Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár was originally published last year in German, with Jamie Bulloch’s English translation hitting the shelves this year. The novel was met with immense critical acclaim with both The Sunday Times and The New Yorker calling Biedermann a “wunderkind” in their review headlines. Indeed, for an author aged twenty-three, this novel is a remarkable achievement. However, as a Hungarian, I assume that a number of readers in my homeland would be focused more on two other aspects. Firstly, we are clearly intrigued by the surname serving as the title. Secondly, it references Biedermann’s heritage as a young man living in Switzerland, with Hungarian heritage on his paternal line. The post Everything Hungarian you may have missed in Nelio Biedermann’s ‘Lázár’ appeared first on The Oxford Student.
Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár was originally published last year in German, with Jamie Bulloch’s English translation hitting the shelves this year. The novel was met with immense critical acclaim with both The Sunday Times and The New Yorker calling Biedermann a “wunderkind” in their review headlines. Indeed, for an author aged twenty-three, this novel is a remarkable achievement. However, as a Hungarian, I assume that a number of readers in my homeland would be focused more on two other aspects. Firstly, we are clearly intrigued by the surname serving as the title. Secondly, it references Biedermann’s heritage as a young man living in Switzerland, with Hungarian heritage on his paternal line.
Hungary and Hungarian authors have been making serious waves in Anglophone media over the past year. In 2025, Dávid Szalay won the Booker Prize and László Krasznahorkai the Nobel Prize for Literature, making the latter the second Hungarian Nobel Laureate in this field after Imre Kertész’s win in 2002. In terms of heritage alone, Biedermann is perhaps closest to Szalay, an author born in Canada to Hungarian parents and brought up in London. While perhaps nationality should not be a factor in literary reviews, I feel a mixture of intrigue and scepticism as I open books about my home written by authors living away from it.
Even so, a particular passage compelled me to review Lázár through a Hungarian lens. As the blurb will tell you, we are following an aristocratic Hungarian family, whose fortunes acquired and maintained during the dual monarchy sharply decline under Soviet rule. First we meet Sándor and Mária von Lázár at the birth of Lajos, with Ilona already present as the elder of the children. Lajos grows into the protagonist of the novel, marrying Lilly, who gives birth to Pista and Éva shortly after they marry. It is this family who experience the burdens of writing history.
I feel a mixture of intrigue and scepticism as I open books about my home written by authors living away from it.
It is precisely this aristocratic lineage which gives rise to the novel’s most striking and folklore-filled imagery, including a peculiar, magical child, and, importantly, an enchanted forest. Biedermann needs such a family to create the forest – it, obviously, belongs to the Lázárs. Similarly, since they are aristocrats, they will, obviously, go hunting in said forest. With that proximity established, Biedermann may then illustrate the haunting and threatening potential of nature, so close to the heart of the family. Indeed, the forest “swallowed” Sándor von Lázár’s father, “killed his mother and driven his brother mad”. While this sequence of events may apply to any folklore, here we have a “dead stag”. It is absolutely crucial that the forest “let the stag run until it collapsed outside the music room with its large windows”.
The stag is not simply Biedermann’s harbinger of death; it is a stab in the heart for Hungarian readers. Any child who grew up in Hungary would have encountered legends about the csodaszarvas, rendered in a translation as The Legend of the White Stag. The stag in this legend leads the sons of Nimród, Hunor and Magor (folkloric forefathers of the huns and magyars), into a seemingly fruitless hunt. They fail to capture the stag yet discover a land of peace and plenty. With the imminent death of Nimród, the sons realise they must expand, migrate, discover lands which may accommodate their offsprings and a new society. Hunor and Magor return to the bountiful land, marry two women (with the question of consent uninterrogated by the tale), and establish a new society. This tale fosters our narrative of honfoglalás, or the migration of ancestral tribes from Asia to the Carpathian basin, to the land destined to be our home.
Killing a stag in a tale concerning Hungarians disrupts the line of history both in temporal and geographical terms. Without the stag, we are frozen within the historical narrative of how we arrived in Europe. Without the stag, we are homeless with no viable direction and destination. Without the linear migratory tale embedded in the stag-hunt, we become vulnerable to rupture, instability, and chaos.
His peripheral position is shattered as he is brought to the centre of a system which carried out a genocide in Hungary, and in Europe at large.
Those adjectives are fitting descriptors of the horrors twentieth-century wars brought to Europe. While WWI does not rattle the family to a great extent, WWII and the Soviet occupation expand and dramatise stylistically a sentiment linked to the Lázárs’ haunting forest. After a traumatic accident Ilona experiences there, she cannot articulate what had happened because her mother tongue, “full of symbols and metaphors, linguistic gems and verbal flourishes does not allow such a tale to be told.
Trauma throttles language and style in the novel. In no other character is this more painfully and dreadfully depicted than in Lajos himself. At first glance Lajos is “this wrinkled, pale-blue and bloated creature”, a peculiar child who bonds easily with his even more peculiar uncle, Imre. He had the potential to be the peripheral figure, who holds the picture together and thus to negotiate the central role of the patriarch. The peculiar child, often with blue eyes, is a common motif in Hungarian folktales (especially rise narratives), although some aspects of his character are also evocative of the Irish and Scottish changeling lore.
So, what is it that makes Lajos particularly Hungarian? To make that argument we must turn to Biedermann’s use of history for his novel. While Lajos has the potential to be subversive, to be different, considering his presentation as a strange and inexplicable child. However, in the midst of World War II, the narrator says: “The time for poetry was over.” Nowhere is this sentiment more acutely painful than in Chapter 33: “Lajos looked after organisational matters.” This sentence is repeated three times before the narrator clarifies: “The Jews had to be listed, labelled, stripped of their rights, expropriated and ghettoised.”
The symbols and folklore surrounding the Lázárs’ manor and forest must break down because Lajos chooses to be complicit in the Holocaust. His peripheral position is shattered as he is brought to the centre of a system which carried out a genocide in Hungary, and in Europe at large. In that way, he does not deserve the privilege of semiotics and stylistic ornaments. In that way, folkloric meaning is subsumed under the rupture, instability, and chaos of history.
History, and those who seek to write history, negate the power of poetry and lyrical prose.
Perhaps unbeknownst to Biedermann, this stylistic and narrative shift may be neatly paralleled with Sándor Márai’s ‘Mennyből az angyal’ (‘Angel from Heaven‘). Although here it is the oppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 that Márai sets out to capture, it is nevertheless resonant with the horrors of WWII. He reworks a popular Christmas ballad – one which most kindergarteners in Hungary must learn – and thus demonstrates the conflict of poetry and politics. In the 20th century, as in Lázár, these two elements become a confusing mixture, dark materials which God himself cannot ordain into new worlds, into order.
Inconsistencies between poetics and history introduce moments of rupture in the narrative. While those moments may read as Biedermann’s failure to synthesise Hungarian symbols with the traumas of the century, I would argue he merely exposes the fallacy of believing that synthesis to be possible. Historical realities, such as Lajos’s compliance in the Holocaust, infringe the semiotics of nobility and aristocracy to which he was previously connected. Indeed, even his heritage and resemblance to a fictive historical figure, Hayo the First from the Siege of Szigetvár, place him on a shifting and unsubstantiated plane of history.
What a Hungarian readership should recognise in the novel as an aspect particularly ours is this instability of our folklore and symbols. History, and those who seek to write history, negate the power of poetry and lyrical prose. How may we insist on meaning encoded in our folklore if more powerful agents seek to rip it away?
For some, the tragedy of Lázár is the downfall of the family under the Soviets. For others, it is the dying breath of folklore. What may save it, at the end of the day, perhaps in the Yugoslavian wilderness, are the courageous souls who escaped with the nostalgia they are determined to preserve.
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