Intercultural Passages in Ottó Tolnai’s Textual Universe

Author(s): Julianna Ispánovics Csapó / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2014

The literary palette of Tolnai’s textual universe within the Hungarian literature from Vojvodina is based, among others, upon the intertwining of various cultural entities. The social and cultural spaces of “Big Yugoslavia,” the phenomena, figures, and works of the European-oriented Yugoslav and ethnic culture (literature, painting, book publishing, theatre, sports, etc.), the mentalities of the migrant worker’s life, the legends of the Tito cult embed the narrative procedures of particular texts by Tolnai into a rich culture-historical context. Similarly to the model of Valery’s Mediterranean, the narrator’s Janus-faced Yugoslavia simultaneously generates concrete and utopian spaces, folding upon one another. Above the micro spaces (towns, houses, flats) evolving along the traces of reality, there float the Proustian concepts of scent and colour of the Adriatic sea (salt, azure, mimosa, lavender, laurel). The nostalgia towards the lost Eden rises high and waves about the “grand form” of Big Yugoslavia, the related space of which is the Monarchy. The counterpoints of the grand forms are “the small, void forms,” provinces, regions (Vojvodina, North Bačka) and the micro spaces coded into them. The text analyses of the paper examine the intercultural motions and identity-forming culture-historical elements of the outlined space system.

‘Transfers’ in Hungarian Literature from Vojvodina

Author(s): Erika Bence / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2014

The study examines the variants of the postmodern phenomena of literary ‘transfer’ (‘trans-correspondence,’ ‘transpass’) and their relationships with Hungarian literature (in Vojvodina) from the beginnings (the creative tradition of Kornél Szenteleky’s oeuvre) up to the events of present-time literary history (e.g., to the publication of Esti by Péter Esterházy). Referential aspects (the literary themes of the railway, the train, the change of trains), specific contexts (e.g., Kornél Esti as a contextual ‘transferring’ literary character) and metaphorical contents (e.g., the meanings of the straight line and the plane in the literature of the region) come into the focus of our research. Another significant aspect of the research is the interpretation of the intricate web of cross-cultural ‘transfers’ (between the works of Dezső Kosztolányi―Danilo Kiš―Péter Esterházy).The dominant motif of Central-Eastern European man’s experience of space is the straight line of the flatlands: lacking the sea-experience of the Southern European or of the more southern regions, as well as the related mythical experience of the world, infinity-experience, or reality perceptions hosting unrealities. The trip in this sense is an intermediate form of life: movement towards other shapes. The direction and extent of this movement has always been defined by the ‘straight line,’ the main road, and later the straight line of the railway.

Change, Crisis, Perspective, and Identity in Two Novels by Rózsa Ignácz

Author(s): Erzsébet Dani / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

For Hungarians who remained stuck beyond the borders after WWI, finding themselves in a foreign country from one day to the next, the historical trauma of the Trianon Treaty occasioned intercultural tribulations never experienced before. What the resulting Transylvanian literature discussed here is concerned with, however, is not what Jeffrey C. Alexander’s cultural trauma theory calls “the trauma process”, “the spiral of signification” (Alexander 2004, 11). Rather, it is concerned with “the indelible marks” “the horrendous event” left “upon group consciousness […] changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander 2004, 1). This literature displays a rich array of the management strategies of minority identity. Earlier I devoted a book to the identity types that ensued from those strategies (Dani 2016a). The present work is based on that monograph and moves on. This time I wish to focus on the key figures of two Rózsa Ignácz novels (Anyanyelve magyar and Született Moldovában) to demonstrate the complex identity patterns that an erosion of minority native language and culture, so destructive to identity, yields. The road that the Hungarian minority travels leads through a succession of active and reactive changes, crises, and modifications of perspective in the maze of minority versus hegemonic intercultural relations.

Suffering, Trauma, and Death in Anna Terék’s Poetry Book Halott nők [Dead Women]

Author(s): Magdalena Garbacik / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Anna Terék is one of the most interesting Hungarian poets of the young generation. The study is focused on Terék’s third poetry book, Halott nők (Dead Women) (2017). The book is a poetry cycle that shows stories/voices of five women. Violence, physical as well as psychological and symbolic, becomes destructive to the identity of the individual but also to the identity of the community. At the same time, it demands an effort of expression. The paper analyses these issues. The study describes the speech / narrative forms and their functions, and it examines the system of metaphors and the specific poetic language. The poems are closely related to the Yugoslav Wars. The study refers to this historical background but also shows the poems’ universal dimension, which makes it possible to speak about them in terms of the life stories of today.

Fried István: „Addig repűlni, hol csak fény lakik”. Egy Kazinczy-pályakép vázlata

Author(s): Krisztián Bodnár / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2022

In this volume, the author has published his studies on the life and work of Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831), richly illustrated.

László Tóth: Hagyomány és identitás. Tanulmányok és esszék a (cseh)szlovákiai magyar irodalomhoz 2006–2021

Author(s): Gábor Csanda / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2022

The author, a historian of literature and cultural studies, examines the development and ruptures of Hungarian literature in Czechoslovakia and Slovakia, and its diverse relationships in a given period (between the two world wars, during the period of disenfranchisement of Hungarians, after the regime change of 1989), providing a profile of the careers of their most prominent representatives.

A szerelem sivataga. Pilinszky és a világirodalom

Author(s): Dorottya Szávai / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 11/2022

The article focuses on the embeddedness of János Pilinszky's work (poetry and journalism) in world literature, and on the integrative, intercultural mediating role of his work, which has so far been only partially discussed by the reception. Seen from this angle, the oeuvre is essentially a European-scale, intercultural, transnational oeuvre, embedded in world literature. The paper analyses also the (East-)Central European references in Pilinszky’s texts, highlighting his interest towards marginality in a broad sense, this interest being reflected most importantly in the author’s rhetorical strategies, in the language of his poetry. The idea of the ‘European’ is also present in Pilinszky’s essays, and it is mediated, the article argues, through the idea of evangelical aesthetics.

Egy kupolányi kérdésfelvetés

Author(s): Kinga Sebestyén / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 12/2022

Mészöly Ágnes: A kupolák titka. Cerkabella, Szentendre, 2020.

A szabad vers kultusza az újvidéki Új Symposion folyóiratban

Author(s): István Ladányi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2022

The journal Uj Symposium was launched in Novi Sad in 1965 and after several internal or forced transformations and generational changes, it ceased to exist in 1992. In the journal’s programme of renewing Hungarian minority literature in Voj/ivodina, free verse based on the avant-garde literary tradition, along with essays and literary criticism, has gained particular importance. The paper traces the rise and literary achievements of free verse in the three decades of the journal.

Elsétált az éjben

Author(s): Péter Demény / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 01/2023

Szőcs Petra: A gonosz falu legszebb lakói. Magvető, Bp., 2022.

Kádár Imre megváltástanai

Author(s): Tamás Gusztáv Filep / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2023

The paper traces the changes in the worldview of one of the background figures of Hungarian intellectual life in Romania between the two world wars – the writer, journalist, literary translator, and theatre director Imre Kádár. Having also experimented in the adapting of modern literary forms, Kádár moved to Kolozsvár (Cluj), Transylvania, as an emigrant in 1919, and at the beginning he represented a version of Transylvanism that preserved ideals of the so-called bourgeois revolution of October 1918. His lasting work is the volume of translations of Romanian folk poetry, A havas balladái (‘Ballads of the Snow-capped mountain’; 1932). His intellectual path led, through Octobrism, Transylvanism, and Gnosticism, to Protestantism. According to his own confession, being subject to anti-Jewish laws in the years of the Second World War, he wanted to proselytize out of pure interest, but he actually converted in the process; from after the Second World War until his death in 1972, he was in the leadership of the Reformed Church in Hungary that was subservient to the communist dictatorship.

Egy kritikus tükörbe néz

Author(s): Kinga Sebestyén / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2023

Lapis József: Elég. Közelítések a kortárs irodalomkritikához. Alföld könyvek, Alföld Alapítvány – Méliusz Juhász Péter Könyvtár, Debrecen, 2022

„mély alapot jövendő nagyságnak.” Jancsó Béla: Érték, erkölcs, közösség

Author(s): Miklós Csapody / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 03/2023

Igazságok könyve

Author(s): Péter Demény / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 03/2023

Károlyi Csaba: Egy teljes év. Beszélgetések Nádas Péterrel. Jelenkor, Bp., 2022.

Az otthon és a távoli égövek. Transzlokális és mitikus terek Hajnal Anna költészetében

Author(s): Anikó Polgár / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2022

The study explores mythical and translocal spaces in the poetry of Anna Hajnal (1907–1977). Translocal spaces do not belong to a single city, to a single culture, they are multi-layered, constantly in flux. The oeuvre of Anna Hajnal, a member of the third generation of the Nyugat, has many transcultural aspects. The poetess grew up in a Germanspeaking village (Kohfidisch, Gyepüfüzes), in a family with a Hungarian-Jewish identity, and the recurring memory of this environment provided a symbolic basis for the lyrical creation of spatial hybridisation. The study deals with the activation of spaces of memory, visualisation, the motif of the mirror as a gateway between the profane and the sacred, the fusion of mythical and exotic spaces (labyrinth, underworld, jungle) into the domestic.

A határ variációi Hunyady Sándor prózájában

Author(s): Krisztina Kovács / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2022

In order to list Sándor Hunyady’s life spaces that condense a cultural mixture, one needs to review the main ideas and theses around a poetical discourse on space. The paper focuses on the aspects of these models which can be applied to literary texts, making use of the concepts of representative theorists of the poetical discourse on space. The rich identity patterns inseparable from Hunyady’s life conduct and life spaces are the places partly discovered by travels, as categories needed to “read” various scenes from Cluj, Budapest, Báčka, Partium or Transylvania. We can get closer to their understanding by analysing the patterns of the border, the blurred boundaries of the night, the mythology of the city. The paper attempts to interpret Sándor Hunyady’s work, based on spatial forms of his prose and using some of the typical examples of the border-experience, as a universe embedded into the literary terrains of modernism, expressing the visions of space in the age.

Távolsági szonettjárat

Author(s): Miklós Csapody / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 05/2023

Béla Markó’s first book of poems published in Hungary, Mindenki autóbusza, appeared in 1989 in the József Attila Circle of Young Writers’ series of booklets published by Magvető. The new volume marked a classicist turn in Markó’s poetry with its choice of the sonnet, a symbol of inner freedom preserved in a closed space. In the book, the avant-garde prose poem Rövid, korszerűtlen kiáltvány is followed by Költők koszorúja. The 14 poems and the master sonnet are portraits of 14 classics of Hungarian literature from Janus Pannonius to Miklós Radnóti. During the dictatorship, Romanian authors were not allowed to publish their writings abroad without permission, but Markó sent his poems to Miklós Csapody for more than ten years, who arranged for their publication. This “philological memoir” by the editor of the book, based on the poet’s letters and the documents of the József Attila Circle, recalls the story of the book's birth, the struggles of the new generation of poets of the time and the situation of Hungarians in Transylvania in the 1980s until the end of the dictatorship.

Egy házi nyúl

Author(s): Péter Demény / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 05/2023

Görözdi Judit – Balogh Magdolna (szerk.): Külországi könyvespolcokon. Tanulmányok Esterházy Péter idegen nyelvű recepciójáról. Reciti, Bp., 2022.

Sas Andor és a (cseh)szlovákiai magyar irodalom

Author(s): Zoltán Csehy / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2023

The subject of this article is the emergence of the problematization and evaluation of Hungarian literature in (Czecho)Slovakia in the work of Andor Sas (1887–1962), especially in his work as a critic. Sas's works were created in ideologically infected times, and this is also reflected in the language and perspective of the texts. Sas primarily dealt with the Hungarian literature in Slovakia in his journalistic critical texts, cultivating what is known as pedagogical criticism. In the memory of his contemporaries, he lives as one of the most significant shapers of minority literature, as a supporter of young talents, but based on his remaining writings, this exceptional role is dwarfed. In the 1950s, Sas showed himself to be a supporter of literary Sovietization, and most of his literary political texts can be interpreted as a demonstration of loyalty. On the other hand, Gyula Duba's discovery as a writer is proof that he was also able to assert more serious aesthetic points of view.

Literary prizes as indicators of changing concepts of cultural policy. A case study from Socialist Hungary

Author(s): Erika Erlinghagen / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The paper introduces a part of a larger research project, conducted within the frames of a doctoral thesis. The main goal of the thesis is to trace the conceptual developments of Hungarian literary policy during the short 20th century, a period of fundamental political and social changes, by using state awarded literary prizes as indicators. In the following, the significance of literary prizes will first be outlined from a cultural-political and literary-sociological point of view, then one of the prizes analysed in the research, the Kossuth-Prize, as well as some sample results will be presented in detail.