Melancholy made in Hungary is fuelling bestsellers across the globe – and widely misunderstood

A capacity for despair' forged by political oppression has long been consider a Magyar national trait. But after Orban, writers in the country remind us that melancholy must not always be bleak

A lone visitor looks for a garden outside an empty monastery. A morose housekeeper won't let anyone behind the door of her own home. A retired general living alone on a crumbling estate waits 40 years to confront the only friend he ever had. Melancholy, an affinity with oblivion without a concrete cause, suffuses the Hungarian fiction translated for foreign audiences over the past 30 years, from the tortured tales of Sandor Marai to the taut novels of Magda Szabo.

In his book In Praise of Melancholy, essayist Laszlo F Foldenyi tells the story of an Englishman who monomanically decides to teach himself Hungarian. For Foldenyi, the commitment to studying a language with 26 cases and with no connection to any other language, from a culture besieged by centuries of invasion, is to embrace melancholy, a seductive capacity for despair". To read Hungarian literature as an outsider, the poet Janos Pilinszky claimed in 1972, is to acquire unique spiritual insights that come from centuries of rootlessness, alienation and strife.