George Konrád
aka György Konrád
George Konrád was a Hungarian novelist and essayist. Konrád was born in Berettyóújfalu, near Debrecen into an affluent Jewish family. He graduated in 1951 from the Madách Secondary School in Budapest, entered the Lenin Institute and eventually studied literature, sociology and psychology at Eötvös Loránd University. In 1956 he participated in the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet occupation.
“Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses. . . . If you don’t like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days.”
George Konrád
“If Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Cracow, Warsaw, and Berlin belong to Europe, then why not Leningrad, why not Moscow--indeed, why stop before Vladivostok? It is all part of Eurasia, there is no state frontier between...I would like to think of myself as some utopian son of Europe, able to touch the Pacific at San Francisco with one outstretched arm and at Vladivostok with the other, and keeping the peace everywhere within my embrace.”
George Konrád