Resistance alone is not enough.

In the book Who's who in Yugoslavia and beyond, to the private banter of Đorđe Sudarski Red, in the reference Tolnai, Here reads the following: "Hungarian-speaking writer. An outstanding writer. And a man. Next to Domonkos, for me the greatest of the middle generation. He led me to write prose and I am grateful to him for that. When he started dating me Diary of the state of war in Poland, he met me at the former Uzor, right across from Tanurdžić's palace, ten meters from the pedestrian crossing, and asked why I don't expand it. I listened to him, and whenever I pass by that place, I remember that it was there that I became a prose writer."

photo: branko lučić

When I met Otto Tolnai in 2018, by chance, in front of the Belgrade tavern "Galerija", I approached him and said: "You are Otto Tolnai?" He answered "I did", and during the next three hours, while walking, he explained to me in detail what it means to be Otto Tolnai. Already in the conversation, interspersed with countless digressions, I entered Tolnai's reference system, or as he would say "New Tolnai lexicon". It was already on that occasion that I was given to understand that this man, whom I had known until then as a poet and essayist, was actually first and foremost interlocutor.

I will try to recall parts of that conversation, not to privatize this record, but because I think it is conversation as such was an important medium and stimulus for his poetry. We have not yet moved from the window of the "Gallery", Oto first mentioned Danijela Dragojević, the recently deceased Croatian and Yugoslav poet. Going to Zagreb, the city that formed him, Oto kept daydreaming about how he would accidentally meet Dragojević while walking and imagined what he would ask him. On that occasion, he mentioned some kind of shoes. These days, remembering his songs, I opened the book of the most recent songs Scandal (published by KOV), translated by Draginja Ramadanski. In the song "An apple with an apple", I came across the following lines:

mnogo sam premišljao
kad bismo se sreli
o čemu bih pričao sa danijelom dragojevićem
(za mene najvažnijim pesnikom)
ćutali bismo poput kejdžovih muzičara
tek kasnije
posle više godina postaće jasno
pričali bismo o cipelama
dinka šimunovića

Was it mere self-infatuation? Does this mean, as everyone would think, that the Oto-interlocutor is constantly retelling the Ota-poet? No. This phenomenon can be understood in this way: if you forget what you talked about with Otto, open his poems, his lexicon: he writes them precisely to remind you of the details of your conversation. Because you will soon see, if you are careful, that Tolnai's reference system is very reliable, that you can swim through his poetry squinting, as if The Human Comedy. Otto is a poet of obsessive repetition. Long-term motives mark his poetry, which, you will see, is also his biography. From the first to the last book, you will often come across an allusion to Dorin (the fatal Indonesian woman he fell in love with in Ljubljana), the elevator in the Zagreb reading room (which he says is the birthplace of his poetry), then to cauliflower, potatoes, a zoo, pigeons, suicides (characteristics of Subotica and Palić), not to mention the figures of Hungarian writers (Kostolanji, Geza Chat...) and visual artists. (Ota Diks, Sava Šumanović...) who became constant characters in his songs. All those points eventually become intimate props for the reader who expects them around every corner. And all of this is performed in a hybrid form between poetry and essay, as he says in the text about Konjović, "my combined way that is sometimes snarky."

If we were to say that Tolnai is a poet of anecdotes, then we must specify that this anecdote is not a joke that is told once and worn out. His poems are a series of small gossips that call each other, from one association to another. Nor is the erudition with which he is guided a mere rant and name-calling behind which he hides as a poet. The intensity of his poems shows that Otto is a poet who waits for the right moment for a poem. For him, a song is based on a burst thrown out at the right moment, without retouching, without working on the verse, one time, as played in a jazz session. The poet's duty, he informs us between the torrents, is to be porous.

The contribution to Yugoslav culture that Oto Tolnai made as the editor of the magazine is incredible - and officially immeasurable Uj Symposium (founded in 1965), together with Istvan Domonkoš, Istvan Konce and Kalman Feher. And then in 1971, in the 77th issue, Miroslav Mandić's "Song on Film" was published, translated by Katalin Ladik. It was assessed that the text "damages the honor and reputation of the President of the Republic, the people and the state of SFRY". Symposium was temporarily banned, Mandic was sentenced to prison, and Tolnai, as the editor, was sentenced to probation.

It was the first sobering up. From him Ištvan Domonkoš, poet Damages, he did not recover, he decided to move to Uppsala and not to publish anymore. (He too passed away recently, in November 2024.) Otto's disappointment, however, found its articulation. Years later, in 1988, in an address "On the sea, the seas and the seas", which he wrote directly in Serbo-Croatian, Tolnai tries to define the "power of the minority" within the Yugoslav context. "It would be worthwhile if Yugoslav literatures studied the dimension of minority literatures, they would learn a lot about themselves." In the following, he articulates one of the most convincing diagnoses of Yugoslavia's downfall, in a way that reveals that he truly believed in Yugoslavism: "Was that spiritual Yugoslavianism, which was still being strengthened in the mirror of minority literature, just an illusion? I don't know. Sometimes I think that resistance alone is not enough, revolutions are not enough. We also need what comes after, that is even more important, we have to work. Sometimes I think that we created the miracle of spiritual Yugoslavianness as a kind of luxury, a superfluous luxury credit.”

What else did Otto tell me about when we met? Somewhere in Terazije, crying with laughter, he was retelling to me Krasnahorkai's story "Theseus' constant". From the same footsteps, he decided to take me to the bookstore near SKC to buy me that book, The world is coming. (translated by Marko Čudić). At the cash register, when the employee informed him that she had not yet left, he could not be surprised. But that's why he readily referred me to the book The lard poet, an attempt to transcribe a multi-day conversation with journalist Lajoš Parti Nađa (translated by Marko Čudić, of course).

One more thing I realized then, as we parted ways: Otto is a poet of encounters. As I followed him to the station, I suggested that, in honor of the meeting, each of us reconstructs the path that brought us in front of the "Gallery". Otto reacted enthusiastically to my proposal. That same evening I typed and sent it to him Where did I go and where did Otto go to meet. By the end of this issue, Oto had not submitted the transcript of his journey.