61 pages • 2-hour read
The Door
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Background
Authorial Context: Magda Szabó
Born in 1917 in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city, Magda Szabó was raised in a Calvinist household. She studied at the University of Debrecen, where she earned degrees in Latin and Hungarian in 1940, beginning her career as a teacher. Her early academic background in classical philology and Hungarian literary tradition provided her with a grounding in both European and national culture, which informed her later engagement with history, myth, and identity in her fiction.
Szabó’s literary career began with poetry. After the publication of her first volumes of verse in the 1940s, her promise as a writer was quickly recognized, and in 1949 she was awarded the Baumgarten Prize, one of Hungary’s most prestigious literary honors. However, in the same year, politics interrupted her rising trajectory. The newly consolidated Communist regime, increasingly intolerant of independent voices, stripped her of the prize and banned her from publishing. For years thereafter, she worked in obscurity as a teacher in an elementary school, continuing to write but denied a public audience. Echoing her situation, The Door portrays how the government has forced the narrator into silence, banning her from publishing her work for a long time.
Szabó returned to the literary scene in the mid-1950s, marking the beginning of her mature career. She decisively shifted from poetry to prose, which helped establish her as a novelist of international stature. Her early novels, including Freskó (1958) and Az őz (1959, translated as The Fawn), addressed the complexity of women’s inner lives and the intergenerational fractures of Hungarian society. These works explored the often-contradictory motivations of her characters with an honesty that challenged social conventions. The Fawn examined the interplay of memory, self-image, and social judgment through a young woman’s alienation, deriving from Szabó’s own experience of marginalization during the early years of state socialism. Szabó solidified her reputation by writing novels that combined intimate psychological portraiture with historical and political reflection. Works such as Katalin utca (1969, translated as Katalin Street) traced the devastation that World War II and its aftermath wrought on ordinary Hungarians.
Szabó’s influence expanded internationally in the 1980s and 1990s, when several of her works were translated into other European languages. Her most celebrated novel, Az ajtó (1987, translated as The Door), brought her global recognition. The novel’s translation into English in 1995 and its later adaptation into film further established Szabó’s international reputation. Recognition of her work grew steadily in her later years. She received the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s highest literary award, in 1978, and in 2003, she was shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize. She continued to write and publish into the 1990s, her later works reflecting a sustained preoccupation with memory, reconciliation, and the traumatic effect of history. She died in 2007 at age 90, leaving behind a body of work that others continue to read and study widely.
Magda Szabó’s influence extends beyond Hungarian literature. Her novels are considered an exemplar of European postwar literature, often compared with the works of authors like Natalia Ginzburg, Christa Wolf, and Doris Lessing in the sense that they engage with intimate and personal themes, as well as historical and political themes. In Hungary, her status is canonical, and her works are read in schools and studied. Internationally, she has become a touchstone for discussions of Central European literature’s contribution to the broader story of 20th-century modernism and its aftermath.
Historical Context: Hungary and Authoritarianism
Recurring forms of authoritarian governance mark the history of Hungary between 1935 and 1980, and such governance casts a long shadow over the plot of The Door. In the mid-1930s, Hungary was still governed by Regent Miklós Horthy, who had held power since the collapse of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. His regime was conservative, nationalist, and authoritarian, resting on a restricted parliamentary system that excluded or marginalized political opposition. Horthy’s personal authority and the dominance of right-wing elites ensured that liberal democracy was effectively curtailed. The Treaty of Trianon (1920), a peace accord signed at the Paris Peace Conference, formally ended the state of war between most Allies in World War I and the Kingdom of Hungary; however, it was traumatic for the people of Hungary because it identified border changes and fueled the irredentist nationalism underpinning authoritarian policies. By the late 1930s, Horthy’s government had moved closer to Nazi Germany, both in ideological affinity and as a strategy to recover lost territory. Anti-Jewish legislation enacted in 1938 and 1939 reflected this authoritarian and exclusionary orientation.
During World War II, Hungary’s authoritarianism deepened under the pressures of alliance with Germany. Though Horthy initially resisted full integration into the Nazi war effort, Hungary entered the war against the Soviet Union in 1941. Repression of dissent and increasing persecution of Jews and other minorities reinforced authoritarian control. The German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 ended any pretense of semi-autonomy. A pro-German puppet regime under Ferenc Szálasi pursued fascist policies of mass terror, deportations, and executions. This brief but brutal phase represented the most extreme form of Hungarian authoritarianism, collapsing only when Soviet troops arrived in 1945.
The postwar period brought a brief opening, as Allied supervision helped restore multiparty politics. However, this democratic experiment was short-lived. By 1949, Hungary was formally established as the People’s Republic of Hungary, a one-party state modeled on Stalinist ideals. Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi oversaw a regime characterized by systematic repression, forced collectivization, political trials, and a pervasive secret police apparatus (the ÁVH). This period of Stalinist authoritarianism transformed Hungarian society, eradicating private property on a large scale, suppressing religious institutions, and subordinating culture and education to ideological control.
The excesses of Rákosi’s regime, combined with economic hardship and widespread resentment, culminated in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. What began as student protests escalated into a nationwide uprising against Soviet domination and Communist authoritarianism. The Soviet military intervention crushed the uprising in November 1956, resulting in thousands of deaths and mass emigration. After 1956, János Kádár emerged as Hungary’s leader. Initially, Kádár presided over harsh reprisals, including executions and imprisonments, to reassert control. However, starting in the early 1960s, he shifted toward a more pragmatic style of governance, inaugurating what became known as “Goulash Communism.” This system maintained the essential authoritarian structure while introducing limited economic reforms and some personal freedom.
Despite its relative liberalization, Kádár’s Hungary remained fundamentally authoritarian. Political opposition was not tolerated, censorship persisted, and independent civil society was absent. By 1980, Hungary had achieved greater stability and relative prosperity than its Eastern Bloc neighbors, but at the cost of political freedom. In The Door, Magda (the narrator) experiences the tightening and loosening of government censorship in much the same way that Magda Szabó experienced it. Though not autobiographical, the novel incorporates Magda Szabó’s experiences of censorship. At the same time, Emerence’s traumatic past reflects the ebb and flow of political violence in Hungary.
Literary Context: Hungarian Literature
Hungarian literature, one of Europe’s distinctive national traditions, developed through centuries of cultural exchange, political upheaval, and linguistic resilience. The 18th and 19th centuries marked a turning point for modern Hungarian literature, closely bound to the country’s political struggles. The reform era of the early 1800s produced writers such as Mihály Vörösmarty, while the 1848 Revolution against Habsburg rule inspired the poetry of Sándor Petőfi, who became a national icon. Later, the prose of Mór Jókai combined romantic nationalism with popular narrative, shaping collective identity. The fin-de-siècle period witnessed both the rise of realism and naturalism in writers such as Kálmán Mikszáth and the experimental impulses of the Nyugat (West) journal, founded in 1908. Nyugat provided a platform for modernist authors, including Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, and Dezső Kosztolányi, who aligned Hungarian literature with broader European currents.
The interwar years were marked by political conservatism under the Horthy regime, yet literary life remained vibrant. Writers like Gyula Illyés, Lajos Kassák, and Antal Szerb contributed to a scene in which modernism, populism, and political critique coexisted. World War II and its aftermath fundamentally altered this trajectory. After 1945, when Hungary entered the Soviet sphere of influence, literature (like all cultural expression) was subject to the mechanisms of censorship and ideological control. The Communist Party, consolidating power under Mátyás Rákosi, demanded conformity to the principles of socialist realism, modeled on the Soviet example. The government expected literature to glorify the working class, celebrate industrialization, and legitimize the one-party state. Writers who deviated from official doctrine risked surveillance, exclusion from publication (as the narrator of The Door experiences), or imprisonment.
This system of censorship had profound effects. Some authors adapted by producing works that conformed to ideological expectations, while others used allegory, historical fiction, or symbolic language to evade censors. During the harsh Stalinist years (1949-1953), many prominent writers were silenced altogether. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was both a political and cultural watershed. Writers and intellectuals were prominent among the revolutionaries, demanding freedom of expression and the end of censorship. The Soviet suppression of the uprising led to renewed repression under János Kádár, yet over time, his regime adopted a more flexible policy. By the 1960s and 1970s, Hungary practiced a comparatively softer form of censorship than its Eastern Bloc neighbors, allowing a limited range of critical or experimental writing, provided it did not directly challenge the regime’s legitimacy. This system produced what some scholars call the “Three Ts”: works were either támogatott (supported), tűrt (tolerated), or tiltott (forbidden).
In this environment, Magda Szabó emerged as a key literary figure. Szabó initially gained recognition as a poet, but in 1949, the Communist regime stripped her of the Baumgarten Prize and banned her from publishing. For nearly a decade, she was forced into silence, working as a teacher while continuing to write privately. Szabó’s return to literature in the late 1950s coincided with a cautious liberalization in cultural life. The Door epitomizes both her artistic achievement and the dilemmas of Hungarian postwar literature. Szabó’s career illustrates the strategies that Hungarian writers developed to navigate censorship. She addressed political and historical questions obliquely, through personal relationships, moral dilemmas, and symbolic structures. In doing so, she helped expand the possibilities of Hungarian prose, ensuring its relevance beyond the confines of Cold War geopolitics. Her role was particularly significant as a female writer who foregrounded women’s voices and experiences in a literary culture long dominated by men.
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