The beautifully composed volume contains paintings, poems and prose writings: paintings by Vadim A. Kovách and Ágnes Medveczky, 13 short stories by Éva Berniczky and poems by her writer husband, Károly D. Balla. The three genres correspond to each other, and the prose texts are in harmony with the poems and paintings, although the short stories, in spite of their stylistic unity, range from the magical to the absurd. Berniczky refers many times to Samuel Beckett (with mottos or names). The world she describes is modern, and quite wretched. “Hurry up, boy, cut out and stow quickly away this single shot from the otherwise banal world, until people fail to notice!” says one character to another in Berniczky’s “Glass-eyed Angels”, and this is exactly what the writer does: cuts out and puts into place, to show the connections and the incoherence of the world.

            One of the most unforgettable texts (“As If It Hadn’t Been Born”) is the description of a woman giving birth in a terribly dirty hospital, showing the wonder of a child born in the amniotic sack. The doctor in the story “never investigates the nature of mysteries”, but the writer of the stories does exactly the opposite; she makes inquiries, presents evidence, remonstrates. The epigraph of the volume is telling: “We should never take seriously the miracles we come upon unexpectedly because then they will disappear, vanish into thin air—their fate is secrecy, mystery, the unfathomable.”

 

“And where could they go at all. Time stopped short or started to flow backwards, and they couldn’t get off ...” Berniczky’s first solo effort consists of a series of fifteen tight and well-composed short stories written in long sentences, showing the hopeless life of the strange but everyday people vegetating in the remains of the Soviet Empire. “First volume, fortissimo” said one of the critics, Csaba Báthori, who emphasizes the well-wrought style and the unforgettable presentation of the embittered characters trying to destroy each other’s lives. Other critics cited Maupassant, Checkov, Bulgakov, Tatiana Tolstaya or Thomas Mann as Berniczky’s predecessors and praise her as perhaps the best presenter of the lives of the people (especially the members of the Hungarian minority) living in the Ukraine. The book’s language is unique, as it sometimes utilizes a mixed language of Hungarian and Russian words, and it refers to many cultural allusions from Russian literature. The writer also uses very concentrated image-clusters which are peculiar to her style. In one of her rare confessions, Éva Berniczky uses the same modest and self-controlled way of expression, showing utmost respect for her profession: “My days are spent in strict devotion, but writing frees me from my restrictions, for it does not narrow down the time and space I can use. … I just simply write, or rather learn to write. My short stories have appeared in many literary periodicals—that’s all. And a few volumes. Since I got used to the taste of unrestricted freedom, actually nothing special happened to me. If it had happened, I’m sure I’d have fled from it. Some people write for the masses—I, on the other hand, try to find my way out of the crowd by the means of writing.”