A Hungarian astrophysicist advocates land reform
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010188
I’ve just finished reading The Dukays, the 795-page magnum opus of the Hungarian novelist and playwright Lajos Zilahy . Written in 1949, the novel tells the story of Count István Dukay, his family, and his times. It begins in the late 1800s when Hungary, as a partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled an area the size of modern Germany. Most of the action, however, takes place in the two decades after World War I, a conflict that led to the dissolution of the empire and, with it, the dismemberment of Hungary. Then, as is still the case today, Hungary’s borders encompassed just 27% of its prewar territory.
Dukay’s vast estates in the Great Hungarian Plain remain intact when the novel ends in 1939, but their continued existence is threatened by the land-reform movement in the person of Mihály Ursi, who first appears on page 624. At that point, the plot is following Dukay’s youngest daughter, Zia, as she recovers from a failed marriage to an Italian prince. She’s living frugally on the fictional Adriatic island of Mandria (based, I think, on Susak ), where she practices her hobby of photography under a pseudonym. Ursi asks her to take his photograph after accidentally dropping his passport into the sea.
To my surprise, soon after the photography session is over, readers learn that Ursi is an astrophysicist. Biographical information about Zilahy is hard to find on the Internet, so I’m not sure whether the novelist was friends with any astrophysicists. Still, it’s at least conceivable that he might have encountered his physicist contemporaries and compatriots Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner in Budapest.
Ursi’s profession serves the novel in two ways. First, the calm, rational astrophysicist provides a sharp contrast to both Filippo Ozzolini, Zia’s foppish, philandering husband, and Dukay, her rich, aristocratic father—as these small details illustrate: Whereas Ozzolini smokes cigarettes in a diamond-encrusted ebony holder and Dukay keeps his cigars in a suitcase-sized humidor, Ursi doesn’t smoke at all.
Second, by choosing to make his land-reform advocate an astrophysicist, Zilahy suggests that land reform is a rational, even scientific, policy. Indeed, one of the book’s highlights is the verbatim introduction to Ursi’s eloquent polemic, The Great Fallow. In the following extract, Ursi begins to justify his interest in land reform as an inevitable consequence of his astronomical research:
When he lays down his complicated instruments, bolometers, actinometers, pyrheliometers, photometers, his prismatic grated spectroscopes, knowing that the hundred billion stars of the Milky Way represent but an infinitesimal fraction of the cosmos, the astronomer—when he says farewell to his laboratory, to the clouds of Magellan Major and Magellan Minor, to the constellation of Andromeda, to the clusters of spheres hurtling through space a distance of hundreds and hundreds of millions of light years; when he sits down to supper with the evening paper in hand—the astronomer cannot help himself if his eyes, his brain and his whole frame of reference regard the tax bill submitted by the Finance Minister, the burglary-cum-murder on Dob Street, regard even the price of kale in the column of market prices from the viewpoint of the universe as a whole.
Literary fiction hardly abounds with astronomers—which is to say I’m struggling to recall any astronomer characters in the books I’ve read. That paucity could constitute a missed opportunity. Although Ursi focuses his cosmic view on land reform and the condition of the Hungarian peasantry, other fictional astronomers could bring their minds to bear on other problems.
Real life has provided novelists with at least one model, the late astrophysicist and human rights campaigner Fang Lizhi .