Magda Szabó is over eighty when she writes For Elisa. It is his last novel and he is aware of it. This is why she puts in her life the moments, the people, the encounters, the history and the stories that have given it the shape it has had and that she sees clearly, now that the time she has lived is greater than that what remains. It is an elongated and open shape. The last page of the book doesn’t close with one point, but three, what we call “suspension” and which here do not suspend but signal that there is still something to tell, to be alive, and that a life is not enough for a novel . Szabó never writes to leave legacy, directives, examples. She does it because it’s her way, just her way, of staying inside History.
The fundamental trait of all his literature, and especially of this novel, is openness to possibility. It is Cili who embodies it. Little Cili, her orphan girl who at a certain point her father and Magdolna’s mother put before her saying only: «Here is your little sister. You have to love them. From now on, there are two young ladies Szabó, unaware as they are of the “murderous ardor” with which she is jealous.
Let’s get to the plot. It is 1920, Hungary has been mutilated of many of her territories, divided above all between Romania and Czechoslovakia, by the Trianon treaty signed by the Entente countries, winners of the First World War. In a few days, fourteen million Hungarians find themselves no longer Hungarians: illegal immigrants in their own homes, irregulars who are hunted down with ferocity and enthusiasm. Cities are filled with refugees, many of whom are children who have lost their parents. Cili is one of them: an orphan from the Trianon, who remained alive by chance, covered by the corpses of her parents – «her data was known by those few found in the documents in her father’s pocket, when they had removed the deceased parents from above the child lifeless”. Magda isn’t much older than her, yet there is an abyss between them: Cili doesn’t even talk about her, Magdolna argues in Latin with her father. Cili embodies that openness to possibility which is the crux of Szabó’s novels.
From 1920 onwards, for another twenty years almost, For Elisa follows the two sisters. The story of their relationship, of their desperation first at being forced to live together and then at not being able or wanting to live apart anymore, is the story of Hungary, of its search for identity in people and not in borders, of its attempt to make peace with the stateless, the missing, the refugees.
Of what the country becomes with the socialist advance, Szabó reports a very clear historical picture. He plants a video camera in his family’s rooms and from there he observes and tells how first the arrogance of the war winners and then the socialist intrusion slipped into the homes, thoughts and yearnings of the Hungarians, attacking their sweet sense of life, that refined feeling that made them part of the heart of Central Europe.
Szabó was one of the few Hungarian intellectuals who did not abandon her country when the socialist regime began to poke its nose into their lives, to establish who could write and how one should think. World literature has received, from those authors (Ágota Kristóf, Sándor Márai), some of the most intense and terrible books on the impossibility of finding a place to feel at home when one is forced to flee one’s own; about what exile is; on the torment of no longer being able to trust in belonging; on the violence that Europe, in its reconstruction after the two world wars, perpetrated on the peoples, trying to convince them that identity was a register to which one could subscribe or from which one could unsubscribe at will.
Ágnes Heller, a philosopher, once wrote: “I am a woman, a Hungarian, a Jew, an American, a philosopher: I am burdened with too many identities”. He wrote it in the same years in which Szabó was prevented by the government from publishing his books and she, instead of leaving, decided to stay and settle for being a teacher, condemning herself to pay the remorse for not having been able to affect more, to stem the evil – «I remained an observer with a sense of guilt», she would write.
Heller’s reaction and that of Kristóf and Márai find an extraordinary synthesis in Szabó. On the one hand, in fact, in For Elisa there is the almost childish attachment to the roots, and the defense of their immobility. On the other hand, there is the questioning of static nature as an essential condition of belonging and the tiredness of an identity that is always identical, pure, that has not mixed with others.
The relationship between the existence of the individual and collective history is a fundamental theme for Szabó, as it was for Elsa Morante, Pasternak, Tolstoy, authors who, not surprisingly, have been accused of excessive pathos, ideological weakness, of harmful impoliticity and anti-epicness because they have shown, without hesitation, without hesitation, like History, that of manuals, of great events, of the Napoleons, subjects man and unhinges him. They did so by fictionalizing the life of the least and the profound and intimate devastation that history, when it became tragic, brought to the heart of every man. In a 1982 letter to Elsa Morante, Adriano Sofri wrote: «Man is part of an infinitely mobile and living whole, and the part can never comprehend or dominate the whole. In this simple fact, a power is manifested that one cannot but submit to: it signifies the limit of our strength and of what we can do and understand».
The fire that burns in little Magdolna’s heart is the flame of the enthusiastic discovery that we exist in relationships with others much more than in relationships with events. A flame fed by a father and a mother who raise their daughters not by educating them, but by civilizing them. Europe should go back to looking at this liberality.