The Disappearance of the Village
The Disappearance of the Village

Summary/Abstract: Of those of my generation who became involved with belles-lettres in one way or another, I was probably the only one to have been reared on the works of the so-called “populist” writers. Even as a university student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this peculiar background made me look like an oddball, or less charitably a redneck with obsolete tastes who had fallen irreversibly behind somewhere along the way. I do not recall receiving glances of pity but I certainly elicited plenty of astonishment and incomprehension, even from my peers who had also grown up in the countryside. It seemed that works created decades before by such noted populist writers as Péter Veres, Pál Szabó, Géza Féja, even Gyula Illyés or Zsigmond Móricz, struck a chord and resonated within me. The hands-on emotional knowledge, the experience of being touched, had all but vanished without a trace by then; the intimacy of recognition was no longer really available as a memory let alone as an actual option, not even for those of my own ilk.

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