarian ethos. He extended his horizons only to be able to focus more clearly on a specifically Hungarian reality. His formative experiences in the village, his introduction to a close-knit peasant community had a profound effect on his literary art-his best novels have a rural setting and delve into peasant psyches.

Reflecting the post-war disenchantment with Western ideals, Nemeth felt that the peasantry was the true repository of traditional national values; in later years he became one of the spiritual mentors of the Hungarian populist movement which rejected many features of Western-oriented urban culture and advocated thoroughgoing reforms whose aim was to upgrade the lives of the notoriously neglected rural masses. As early as 1928 Nemeth wrote that the peasantry possessed "pre-poetic energies," and was the creative force behind Hungarian culture. There was not one great Hungarian writer, he believed, who was not a disciple of the people. Nemeth's main criticism of Nyugat was that it produced great personalities but not a coherent cultural tradition. In some ways he had more respect for a previous generation of Hungarian writers who, he felt, may have been less sophisticated, less dazzling as artists, but had stronger convictions.¹ Mihaly Babits, the other great literary figure of the early twentieth century and editor of Nyugat from the late twenties on, attacked Nemeth bitterly for such views, condemning his "retroactive distortions" as well as his high-handed generalizations about contemporaries.

Laszlo Nemeth drew the ire of most of his fellow writers almost from the beginning of his career. In his very first literary essays he developed the thesis that Hungarian culture reflects the tragic destiny of the Hungarian people. Nemeth felt that some of the greatest figures of Hungarian literature were prevented by the exigencies of time and place from realizing their true potentials, and their creative efforts were regularly met with incomprehension and indifference. The typical Hungarian literary artist, Nemeth believed, had always been a lonely, frustrated, tragic individual, crushed by a hostile environment. It was obvious to Nemeth's foes that the young critic included himself among the ranks of the misunderstood great; at first they chalked up his self-righteous attacks on the state of Hungarian

society and culture to youthful arrogance, but as time went on, they had a harder time dealing with his overdeveloped ego and his own extreme sensitivity to criticism. Yet, not even Nemeth's most vociferous detractors disputed the fact that here was a highly gifted writer, a man of bold conceptions, a tirelessly inquisitive spirit whose writings revealed not only an encyclopedic breadth but a rare ability to combine artistic subjectivity with scientific accuracy. Science was never alien to Nemeth; he began his career as a scientist, a physician. His life-long attempt to apply, on the one band, the rigors of the scientific method to humanistic speculation and, on the other, to convey scientific concepts and theories in the suggestive metaphors of the poet can be seen already in his first two papers, one of them a study of Endre Ady's poetry ("Az Ady-vers genezise" [The Genesis of the Ady Poem]) and the other, a scientific study entitled "Uj szempontok a status praesens felveteleben" (New Perspectives on the Recording of Clinical Data). Nemeth himself writes in a review of his career: "My aim was to convey, in biological terms and with the help of the then fashionable science of characterology, a budding writer's view of man ... The other essay, 'The Genesis of the Ady Poem,' traveled the same route but in the opposite direction; it tried to chart the course of a biological entity-Ady's creative character-by following the course of his poetic revolutions."³ Both of these studies reveal Nemeth's intense interest in character makeup. It has been pointed out often that Nemeth's concept of character defines much of his writings. For him character is a unified and largely immutable set of physical, emotional and psychic attributes. One of his favorite words, in fact, is alkat which denotes physical structure, body build, as well as character makeup, temperament. To a large extent it is this Gestalt approach to character that accounts for Nemeth's interest in Greek mythology, in archetypes, in quasi-Nietzschean notions of towering individual excellence, as well as in modern psychological, characterological theories.

Ironically enough, Nemeth's own alkat did not predispose him to his would-be role as social reformer and stern arbiter of literary taste. This is how Gyula Illyes, Nemeth's great contemporary, describes the twenty-four-year-old winner of Nyugat's short story contest: "When the winner appeared before the chairman of the jury, he-as he later told me-thought that the author, whom he hadn't seen before, sent his son to accept the prize money. A slender, fairhaired, girlish-faced young man with the looks of a graduating high

school senior stood before him, possessing the modesty of those appealingly well-mannered youths who still blush when they must say or hear anything slightly unusual."⁴ Yet, this shy, unassuming young man told Erno Osvat, the powerful editor of Nyugat, that his aim was to become "the organizer of Hungarian intellectual life."⁵ The young Nemeth believed that the age of nationalism, which in many ways created and nurtured the literatures of Eastern Europe, was over by the end of the First World War, and these literatures would lose their direction and purpose if the reawakened national spirit expressed in them did not reflect the changed historical circumstances. It was this renewed national culture that Nemeth wanted to help bring about. But as Illyes points out in his reminiscence, Osvat wanted to recruit writers, not revolutionaries. To be associated with Nyugat naturally appealed to Nemeth, and contrary to a widespread impression, the rift with the periodical did not come right away. But it did become apparent soon enough that Nemeth's audacious self-appraisal, his controversial theories about Hungarian culture, his highly personal views of Hungarian writers, and in general his moral strictures and reformist zeal ran counter to Nyugat's esthetics-oriented editorial policy. After the publication of his prize-winning short story about the death of a peasant woman ("Horvathne meghal" [Mrs. Horvath Dies]), Nemeth tried his hand at a few more peasant stories and a novel, but then he turned to criticism, and during the next few years published a number of important literary essays in the little-known Protestans Szemle, in the neo-conservative Kelet Nepe, and more significantly, in Erdelyi Helikon. (Nemeth was among the first Budapest-based writers to pay close attention to post-war Transylvanian literary developments, and he continued to survey that scene throughout the thirties.) In most of his early essays, including the one written on the works of the novelist Dezso Szabo, Nemeth revealed that his literary views and emerging social theories, which were later judged by liberal Hungarian critics to be narrowly ethnocentric and retrograde, could not really be identified with the aggressive chauvinism and mystical racism that gained currency even among serious intellectuals during the interwar years. The ultra-nationalist Dezso Szabo, who swung from extreme left to extreme right without giving up his radical fervor, exerted a considerable influence on the post-World War I generation, including Nemeth himself. But for Nemeth race was above all an ethical concept; it did not denote "collective blood ties," but "a spiritual

fellowship, a model for human conduct, the gospel of a non-ecclesiastic religion ... salvation in and through literature."⁶ In his essay on Dezso Szabo, Nemeth ennobles and poeticizes his first idol's nationalism. If anything, the young essayist was challenged, spurred into action, by the post-Trianon gloom. As we shall see, Nemeth was aware all his life of the extraordinary moral advantages of being an underdog; these early essays already hint at his conviction that adversity brings out the best in an individual, in a nation, and even a siege mentality can do wonders for the national psyche.

In the late twenties and early thirties Nemeth's brand of creative criticism needed its own forum; it could not conform to the literary-political orientation of any of the existing journals. For a while Nemeth was on friendly terms with Babits, the new editor of Nyugat, who encouraged the young critic to introduce on the pages of the journal the works of talented new writers. But when Nemeth accused Babits, who administered the prestigious Baumgarten Prize, of using it as a pawn in a literary power struggle, their friendship came to an abrupt end. (In 1930 Nemeth himself was awarded the Baumgarten Prize, but when Babits's choice was attacked in the press, an offended Nemeth returned the prize and the substantial money that came with it.) In 1932 Nemeth decided to go it alone and started his own periodical, Tanu (Witness), which he wrote entirely by himself.

During its four years of existence, Tanu offered not only a reassessment of modern Hungarian literature and the historical-political circumstances which gave rise to it; its author-publisher took it upon himself to acquaint his readers with the best in recent Western literature. The periodical was to be one man's view of the intellectual currents of his age. Lengthy essays appeared in Tanu on Proust, Joyce, Pirandello, Gide, Ortega y Gasset, Freud and others. These erudite and at the same time passionately subjective appraisals won Nemeth the admiration of even his severest critics. Whatever his subject happened to be-the untamed genius of the ancient Greeks, the glorious wordiness of Shakespeare, the calculated greatness of Goethe, the brilliant dilettantism of Proust-Nemeth's highly individual point of view, his combative spirit, quickly became manifest. Not only was he often drawn to writers (e.g., Tolstoy, Gide, Proust) who were in some ways kindred spirits, he also tended to reshape them in his own image. When, for example, he writes that for Proust "nature and morality are one," or that the heroine of

Gide's Porte etroite "could be happy but she tastes the joy of self-denial," one thinks inevitably of Nemeth's own notion of heroism (that curious mixture of Nietzschean hauteur and Christian self-effacement), and of Nemeth's heroes and heroines who exemplify this ideal.⁷

The group of writers, poets and publicists who had the warmest praise for Nemeth's many-faceted literary activities were the populists. In the mid-thirties the sweeping reforms advocated by this group, their enthusiastic espousal of a constructive kind of ethnocentrism and their rediscovery of peasant cultures caught the imagination of some of Hungary's leading political figures, and for a short while it seemed that as in years past, Hungarian poets and writers would play an active role in shaping their nation's destiny. Many of the populists looked to Nemeth as the potential ideologist of the movement; but as soon as populism became politicized, Nemeth had second thoughts-not because he considered himself an ivory-tower intellectual (he always had proposals for political and social reform up his sleeve), but because direct involvement in politics was alien to his temperament. He saw himself primarily as a man of letters and an educator. At a time when liberal democracy in Hungary was an illusion, and the country was fast sliding into the Fascist orbit, Nemeth wrote of a "Third Hungary," one that would be energized by the latent strengths of the rural masses. In retrospect Nemeth recognized that "the Third Hungary was closer to a Platonic ideal, which a man not cut out for politics tried to bring down to earth ... than to a workable political program. Still, at the time there were signs of official recognition. In 1934 Nemeth was put in charge of the Hungarian Radio's literary programming. Influential members of the cultural establishment were reading Tanu and following Nemeth's career with interest. He became a sought-after lecturer and was one of the founders of the populist periodical Valasz (Answer), though after realizing that he couldn't reconcile his own lofty concepts with the more pragmatic reform plans of the populist mainstream, he and the editors of Valasz parted ways. During the thirties Nemeth formulated some of his most important and controversial ideas. They were published in a series of volumes entitled A minoseg forradalma (The Revolution of Quality, 1940-1943). Influenced by the pessimistic world views of such social critics and philosophers as Spengler, Dilthey and Ortega y Gasset, Nemeth rejected both capitalism and socialism, believing them to be identical phenomena.

"Both are interested in bringing about, through opposite means, a mass society based on large-scale economic development, mass production," he wrote. But the profound ill of the world can not be cured by a revolution based on the equal distribution of wealth as conceived by the socialists ... The real revolution must take place within the individual consciousness," Nemeth opted for a "third way," quality socialism, a societal order inspired and led by the "latent better ones," who in a self-imposed exile from conventional society set a moral example for the masses. "The revolution of conscience would remain free of violence; moral example would be responsible for its success. An independent societal entity-the intelligentsia-would become the vanguard and try to reshape society in its own image."⁹ Nemeth's ideal was a classless society in which each profession would reach an intellectual level. Under such circumstances class distinctions would disappear, and a truly classless society would emerge.

Nemeth's ideas were attacked both from the left and the right. The "revolution of quality" was judged to be dangerously elitist and at best naively utopian. And when in a series of essays published under the title Kisebbsegben (In the Minority, 1942), Nemeth talked about the "genius" of race and distinguished between "deep" Hungarians (melymagyarok) and "skindeep" Hungarians (higmagyarok),¹⁰ he was called a literary fascist and an out-and-out racist. His views were considered particularly outrageous because their publication coincided with the passage of discriminatory legislation against Hungarian Jews. Ironically, Nemeth was as concerned about the assimilation of Hungary's Jews as about the dissimilationist tendencies discernible at this time among Magyarized Germans. But to repeat, terms like race and quality, were charged with ethical significance for Nemeth. He was neither a professional political scientist nor a trained philosopher; he approached social and political problems as a writer with a strong moralist bent, who tried to reconcile the rationalist world view of a scientist with the idealistic, even messianic impulses of a reformer. In an essay on Nemeth's ideology, the philosopher Tibor Hanak points out that "quality as a moral ideal cannot be scientifically verified; it cannot be expressed in quantitative language. Quality is 'life,' whereas quantity belongs in the realm of science. Nemeth tried to bridge the gap between the two on a pedagogical rather than a theoretical plane."¹¹ Of course he also tried to bridge this gap in his novels and

plays. Nemeth's theories about racial determinants and moral exemplars appear uncompromising and dogmatic when he expounds on them in his essays. But his persistent attraction to self-effacing supermen, secular saints, wronged moral giants make for rich and rewarding fictional works. The theories he advocates so militantly in his essays are much more subtly diffused, and frequently questioned, in these works. The moral fervor of the ideologist is cooled and confounded by the esthetic sensibilities of the artist. In a recently published diary entry Nemeth himself admits: "It was in my essays that my mission as a writer broke through; my novels and dramas are secondary formations. They aided the process of self-purgation and helped me eliminate unwanted residues. In my novels I fantasized about-and removed-the threats to my psychic integrity. ... I licked my wounds in them."¹² It is important to note, too, that the setting of most of Nemeth's literary works, including fiction written or completed in the sixties, is post-World War I Hungary (His last novel, Irgalom [Mercy], begun in the Twenties and published in 1965, contains the most elaborate and penetrating portrayal of the post-war scene.) Not only was the ambiance of this period most familiar to him, but its problems and hardships as well. Indeed, many of these works can be viewed as a morally aware artist's attempt to fill a spiritual void left by the war and its aftermath. Nemeth's heroes are defiant idealists who are invariably pitted against worldly and practical-minded antagonists, and struggle valiantly, and often needlessly, pathetically, to save a crass, mean-spirited, conventional world.

Nemeth began to write his first novel, Emberi szinjatek (Human Comedy) in 1928. In an autobiographical narrative first published in the Thirties, the author tells us that the model for Zoltan Boda, the novel's hero, was a fellow medical student, a strange, high-strung, impotent boy who dropped out of medical school to become a medicine man in their village. Emberi szinjatek was meant to be an ironic account of an eccentric boy's quest for martyrdom. Nemeth's purpose was to show that "sainthood and neurosis are two sides of the same coin."¹³ But the hero outwitted the irony. As he was writing this ambitious novel, the young author realized that he was identifying more and more with Zoltan Boda, and found himself smuggling into his hero's life his own dreams and ideals, making him fight for his own causes. Looking back to this period in his life, Nemeth wrote years later: "I believed I fit into all the roles that a 'normal' person

was expected to fit into; I adjusted well to the world. But having reached this peak, I became-the novel attests to it-suspicious of all the wholesomeness and normalcy; didn't it deceive me and shut out forever my better, nobler self, my 'abnormality?' "¹⁴

Nemeth's second major novel, Gyasz (Mourning, 1930), also exemplifies a magnificent obsession; it, too, was intended to be a clinical study of excessive behavior-in this case a peasant widow's defiant grief-that ultimately turned into a tribute to the obsession. In Gyasz Nemeth wanted to "unmask the falsity of mourning-the heroic hypocrisy of proud souls like me who know too much about mourning themselves, and don't dare to forget even what they are in fact beginning to forget. The hoarse, bitter laugh of a cousin of mine became the melody, the motto of the novel. The last time I saw her was in the cemetery, at the grave of her son and of her husband who fell in battle. In Zoltan Boda of Emberi szinjatek I wanted to present an ironic picture of sainthood; the same way in the portrait of Zsofi Kurator [heroine of Gyasz] I wished to make pride the object of my irony. But just as sainthood before, pride won out over my irony."¹⁵

The autobiographical antecedents of Nemeth's third novel, Bun (Guilt, 1936), are even more revealing. Nemeth married young (he was not yet twenty-five), and his wife, Ella, was a practical, down-to-earth, in many ways conventionally bourgeois woman who bore him six daughters and who-thanks to her ingenuity and perseverance-made it possible for her husband to devote much of his time to writing. As Nemeth's biographer points out, "Tanu as well as Nemeth's other works may have had a hundred different muses, but they all had one mother: Ella Nemeth."¹⁶ Her husband was very much attached to her, but because she was easygoing, non-intellectual, an earth mother, the intellectually discriminating and morally squeamish Nemeth tried often to fight off her powerful and seductive influence. In an unusually frank, posthumously published diary entry the author confesses that despite his love for Ella "my life with her was spent in endless rebellion, dissatisfaction and-dare I say it?-unhappiness."¹⁷ After he stopped publishing Tanu and discovered that the populists' reform plans were not taken too seriously by the government, Nemeth again decided to go it alone. He wanted to establish a community of like-minded individuals, and with this in mind, planned to buy a farm which would become a "tiny island of quality socialism," the first model of a fondly envisaged "Garden Hungary," where the workers would not only be

intellectuals but-not so incidentally-Nemeth's disciples as well. As can be expected, Ella, "the enraged mother," was opposed to this highly impractical venture. Instead of buying a farm she was interested in having a home built for her growing family.¹⁸ The conflict between husband and wife produced Bun, a brooding novel about a simple peasant boy who drifts into the capital and is hired as a laborer by Mrs. Endre Horvath, a wealthy middle-class woman who is having a house built in a fashionable suburb of Budapest. Mrs. Horvath is a materialistic, calculating woman, while her husband, Endre, is a sensitive, anguished intellectual. Bun reveals the huge gap between peasant and bourgeois, and is concerned mainly with Horvath's tragic attempt to bridge the gap, to atone for the guilt he feels in the face of social injustice, by trying to improve the boy's lot. However, the gap proves to be too wide; not only is his wife exasperated by his acts of charity; his gestures are ignored, misunderstood by the lad himself. The novel ends with Horvath's suicide.

After Tanu ceased publication in 1936, Nemeth's career as a publicist seemed to be over. His ideas were attacked, his integrity questioned; more than ever he needed the "cleansing rinse of fiction."¹⁹ He embarked on what he felt would be the most ambitious work of his career: a sweeping novel of education, an encyclopedic fictional treatment of modern Hungarian history, a story, a Proustian dissection of classes, types, intellectual and social currents. It was conceived as a seven-part novel about the momentous struggle for self-realization of one man, Peter Jo. Entitled Az utolso kiserlet (The Last Experiment), this monumental novel was to have been Nemeth's swan song, his message to posterity: "The Last Experiment tried to magnify the dimensions of my own experiment and fall, and provide an encyclopedic synthesis of what before the historic breakup was still intact in my country and its people, and what art-for in art even the vanquished can triumph if he survives-could preserve for more fortunate epochs.²⁰ Many critics felt that Peter Jo was Laszlo Nemeth-and indeed there are quite a number of superficial biographical resemblances between the two, but Peter Jo does not capture the essence of the "Nemeth character" the way some of his tragic heroines do. The author had to realize that works conceived on a giant scale are not always successful. In attempting to write an all-encompassing novel, Nemeth described landscapes and milieus he knew little about, and felt compelled to

pad his work with too many philosophical mediations. Only the first four volumes of the projected seven-part cycle appeared, the last one in 1941. Nemeth could not remain a reclusive novelist; too many things were happening around him during these years. He may have felt that he was pushed off the literary scene, but his interest in public affairs, his urge to answer new calls, to respond to new stimuli, was too great. Amazingly enough, in addition to publishing his highly provocative political essays, discussed earlier, Nemeth found time during this same period to produce a number of important dramas. (In surveying Nemeth's career, one realizes that his enormous creative abilities were matched only by an almost compulsive need to write-this despite his vows, frequently voiced, never fulfilled, to withdraw into silence. His post-Second World War output is no less formidable than his pre-war production. During the last years of his life, he suffered greatly from the aftereffects of a stroke, but what he found most intolerable was that he could no longer write.)

As a playwright, Nemeth was also concerned with moral issues-issues that for him took on greater urgency in a fragmented, despondent world. As in his first novels, Nemeth's early social and historical dramas grew out of his clash with his wife and his family, yet they reflect some of the more profound social ills of his times. The heroes of these plays are driven by an ideal which is irreconcilable with their family's earth-bound needs and desires. The heroes' attempt to abandon society are usually frustrated by a wife or a child. The conflicts are violent and lead invariably to the family's downfall. The names alone of the historical personages that later caught Nemeth's fancy-Pope Gregory VII, Jan Hus, Galileo, Gandhi, the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, the Hungarian physician Semmelweis-suggest the sense of continuity and consistency in his art. Nemeth adopted Gregory's motto-"I loved the truth and hated injustice"-for all his historical dramas. The unifying theme of these works is the noble and tragic struggle of individual genius against mass stupidity and intolerance.

From the beginning of his career, Laszlo Nemeth felt he was a writer with a mission. He was indeed a nineteenth-century man in his desire to use literature as a weapon, a means to an end; in believing that a writer can still be teacher, prophet, secular priest. At the same time Nemeth was also a quintessentially modern writer, whose skepticism and psychological sophistication invariably mocked his own idealism and insistence on moral purity. This is why his

characters can be seen either as tragic heroes or egomaniacs, geniuses or misfits. As we said, Nemeth's novels and plays, despite their revolutionary aims and grand themes, are rather narrow in scope, dealing as they do with conflicts between husband and wife, parent and child. His novels are family novels, his dramas domestic dramas. His few attempts at traditional utopian literature are rather naive and unconvincing. As an artist Nemeth knew that East Europeans cannot afford to be dreamers. "In this bleak region of history," writes Gyula Gombos in his essay on Nemeth, "the too beautiful and too perfect always seem frivolous."²¹ It was because he wanted to be guided by both faith and reason that the young Nemeth had trouble fitting into groups or pleasing his various critics. He was too cerebral for the populists, too irrational for the Western-oriented urban writers, too idiosyncratic for the leftists, too heterodox for conservative Christians. Nemeth the novelist and playwright weighs down his old-fashioned heroes with all kinds of debilitating encumbrances and handicaps; he forever sets traps for them from which they cannot escape, and their greatness lies in the fact that "even with hands and feet tied they keep climbing, grasping. ²² He is irresistibly drawn to his doomed heroes, though his attraction to them stems from an identification with the Greek rather than Christian ethos. "Why bother with the damned?" he asks in his brief but seminal essay, "Drama es legenda" (Drama and Legend). " 'Look at them and keep walking,' says Dante, and with him the entire Christian tradition. But there are other, man- rather than god-centered ages-Ancient Greece, for instance, or the Modern period-that find forbidden pleasure in the self-justifying laments of tormented heroes ... To bow down and at the same time shake rebelliously the pillars of Eternal Order; to blaspheme God while worshipping Him-this has been the stimulus for great drama ever since Prometheus and Sophocles."²³ In his own plays, novels and essays Nemeth got back at the world. Born out of deep-seated national and personal hurts, they celebrate moral triumphs over physical perdition.

Notes

1. See "A Nyugat elodei," in L.N., Az en katedram (Budapest, 1975), pp. 643-670.

2. "Pajzzsal es dardaval," Mihaly Babits, Konyvrol konyvre (Budapest, 1973), pp. 288-289.

3. "Negyven ev," in L.N,, Negyven ev-Horvathne meghal-Gyasz (Budapest, 1974), p 9.

4. "Az Iszony francia kiadasanak eloszava," in Gyula Illyes, Ingyen lakoma Vol. 1 (Budapest, 1964), p 283,

5. "Irova avatnak," in L.N., Kiadatlan tanulmanyok Vol. 1 (Budapest, 1968), p 64.

6. Miklos Szabolcsi, ed., A magyar irodalom tortenete Vol. 6 (Budapest, 1966), p. 498.

7. See my review of N.'s Europai utas in Books Abroad Vol. 48 (Autumn 1974), pp. 821-822.

8. "Negyven ev," p. 11.

9. See L. N., A minoseg forradalma Vol. 1, pp. 9-21; Vol. 4, pp. 10-31, 50-79, (Budapest, 1940).

10. See L. N., Kisebbsegben Vol. 1 (Budapest, 1942), pp. 13-108.

11. Tibor Hanak, "Mennyiseg-Minoseg," Uj Latohatar Vol. 22 (Munich, 1971), p. 187.

12. L. N., Utolso szettekintes (Budapest, 1980), p. 160.

13. "Ember es szerep," in L. N., Homalybol homalyba Vol. 1 (Budapest, 1977), p. 360.

14. L. N., Emberi szinjatek Vol. 1 (Budapest, 1966), p. 8.

15. "Ember es szerep," pp. 434-435.

16. Laszlo Vekerdi, Nemeth Laszlo-Alkotasai es vallomasai tukreben (Budapest, 1970), p. 90.

17. L. N., Utolso szettekintes, p. 48.

18. "Negyven ev," p. 19.

19. Ibid., p. 22.

20. Ibid.

21. Gyula Gombos, "Tanitas a minosegre," Uj Latohatar Vol. 22 (1971), p. 42.

22. L. N., Megmentett gondolatok (Budapest, 1973), p. 642.

23. "Drama es legenda," in L. N., Kiadatlan tanulmanyok Vol. 1 (Budapest, 1968), p. 601.

A Case Study on Trianon