Cholnoky László - Black szárnyak

"After such grumblings, Christ again launched shrewd attacks against our Lord, hurling soul-crushing insults at him for arranging things in this way, or at least for allowing things to be this way. But if he was not annoyed at this time, he calmed down again, his insults slowly, little by little, refined into some obscure revelation, which he did not tire of for hours, and from which something dawned, with a fog-like obscurity, that he, Prikk, was to some degree familiar with the affairs of the heavens, and that he had an inkling as to why all this bloody injustice was being done to him. Such voluminous revelations were usually followed by a few weeks of silence . During this time, Prikk drank without a word and in the face of the outside society limited himself to the few absent-minded, chin-scratching movements with which he concealed the ugliness that nestles in the souls of alcoholics, whenever he felt that the ugliness wanted to sit on his face, to look carefully for new fodder for hatred. based on this, he was able to get close to Prikk's wonderful, complex soul, he could almost be certain that Prikk's sense of shame was also hidden in these concealing movements, as well as a sense of tenderness. It was obvious that Prikk did not want to be a burden to anyone." -Prikk's heavenly journey

Among the famous Cholnoky boys, while Jenőt (1870)'s approach and taste are the XIX. century, Viktor (1868) stands on the border of two worlds, and László (1879) is already a creator of modern times. The heroes of his writings "fall towards annihilation from the beginning of the stories. They are stagnant people, structurally anxious, figures struggling with fatal unhappiness. The death of the will has already happened when we meet them. The theme is most often alcoholism and failed, unfulfilled love living in veiled memories. (.. .) The pub is a frequent location, and the church, the grove or the Danube bank also appear often, and in the shorter writings, Veszprém, the surroundings of the Séd stream - childhood. Among the pairs of opposites, there is the constantly emerging dialectic of nihil and the joy of life , and the gap between decadence and the desire for a coveted life," writes Zoltán Egressy in the afterword to our volume.