Jeno Heltai (1871-1957) was a Hungarian writer, poet, journalist, and theater director, Czárdás tells the story of a wounded WWI airman who retrns to Budapest searching for "the blind man and the porcelain woman who had come to him in his delirium" after he was wounded. "Night after night through wine cellars and gambling hells, he pursues these phantoms, colecting by the way as bizarre a company of lost women nad desperate men as can be met." The czárdás is a traditional Magyar folk dance "in which a group of mixed dancers, moving to the beat of a disturbing rhythm, rise to a height of furious passion."