Péter Nádas

Péter Nádas (born October 14, 1942, Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian author, essayist, and playwright known for his detailed surrealist tales and prose-poems that often blended points of view or points in time.

Nádas grew up in communist Budapest. His mother died when he was a child, and his father committed suicide outside the family home in 1958; thereafter he was raised by his grandparents. He left high school before graduating and turned to studying photography and taking photographs for a Budapest magazine in the early 1960s. He earned a diploma from a journalism school in 1963 and subsequently worked as a magazine photographer and a journalist. In 1965 Nádas had his first short story published in a literary magazine, and his first novella, A Biblia (“The Bible”), based on his childhood experiences, was published in 1967. Two years later he published a collection of short stories, Kulcskereső játék (“The key-finding game”), also rooted in his childhood. In 1972 he completed his first novel, Egy családregény vége (The End of a Family Story)—told from the point of view of a young boy growing up in a communist society—though, because of censorship issues, the book was not published until five years later. Soon after the novel’s completion, Nádas traveled to East Berlin on a theatre scholarship. While there, in 1973 he began writing what is arguably his most famous novel, Emlékiratok könyve (A Book of Memories), a massive Proustian work of intertwining narratives centring on an expatriate Hungarian living in East Berlin in the 1970s. The book, which took him over a decade to write, was not approved by Hungarian censors for publication until 1986.

Nádas began writing plays in the late 1970s, and from 1980 to 1981 he served as a dramaturge at a theatre in northwestern Hungary. Critics were divided about his plays, which were considered minimalist. Three of his one-act plays were collected in Színtér (1982; “Stage”).

In the late 1980s Nádas published several collections of essays, including Évkönyv: ezerkilencszáznyolcvanhét, ezerkilencszáznyolcvannyolc (1989; “Yearbook: Nineteen Eighty-seven, Nineteen Eighty-eight”), a collection of 10 essays assigned to months from February 1987 to March 1988. The essay topics ranged widely from love to death to politics and were illustrated with Nádas’s own photographs. He followed up with Az égi és a földi szerelemről (1991; “On Divine and Earthly Love”), a book-length essay about love in contexts ranging from ancient mythology to the present day, and Párbeszéd: négy nap ezerkilencszáznyolcvankilencben (1992; “Dialogue: Four Days in Nineteen Eighty-nine”), a transcript of a conversation with a Swedish journalist friend about the differences between eastern and western Europe that had come about because of the Iron Curtain. He continued to publish essays and short stories throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century.

After decades of concentrating on shorter works, he released a three-volume novel, Párhuzamos történetek (2005; Parallel Stories), formidable in its length—over 1,000 pages both in the original Hungarian and the English translation—and its variety of content. The scattered narrative, focusing seemingly randomly on events and experiences since the World War II era, intersperses surrealistic visions and graphic sexuality. In 2010 Nádas returned to theatrical work with Szirénének (“Siren Song”), part of a project for which European authors of various backgrounds were assigned parts of Homer’s Odyssey to adapt for the stage.

Nádas received several awards for his work, including the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2007. He became a member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts in 1993 and of the Berlin Akademie der Künste in 2006.