Living in Budapest. Tenement life and communities in Zsigmond Móricz's novel The Wife Intervenes
Renowned author Zsigmond Móricz entered the literary world primarily as a writer focused on peasant life, serving as a literary sociographer of peasant society. Although he created many works centered on village life and rural settings, he also left behind numerous writings with a Budapest focus, though these received little attention. In the last ten to fifteen years of his life, Móricz sought ‘to capture Budapest’. One of the spatial-literary frameworks for this authorial mission became the tenement. In his Budapest novel, ‘The Wife Intervenes’ (Az asszony beleszól), Móricz draws on his experiences from his youth with housing, telling the story of Budapest's society in the 1930s within the backdrop of a double-courtyard tenement in Ferencváros, focusing on the intelligentsia teetering on the edge of middle-class status and the fear of downward mobility.
One of the writer’s earliest memories of Budapest dates back to 1896, from a visit to the Millennium Exhibition. During this time, Móricz stayed with his uncle at the apartment of a village blacksmith, now working as a laborer at the Ganz factory, on Teréz Boulevard. According to Móricz’s memories: ‘We stayed with the blacksmith’s family in an apartment opening to the courtyard where sunlight never reached. But what pride and wealth that life had. How self-assured the blacksmith was that he didn’t live in a small house filled with the smell of cows and pigs like in the village, but in this magnificent palace. And on Saturdays, he would bring home his earnings… The pride of city life practically sizzled in these dark courtyard apartments. Let us not forget that these enchanting tenement palaces were so magnificent back then that Vienna and Paris had nothing more modern or better to offer to this same class of residents. Who cared then that the courtyard was nine meters deep? The whole crowd lived on the streets, only coming home to eat, and their hearts swelled with joy when they entered the grand staircase and saw the plaster faun and the busty nymph who watched over their dreams.’
The host family was drawn to the capital by the well-paying factory jobs that industrializing Budapest had to offer. The city, evolving into a bustling metropolis, required a constant influx of human resources: factory workers, tradespeople, and tens of thousands of domestic workers, including maids and housekeepers for middle-class households. Like Móricz’s fellow villagers, many found homes in the rear, courtyard sections of newly built tenement houses along the Grand Boulevard and in the expanding inner-city districts (Terézváros, Erzsébetváros, Józsefváros, and Ferencváros).
From 1900, Móricz lived in Budapest with intermittent breaks – up until 1936 when he finally moved to a nearby village called Leányfalu. As a young journalist, he produced occasional reports and articles on the capital city, yet it wasn’t until the late 1920s that Budapest began to captivate him as a subject and material worth documenting. From this period on, his articles and sociographic writings on the city became more frequent in the magazines Pesti Napló and Az Est.
‘I thought I would never be able to write about Budapest [until I realized] that Budapest is the countryside... If the people are from the countryside, [...] then I see and know them,’ he wrote. This revelatory insight led to a whole series of short and full-length novels. In these works, the notion that ‘in Budapest, everyone is from the countryside’ often appeared as a repeated, axiomatic line spoken by the characters.
‘The Swallows Build Their Nest’ (A fecskék fészket raknak) was published in 1931, ‘The Wife Intervenes’ (Az asszony beleszól) in 1933, ‘Better Than Home’ (Jobb mint otthon) in 1934, ‘The Captive Lion’ (A rab oroszlán) in 1935, and the ‘Csibe’ series of short stories in 1935–36, all in Pesti Napló.
The writer – sometimes with more, sometimes with less success – attempted to conduct thorough research for his Budapest writings. During his material-gathering walks in the 1930s, he explored many suburban districts. He discovered Ferencváros, which had been inhabited for only twenty years at the time, the then-unknown Angyalföld, the slum of Kiserdő, and noticed the modern rental buildings rising in Újlipótváros. Móricz’s outings served a dual purpose: collecting raw material for the continuous stream of newspaper articles he produced, as well as finding inspirational themes and charecters for his Budapest novels. Beyond his field explorations, he also strove to ‘learn’ Budapest. He delved into statistical publications about city life and became deeply engaged with the city’s rental housing issues.
The society of the tenements in The Woman Intervenes
In Móricz’s Budapest prose, the defining settings are the tenement building and the home, and, in The Captive Lion and Better Than Home, the workplace. Characters in these Budapest novels live and move in city locations suited to their social status. The ‘middle-class’ or ‘borderline middle-class’ protagonists frequent cafés, theaters, and Margaret Island, live in rental flats, and work in offices or banks. This setting contrasts sharply with the urban, working-class environments of Móricz’s most powerful Budapest prose, the Csibe stories, which unfold amid tenements and suburban pubs. Yet, the more stable novel milieus of The Wife Intervenes and Better Than Home are permeated by a fear of poverty and descent into ‘proletarian life,’ especially in the latter novel.
The entire narrative of The Wife Intervenes unfolds within the outer and inner spaces of a double-courtyard tenement complex in Ferencváros. Móricz provides an almost complete overview of the apartments on the building’s first floor and the society of its residents. The novel is set in a small apartment in the rear courtyard, where Móricz and his first wife, Janka Holics, lived during the early years of their marriage, and in the surrounding apartment community. The setting is so authentic that the apartments and parts of the building described in the story match precisely with the layout and site plan documentation of the building at 91 Üllői Road, where the couple lived. This is interesting not for the ability to verify Móricz’s accuracy down to the centimeter but because the blueprints help clarify the spatial structure of the tenement-house society portrayed in the novel. This structure corresponds with the variations in placement and quality of the documented/fictional apartments.
Residents and Apartments
The novel is set in a tenement house in Ferencváros during the 1930s. The plot revolves around a few complimentary theater tickets that start their journey from the rear courtyard and make their way through the homes of residents in the front courtyard and on the street-facing side of the building. The drama arises from the fact that, despite receiving these free tickets, most middle-class tenants cannot afford a theater visit befitting their social status, especially at the end of the month. As the story progresses and we trace the path of the tickets, the multi-zoned structure of the apartment building becomes apparent. The characters inhabit three distinct social spaces, defined by the location, quality of the apartments, and the occupation and social status of the residents.
In the rear wing of the tenement house, where the most marginal elements of this social hierarchy reside, are modest, often one-room apartments with a kitchen but no amenities were situated. Here, we find families of workers, some struggling tradespeople, and ‘tenants of questionable backgrounds’. Among these residents are a laundress, a cab driver known for beating his family and being a drunkard, a lonely alcoholic (former) teacher, the young mistress of an army lieutenant from the countryside, a shoemaker, and a factory worker at the end of the second-floor balcony, who has separated his small space with a makeshift fence and whose daughter now works as a typist. There is also an unemployed locksmith and a pipe carver, along with his wife, a cleaning lady. Most of the information about these tenants comes from gossip, especially the detailed stories of the laundress, who often shares her observations with the journalist’s wife. The novel’s plot does not venture into this remote part of the courtyard, and the interiors of these back apartments remain unseen. However, Móricz provides extensive insight into the life of the central journalist couple, who live on the edge between the front and rear courtyards, serving as the main focus of the story. Their home lies along the corridor connecting the two courtyards, with its entrance and windows facing the second courtyard, and a kitchen window offering a view through the air shaft to a room window of a first-courtyard apartment. Móricz takes pleasure in describing every detail of this one-room apartment with an alcove, including its furnishings. The location, view, and layout of the apartment in the novel align exactly with the features of the writer's own rented apartment from 1905 based on the architectural drawings. In the fictional adaptation, however, the apartment's heavy, traditional furniture – towering cabinets, columned sideboards, and a clunky forty-pengő bedroom set – has been replaced by the writer's imagination with light, modern metal furniture, following the trends of the 1930s. This unique, stylish furniture becomes a feature in itself, turning the apartment into something of a spectacle. The journalist’s wife even becomes acquainted with other tenants in the building because of the apartment’s interior, including residents from the first courtyard. Remarkably, even a lady of high social standing from one of the large street-facing apartments visits to admire the setup.
‘“This modern furnishing is still a rarity in Pest. They say you have a kitchen cabinet that's unique in the city.”
“Yes, very modern. Aunt Mariska bought it for me at my request. It was a sample collection for small apartments, and we really like it because our apartment is so tiny, we have to make use of the space.”
“Steel pipe furniture, my dear”, said Aunt Gizi. “The beds are wonderful. And everything is so easy to handle, to keep clean. It's like a doctor's office […]”
“My dear”, said the honorable lady, “I tell you, in today’s world, this is the greatest happiness, such a small apartment. You don’t need a maid, you don’t have to wear yourself out.”’
(Zsigmond Móricz: Az asszony beleszól. Budapest, 1955, 45.)
The alcove apartment is in the semi-comfort category [In today’s terms, semi-comfort means that the apartment has at least a living room of minimum 12 m2 floor space, a cooking premise, bathroom or flush toilet, public utilities (at least electricity and water), and individual heating. (In the 1930s, it may have been even less than that based on Móricz’s description.) Source: https://www.ksh.hu/apps/meta.objektum?p_lang=EN&p_menu_id=210&p_ot_id=200&p_obj_id=1752]: its occupants do not need to use the shared toilets in the rear courtyard, but in principle, they would have to do without the comfort of a bathroom if the modern furniture did not include a standing shower, for which the bathwater is prepared every morning with an auto-geyser heater. From Móricz’s recollections, we know that when they were first married, he was embarrassed to bring his wife home into their one-room, alcove apartment opening to the rear courtyard, and just like the protagonist of his novel – Imre Vígh – he tried to get out of the ‘depths’ of the tenement block as quickly as possible. In the middle section of the tenement house, within the first courtyard, alongside a few one-room apartments, mostly semi-comfort, two-room rentals are situated. Each of the larger apartments there have rentable rooms branching off in two directions from the hallway, so they can be easily separated from the rest of the flat if needed. In the novel, Móricz enters two of these apartments, both occupied by single women who earn a living by renting out space. ‘Auntie Zöld’ (named after her obligatory green scarf) lives in the apartment next to the young journalist couple, with a window facing their kitchen through the lightwell (leading Imre to witness what he believes to be a potential crime – a story he could report on). In this apartment, the widow who rents it out retreats to the kitchen herself, while letting her two rooms to boarders. According to house gossip, the room facing the lightwell is often occupied by ‘women of questionable morals’ (currently, a cashier lady). In the novel, Móricz describes another household within a first-courtyard apartment: a colonel's wife, Mrs. Véghely, and her two adolescent daughters occupy the small room of their ‘well-arranged’ three-room apartment (with separate entrances for each room). After her husband, the colonel, abandoned the family, Mrs. Véghely supported them by making handicrafts and renting out two rooms. Her tenants are a law student preparing for his final exams and a provincial landowner in the process of divorce. Móricz drew on his own experience with such tenant arrangements, as he and his wife had taken in a boarder in their second, larger home with two rooms and a maid’s room. The high rent of 650 crowns – and possibly the grief over the loss of their first child – led them to seek additional income through subletting.
The residents introduced in the middle section of the building occupy a higher social status than the manual laborers, struggling tradespeople, and ‘lumpen’ tenants of the rear courtyard. For these ‘middle’ tenants, survival does not hinge on physically demanding labor or the free soup kitchens frequented by those from the rear apartments. In this milieu, Móricz highlights female characters who strive to maintain a semblance of middle-class respectability, often through a precarious balance of appearances associated with the middle or upper class. These women, many of whom are left alone due to widowhood or divorce, sustain themselves by making handicrafts or renting out rooms. Móricz was deeply interested in issues of female emancipation and the evolving roles of women in society. In this novel, he primarily explores the dynamics and conflicts between female and male roles within marriage. However, in Better Than Home, he delves into the life and challenges of a single woman raising her child on a modest clerical salary, examining the difficulties and societal pressures such a life entails.
In the most prestigious section of the building, facing the street, there are two spacious apartments per floor. These well-lit, full-comfort, large apartments offer high-quality living, featuring 3-4 rooms, a bathroom, maid’s room, a kitchen, pantry, foyer, and a separate toilet. The rooms are arranged en suite, flowing into each other in a grand layout, befitting the high-status tenants: senior civil servants and wealthy industrialists. Among the distinguished residents are the Schultheisz family, headed by a ministry counselor, his homemaker wife, and their three teenage children. Another tenant is the childless Flemming couple, owners of a luxury soap factory. The two families indeed represent the peak of the society in this building, but their homes reflect distinct styles, lifestyles, and tastes. In the Schultheisz household, the decor exudes authority and tradition, featuring old, imposing furniture, dark wallpaper, and deep brown parquet flooring in their salon, bedroom, and study. In contrast, the Flemming residence showcases a contemporary, exclusive style aligned with modern trends. Their rooms feel bright and spacious, with solid, light-colored walls, pure white ceilings accented by colorful borders, and honey-toned, glossy parquet floors. Móricz lingers over the luxurious details of the Flemming apartment, capturing ‘the shine of low-profile furniture, the grand silver and porcelain vases overflowing with flowers.’ Particularly indulgent is his description of Mrs. Flemming's favorite divan, adorned with silk and velvet cushions that evoke a ‘drunkenness of wealth.’
Relationships within the apartment building
In the tiers of the apartment building in the novel, we find members of three distinct social strata, separated yet in close spatial proximity and interdependent in a network-like way. As the four complimentary theater tickets make their way through the story, the chain of favors and obligations between the characters is revealed. Everyone asks for or receives something from a neighbor ‘above’ them in rank or income, while also providing small loans or unnecessary items to a poorer, more vulnerable tenant. At one end of this chain is the washerwoman, who gains a little lard and two onions; at the other end stands Mrs. Flemming, the soap manufacturer’s wife, who receives the theater tickets as a favor in exchange for gift packs of toiletries.
The relationships among residents of the tenement building are structured by two types of boundaries. On one hand, social differences among those living in the courtyards are somewhat overridden by spatial proximity, as all residents, whether of working-class or middle-class, intellectual status, are subject to the public scrutiny of their neighbors. They all live along the open walkway encircling the courtyard: this is where they move about and are observed, with kitchen and room windows opening onto the walkway, through which they ‘monitor’ one another.
For the first time in her life – thanks to the theater tickets – Bolyka, the counselor’s daughter, enters an apartment opening onto the courtyard. After overcoming the shock of the dark and unattractive interior, she begins to feel saddened by the extreme separation of her own street-facing home. ‘If someone passed by along the walkway below the window, they would immediately discuss the person who had passed, and in one hour she learned more about what was happening in the building than in the ten years they had lived there. They lived in a large apartment, with only the kitchen and servant's room windows facing the walkway, so they never saw anyone coming or going. They didn’t even know who lived in the building, but from this spot, like a watchtower, the Véghely family kept track of all the residents and everything about them.’ While the residents of the street-facing apartments enjoy greater privacy and are less involved in the daily life of the building, rarely seen or heard, with their windows opening to the outdoors and their homes accessed by a closed staircase (or in one case, a short internal hallway), the caretaker's oversight extends to every resident, regardless of apartment location or social rank. In the novel, Móricz particularly caricatures the system of allowing residents entry after ten p.m., collecting door fees, and the caretaker's role as a Cerberus-like gatekeeper. His protagonist, Imre, often grumbles about the absurdity of a system where even reaching one’s own home requires payment, while in Berlin’s new buildings, residents all have door keys and every building is equipped with stairwells.
On the other hand, social separation overrides any forced proximity. The laundress does visit the journalist's apartment, but she only reaches the kitchen, where she works, helps the housewife, or spreads the latest gossip. Her relationship with the lady is merely one of servant–mistress, or maid–housewife. Meanwhile, the ‘ladies’ circulating the theater tickets – the journalist's wife, the colonel's wife, the noblewoman, and the soap manufacturer’s wife – despite their differences in income and social status, have much more equal relationships with each other.
In the novel, Móricz provides a detailed calculation of the theater visit costs for the journalist couple, the colonel's wife, and the counselor's family, in accordance with their social ranks. The same four complimentary theater tickets cost 4 pengő for the Vígh family (with home-brought candy, the journalist husband's free tram ticket, and the wife without a hat – saving on coat check fees), 2 pengő 44 fillér for the even more frugal colonel's wife and her daughters, and 7-8 pengő for the Schultheisz family (including a theater program booklet, candy bought at the theater, and the taxi ride).
They are all members of the broadly defined ‘middle class,’ albeit under different circumstances. The newly started journalist or the abandoned colonel's wife lives at a ‘petit-bourgeois’ standard of living due to their life situations, but their social network of friends and family pulls them upward. For them, a good marriage (the hope of a marriage between the colonel's daughter and the rural landowner emerges in the story) or professional/financial success (through the journalist protagonist’s writing and skill, the couple moves into a two-room apartment by the end of the story) offers a passage into the world of the street-level large apartments, much as Móricz himself experienced moving through all three types of housing presented in the novel.
When he was a journalist at the beginning of his career, they lived in the analyzed one-room plus alcove apartment facing the rear courtyard, followed by, after the first successes, the two-room apartment with a maid’s room rented at 95 Üllői Road in 1906, and then, in 1911, the now successful writer’s street-facing large apartment with three, then four rooms.
The overlap and similarity between the fictional residents in the novel and the real-life dwellers of the house at the turn of the century can be reconstructed based on the 1900 Budapest Address and Housing Register. According to this, in the years when Móricz and his family moved into the building at 91/a Üllői Road, the composition of residents in the building somewhat differed from that of the novel’s described community. The social layer represented in the large apartments matches: high-ranking public servants, some large-scale merchants, and high-ranking military officers (15% of the total number of residents), as well as the presence of manual laborers (30%) in the rear courtyards. Retirees, landlords, non-commissioned officers, and private individuals (a few percentages) are also found in the register. However, the most significant difference is the high percentage (25%) of small craftsmen and small traders, who are entirely absent from the novel.
Judit Verő-Valló (Translation from Hungarian: Barbara Szij)
(October 2024)