Aladár Kuncz: Black Monastery

The iconic work by Aladár Kuncz is a novel, a diary, a psychological portrait and a record in one. Black Monastery is not only an exciting read, but also proves that the diversity of genres can be reconciled in an artistic way. “Authentic” is undoubtedly the best word to characterize this account of the five years the author spent in a French internment camp during the First World War. Aladár Kuncz is amazingly moderate and enviably fair at presenting good and bad, without any unnecessary mannerism or pathos. As his fellow prisoner and friend Andor Németh puts it, he presents “those hundred-odd people, all of them separately, one by one, making them all visible among the horrible thick walls”.

The 2014 edition of Black Monastery, the first volume of the Collected Works of Aladár Kuncz series published in cooperation between National Széchényi Library and Kriterion Publishing House, is also the most complete version of the work so far, after a number of scanty and censored editions. “It is not a critical edition. The text was restored after seventy years by the reinsertion of the previously censored parts”, explains the editor, Éva Jeney, in the introductory study. „Our primary source was the first edition of 1931 prepared for printing by Kuncz himself [Erdélyi Szépmíves Céh, 1931]. We compared it line-by-line to the 1996 Kriterion edition, and because we wanted to provide the readers with an authentic version, wherever we suspected an unconfirmed intervention, we checked also the manuscript. [...] We took over the notes to the 1967 edition of Irodalmi Publishing House (Bucharest), corrected them, and what matters most, completed the list. [...] We now publish the complete picture material of the original work, together with the captions. [...] There are also some new illustrations that could not be seen in the previous editions of Black Monastery.”