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Niki

Niki

The Story of a Dog

by Tibor Déry, introduction by George Szirtes, translated from the Hungarian by Edward Hyams

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Hungarian Literature International Literature
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“The Dog adopted the Ancsas in the spring of ‘48”: so the story begins. The Ancsas are a middle-aged couple living on the outskirts of Budapest in a ruinous Hungary that is just beginning to wake up from the nightmare of World War II. The new Communist government promises to set things straight, and Mr. Ancsa, an engineer, is as eager to get to work building the future as he is to forget the past. The last thing he has time for is a little mongrel bitch, pregnant with her first litter. But Niki knows better, and before long she is part of the Ancsa household. The Ancsas even take her along with them when Mr. Ancsa’s new job requires a move to an apartment in the city. 

Then Mr. Ancsa is swept up in a political crackdown—disappearing without a trace. For five years he does not return, five years of absence, silence, fear, and the constant struggle to survive—five years during which Mrs. Ancsa and Niki have only each other.

The story of Niki, an ordinary dog, and the Ancsas, a no less ordinary couple, is an extraordinarily touching, utterly unsentimental, parable about caring, kindness, and the endurance of love.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590173183
Pages: 144
Publication Date:

Praise

I know of no other work that portrays more precisely or convincingly the mind and soul of an animal than this superb novella, which is also one of the most affecting love stories I have ever read. Déry uses a dog’s life to illuminate what it means to be a human being, in particular one struggling to survive a brutal dictatorship.
—Sigrid Nunez, Vanity Fair

[A]n extraordinary novel...It is Niki's sheer dogginess, so perfectly rendered throughout, that is at the heart of this novel's greatness.
— Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe

One of Hungary's leading novelists...Mr. Dery brings a kind of cunning naivete that records (or imagines) with utmost seriousness all the tremors of Niki's soul. He puts, as it were, the psychological realism of the contemporary novel at the disposal of a fox terrier.
— The New York Times

Outstanding Hungarian novelist and imprisoned hero of the 1956 revolution.
— The Nation

Niki is a masterpiece, like Of Mice and Men, of the presentation of "Man's inhumanity to man."
— Richard Church

In Niki there is nothing mawkish: one's heart is truly touched. By centering his seemingly artless story on the figure of a dog—that humblest, most poignant, and tenacious symbol of devotion, of the need to be attached—Tibor Déry has done more than present a contemporary political and human tragedy; he has illumined what might be called canine situation under the aspect of eternity.
— Rosamond Lehmann

[Déry's stories] remind me of stories by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Verga, Lawrence and Hemingway. Here is one of the outstanding writers of the twentieth century.
— Ben Sonnenberg

Tibor Déry has few equals among writers in Hungarian...[He] is one of the...masters of that great tradition of European realism that we associated with the name of Thomas Mann, and he deserves our close attention.
— Times Literary Supplement (London)

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