Lázár
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, death by suicide, racism, religious discrimination, and mental illness.
Art and Literature
Art and literature play a significant role in the novel, chiefly because characters invest paintings, novels, poems, and other works with meaning. Edmund Pontiller, for example, is a Benedictine priest, but rather than the Bible, the most significant books in his life belong to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time series. Pontiller is so personally invested in the work of his hero that these novels become a governing principle in his life. The secular works offer him emotional guidance just as the Bible offers him moral guidance. In times of war, both are essential to Pontiller’s fight against fascism. Pontiller’s love of art also helps him to form a bond with those in his care. Before he’s arrested by the Gestapo, he hides a book about Vermeer’s paintings beneath Eva’s bed. Knowing how much she loves these paintings, he hopes to leave behind an emotional legacy after he’s taken away, leaving Eva with something to remember him by. Eva does remember; she treasures the book and the memory of studying Vermeer’s paintings with Pontiller, showing how art and literature can be used to bridge the gap between time, space, culture, and even death. Such works, the novel suggests, can endure beyond the life of a single person.
Ilona’s childhood experiences make explicit the way in which books, art, and culture can function as a shorthand for complicated emotions and ideas. Following her traumatic experience in the forest, Ilona has to “develop a narrative language of her own” because she lacks the words to express her new, difficult emotional state (42). Her language is markedly different from how she spoke before, just how she has developed a strong appetite for meat that didn’t exist before. Language, a foundational aspect of written art, must be rethought in the wake of traumatic experiences as Illona seeks to understand herself and make herself understood to others. In a similar way, Eva finds herself turning to a range of authors to comprehend her and her family’s situation in postwar Hungary. She reads Franz Kafka, for example, in the hope that his work will help her come to terms with the incomprehensible and punishing bureaucracy that now surrounds and threatens her. She reads Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf to better understand the plight of women in her rapidly changing society. As Ilona sought out an entirely new language for herself, Eva seeks out a new literary context for her existence, coming to understand her situation through art and literature.
Literary allusions also play an important role in the novel. The book is rife with such allusions, referencing works such as Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, the music of Franz Liszt, and Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. The characters’ actions speak to the broader world of literary history; Mária’s suicide, for example, eerily parallels Woolf’s suicide, adding an extra tragic dimension to Eva’s own interest in the author’s works. Though Pontiller, the devoted fan of Proust, dislikes the work of James Joyce, the famous ending of the Irish author’s short story “The Dead” is echoed in Lajos’s own moment of rumination, as he feels a profound change in himself while watching the snowfall before returning to bed with his wife. Even the depiction of Joseph Stalin includes the motif of literature to add a humanizing moment, as the elderly dictator searches for his copy of Dead Souls before, in his last moments of consciousness, reflecting on Gogol’s discussion of the character of the Russian people. Such moments infuse the novel itself with a broad veneration of art and literature, illustrating how—even in history’s most tragic, consequential, and terrible moments—such works can transcend generations and offer disparate characters a means of expressing and understanding themselves.
Water-Blue Eyes
Lajos’s water-blue eyes function as a symbol of the inescapable truths of lineage and the foundational secret at the heart of the Lázár family. Inherited from his biological father, the young groom Pál, Lajos’s eyes are a physical manifestation of a history that the family’s aristocratic identity cannot erase. They stand in stark contrast to the expected family features, representing an inconvenient and persistent truth about Mária’s affair and the compromised “purity” of the von Lázár bloodline. This physical trait directly undermines Sándor’s rigid adherence to patriarchal tradition and exposes the fragility of the aristocratic facade he strives to maintain, thus showing the theme of The Decay of the Aristocracy.
The eyes serve as a constant, subconscious reminder of the truth, even to Sándor, who experiences fleeting moments of recognition without full comprehension. This inherited physical marker becomes most powerful at the moment of Sándor’s death. As he falls down the stairs, he doesn’t think about his wife or children; he thinks about “the young groom with the water-blue eyes” (77), as though this truth has been obvious to him for years yet gnawing at the edge of his consciousness. This closing recognition reveals that the unspoken truth has haunted him his entire life, proving central to the theme of The Weight of Inherited History.
The Forest
The dark forest bordering the manor house is a powerful symbol of the irrational, mysterious, and dangerous forces that lie just beyond the Lázárs’ control. It represents the untamable wilderness of trauma, mental illness, and death that encroaches upon the family’s ordered aristocratic existence. The forest is an active agent in the family’s downfall; it’s the place where Sándor’s father disappears, where his mother is called to her death, and where Ilona suffers a deeply traumatic childhood experience. For Imre, the forest is the source of his psychological collapse, a place populated by the terrifying figures from Hoffmann’s tales.
The narrative explicitly defines the forest’s destructive power, stating that it is, to Sándor, the force that “had swallowed his father, killed his mother, and driven his brother mad” (11). This personification transforms the landscape into a physical embodiment of the theme of The Weight of Inherited History. The family’s inability to conquer or comprehend the forest mirrors their broader failure to confront the dark, subconscious currents that ultimately lead to the decline of the aristocracy in Hungary. It’s a constant, ominous presence, reminding them that their wealth and status offer no protection from the primal chaos that will eventually consume them.
Shadows and Darkness
The recurring motif of shadows and darkness represents the subconscious mind, repressed memories, and the unseen world of trauma that haunts the Lázár family. Characters drawn to darkness are often those most deeply connected to the family’s unspoken history. This is evident in Pista, whose unusual relationship with shadows signifies his intuitive link to the inherited pain that defines his lineage. While Lilly is disturbed by his behavior, Pista’s claim that “[s]hadows talk to [him]. [Her] shadow does too” suggests a unique perception of the hidden truths that others ignore (93). Rather than a denotation of evil, his affinity for darkness is a comfort in a world where the unspoken is more real than the visible.
The motif emphasizes the theme of The Weight of Inherited History, visualizing the intangible past as a tangible presence. For Pista, shadows are repositories of memory and feeling, a truth his great-uncle Imre also understands as he stares into the twilight from his blue room, seeing figures that exist only for him. The motif suggests that the Lázár legacy is one of the dark, psychological spaces that each generation is forced to inhabit.
Water
Water is a powerful and ambivalent motif, appearing as a site of death, temporary escape, and historical tragedy. Bodies of water—from the manor house pond to the Danube River—mark key moments in the family’s story, symbolizing both finality and the relentless, tragic flow of time. Mária’s suicide by drowning is a key event that illustrates water’s dual nature. For her, it is a gentle release from a suffocating life, described as “a simple immersion, a silent receding from life” (4), rather than a violent death. This act of self-annihilation emphasizes the personal despair contributing to the theme of The Decay of the Aristocracy.
In contrast, the thermal lake in Hévíz offers a recurring setting of respite and social connection, a temporary escape from the family’s internal pressures. Later, the motif takes on a historical dimension, as the Danube becomes a site of mass murder during the Holocaust, directly connecting the family’s personal story to the theme of The Interaction of Macro and Micro in Understanding History. Finally, Pista and Eva’s desperate flight to freedom culminates in crossing a frozen river, a dangerous baptism that marks their break from their inherited past and their entry into the uncertain world of exile.
Unlock the meaning behind every key symbol & motif
See how recurring imagery, objects, and ideas shape the narrative.
- Explore how the author builds meaning through symbolism
- Understand what symbols & motifs represent in the text
- Connect recurring ideas to themes, characters, and events