People of the Puszta

by David Auerbach

The puszta is the Hungarian term given to the Carpathian Basin, the vast steppe of southwestern Hungary: sprawling yet flat and empty. Prior to the 20th century, when industrialization finally took hold, it was populated by a series of small, remote farming communities under the absolute rule and ownership of aristocrats. Each community (which itself can be called a “puszta”) housed a few dozen families which worked ceaselessly on the land, their lives almost totally bound by the small perimeter of the community, around which lay wilderness approaching a void. The inhabitants were landless serfs, post-feudal laborers permanently subject to “villein services and tithes without compensation.” Gyula Illyés was born in such a puszta, escaped it to live a itinerant, literary, and activist life, then returned to it to chronicle it with an uneasy mixture of alienation and nostalgia. People of the Puszta, originally published in 1936, is a portrait of his paradoxical recognitions as much as of the community itself, as he struggles to depict the truth of these people who “live in a curious, airless but somehow invigorating community, materially and spiritually alike.”

Gyula Illyés was born to a family in the middle stratum of puszta life, above the brutal, incessant hard labor of the farm workers, but below the elite caste of managers and bailiffs who enforced the structures and laws of the puszta. Illyés’s own realm was that of overseers and foremen, who “filtered and transformed the higher directives into something effective. The various overseers were not gentry; with one or two exceptions they were far worse--they were the slaves of the gentry.” While this system emerged somewhat organically from the feudal period, the ruling classes subsequently enshrined it in law to ensure that serfs would remain dutiful, beaten-down, and landless. Illyés describes the heartless, total “convention” that set out the laws of puszta life:

The contract of service or service-book gives a precise list of dues, which may be divided into ‘cash, payment in kind and land to work on.’...the so-called ‘convention’. ...these contracts allow the servants just as much food as will keep them alive...The people of the puszta are not inclined to stoutness. They are a gaunt, bony race. They are sunburnt and therefore appear to be muscular and tough even when they are really at death’s door.

The circumstances of their lives reduce them to servility. The force of the convention, the isolation of the community, and the nonnegotiable class system created an ideal underclass:

It is impossible to find better material from which to create a state, for the people of the pusztas have the greatest respect for authority. Undoubtedly this respect is the result of their training, which is so traditional and so thorough that today it runs deep in their blood and has so permeated their nervous system as to become almost instinctive.

Rather obviously drawing from Marx’s thought, Illyés finds that the upper classes of the puszta reinforce the system: he quotes an estate manager’s wife as saying that the workers “must be treated like bees...You must take away from them to make them work on. If they had everything, they would pound the zither all day and warm their backsides in the sun.” When the Great War demanded the removal of the workers from their ancestral homes, it was found they were ideally suited to the mechanized obedience required of footsoldiers:

There was no need to explain to them how to find cover; they would hide behind a molehill, and went on patrol with the invisibility of ghosts. For three days they sat motionless in a crater. They were wide awake all the time and bore it patiently. ‘That’s what they had been doing all their lives.’

What differentiates Illyés’s book from a reductionist class account, however, is his immense effort at empathy toward the fellow figures of his past, as well as his recognition that some of that empathy is now irretrievably lost, on account of his own movement in life. Beyond his own recollections, he moves toward inhabiting the near-inhuman lifestyle of the lowest workers. In passages like this, where he describes the soul-killing work schedule of farm workers, he subtly moves from the outsider’s snap judgment into a deeper sympathy, pulling back the curtain to explain how such a wretched state of affairs could have come about:

The people of the pusztas are certainly lazy or rather slow to move. But even this measured slowness has an almost spectral quality. Anyone accustomed to the normal speed of work feels after watching them for a time that he must be viewing madmen, or weird machines, or a slow-motion film...Daily work which begins at 2 or 3 in the morning and finishes at 9 or 10 in the evening is too much to endure for four years, never mind forty. It is work which never ceases, uninterrupted by a single day off or holiday, because the animals, after all, need tending at all times.

In this book Illyés accomplishes something quite rare: an economic macroportrait integrated with the individual memoir of a marginal member of that economy. Illyés succeeds in interleaving the two such that personal is not merely exemplary and the sociology is not merely supplementary, but rather they show the dynamic struggle between the force of economic ‘convention’ and the occasional outbursts of personal autonomy. Such outbursts are what differentiate it from the more documentary and statistical account of Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost, which excavated recorded research in order to argue for a more positive and dynamic few of pre-industrial England. Illyés lacked access to any such research, yet the tremendous value in Illyés’s book is that it integrates all that was lost to The World We Have Lost, the daily lives and momentary outbursts which cannot be captured in ledgers and records.

These outbursts are not always positive. The most haunting section of the book depicts, vividly, a remembered event from which Illyés still recoils: the suicide of a neighbor’s daughter after she was raped by an assistant farm manager. There is no justice, no recompense, barely any mourning. The dehumanizing structures of the puszta have ground down the better capacities of human ethics. The attitude toward mechanical work invades all aspects of life: the manager “had used her not as a human being, but as one might use a drinking-mug or a shoehorn. The girl was dead and her death was filed away in people’s memory as if she had been snatched up by a machine or trampled on by a bull.”

Alongside such horrors, however, there are also hidden spiritual triumphs. Illyés lovingly describes the work of the “poet-reporters,” who chronicled events of the puszta in verse, like singers of tales. Without newspapers, they wrote on scraps of paper, building up verses that were traded between puszta inhabitants. After the war, some of these works were printed, revealing that many puszta towns had their own poets, and that all was not quite as gray and undifferentiated as the convention had intended.

What results is a portrait of an underclass for which there was next to no insight. Even in the world today it would be difficult to embed someone in such a community; the ubiquitous media and coverage shouldn’t mask that we have no firsthand visibility into large crosssections of humanity. Few escape; fewer become known after having escaped; their stories, when they are told, are laundered through the myths and cliches of the elite classes. In the time in which Illyés writes, there was next to no knowledge at all of the puszta’s inhabitants. as Illyés points out, not even by their aristocratic masters. He paints a picture of strict societal strata, both outside and inside the puszta, in which birth is almost always destiny.

Illyés portrays his own escape as a combination of chance, nature, and inspiration. The chance is from his family successfully raising four cows that brought them a measure of freedom not allotted to most puszta inhabitants. The inspiration is primarily in his maternal grandfather, who despite aristocratic descent embraced the inhabitants of all society’s strata with dignity and kindness, who shrugged off long-held dogma at a moment’s thought. And in his nature, there is an aesthetic and affective openness, restrained in much of the book but bursting forward at times when he recalls his first encounter with the bizarre, monstrous form of the mechanical train:

I held up my head and enjoyed every minute of the hellish rumbling, the wild magic of the rushing wind, the dense, stifling smoke, and the quaking that shook earth and sky. My face was licked by scalding steam that cooled immediately--the tongue of the devil. I shut my eyes and drank in a deep draught of the sulphurous smoke. By now the train was whistling far away in the distance; I could just see its tail as it was sucked in between the next two hills like a worm disappearing into a duck’s bill. It was such a tremendous experience that my memory hardly dares to recall it now. If Leviathan were suddenly to appear to me in the heavens as it did to John, I should merely wave it away; it would have no effect on me now.

These pusztas, in the form Illyés describes, are gone now. Industrial development rendered them inefficient and useless. The inhabitants were mostly casualties of the shift. After an abortive encounter with a tradition-minded educational system, Illyés himself went wandering, eventually enlisting as a soldier in the Hungarian Red Army, only to see the Hungarian Soviet Republic fall in 1919. He then grew to be a major figure in Hungarian letters while remaining active on the left, fighting and then hiding from the Nazis until withdrawing from politics after the end of World War II, as Mátyás Rákosi began his Stalinist rule of Hungary.

Today, when the tension between small and large has grown distended, we find ourselves less able to move from small to large and back again, and we are forever reducing one to the other. On the one hand we mark out every incident as an example of some larger trend, and we define an individual chiefly as a Venn diagram of intersecting, grouping signifiers. On the other hand we exalt the individual’s “lived experience” as something that trumps all scientific and critical inquiry, then refuse to recognize the contradiction between these two tendencies, crushing anything unique about such “lived experience” into archetypal cliches about identity groups. For what it's worth, this habit is hardly unique to the left; J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy ineptly combines the same two maneuvers to structurally similar effect, making it as much a tendentious bastardization of Illyés’s basic model as Robin DiAngelo’s anecdote-driven litanies are.

In 1950, Illyés wrote “One Sentence About Tyranny,” a long poem clearly directed at the oppressive Stalinist regime of the time, and censored for decades after. But in light of People of the Puszta, it is also directed at all the oppressive, claustrophobic conventions of the puszta, their worst aspects now writ large in a modernized communist society:

Thus does the slave forge with care The fetters he himself must wear; You nourish tyranny when you eat; You beget your child for it. Where seek tyranny? Think again: Everyone is a link in the chain; Of tyranny’s stench you are not free: You yourself are tyranny. Because, where tyranny is, Everything is in vain, Every creation, even this Poem I sing turns vain, Because it is standing From the first at your grave, Your own biography branding, And even your ashes are its slave. (tr. Vernon Watkins)

Though far from polemical, People of the Puszta is an education in resisting tyranny, for its author as much as for its readers.