Hungarian Writer Research Articles

Konstruowanie siebie w opowieści – o historii i tożsamości w "Domu kata" Andrei Tompy

The main purpose of the article is to present the literary output of Andrea Tompa, using her debut collection entitled 'Dom kata' as an example. In her work, the Hungarian writer uses her creative potential connected with the experiences of growing up in a discriminated national minority in Romania in the 1980s. In the paper, I demonstrate how the history of the area and biography intertwine in the literary transformation of experience in a quasi‑autobiographical story about entering adulthood. In Andrea Tompa’s work, one can see how the geo‑cultural experience has an impact on both the way the story is constructed and the narrative strategies applied, as well as its influence on the reception of the work among readers. The trauma of the regime and exclusion associated with Romania in the second half of the 20th century is conveyed by means of a hybrid form and fragmented narratives. This unique combination that makes up the book of the Hungarian writer provides an inspiring material for literary research, both from the perspective of memory studies and the poetics of experience. As for the way of constructing the story, which is hard to categorize according to strict genre classifications, it only enlivens the reception.

Sándor Petőfi es de todos: una reflexión a la hora de intentar traducir Nemzeti dal

AbstractThe Hungarian writer Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849) achieved the union of the Hungarian people thanks to the verses of his National Song (Nemzeti dal), which have always been quoted and recited with great interest. Therefore, the following paper aims to analyse some problems with the poem's translation into Spanish and present a new version of this emblematic poem for the Hungarians.

The experience of living as a minority in Transcarpathia between the two world wars

The territory of the Transcarpathian region was an organic part of Hungary before the peace agreement that ended the First World War. After the region joined Czechoslovakia, the concept of Transcarpathians, Transcarpathian Hungarians was formed. Since literature reflects reality to a greater or lesser extent, we assume that the works written in this region contain linguistic, cultural and other elements of the existence of people who all of a sudden found themselves in a minority status. Thus, after analyzing samples of artistic prose written between the two world wars, we will be able to highlight certain aspects of the process of formation of the existence of a minority. The novel "Water Runs Between Two Shores" by the Hungarian writer Mihály Tamás depicts the period when Transcarpathian Hungarians suddenly found themselves in the status of a minority, and the Czech artist Ivan Olbracht highlights in his works the situation of two other ethnic groups at that time - Jews and Ukrainian Ruthenians. An analysis of the prose of two writers will provide an opportunity to trace how the representatives of various ethnic groups living in the territory of modern Transcarpathia reacted to changes in social, political, economic, linguistic, and cultural circumstances, and how the multilingual colorful cultural reality is reflected on the pages of the works. Keywords: Transcarpathia (Subcarpathian Rus), multilingualism, minority, identity.

Experiences of strangeness in the prose of Éva Berniczky

This paper presents some of the characteristic features of Éva Berniczky’s prose. Berniczky is a Hungarian writer living in Uzhhorod, Transcarpathia, who regularly publishes in journals that define the Hungarian literary canon. Yet her presence in literary history compilations is not obvious: neither the Hungarian, nor the Transcarpathian regional literary canon has accepted her works lightly.
 In this paper, the experiences of strangeness in her short stories and in her one novel to this day, Méhe nélkül a bába (The Midwife Without a Bee), are discussed in terms of two problematic issues. In the first part, the interplay of cultural differences is brought to the fore, namely because, in reading the collected short stories in Szerencsegyökér (The Root of Fortune aka Mandragora), we have noticed that Berniczky’s writing is fundamentally characterised by the linguistic representation of multilingual and multicultural communities. We start from the premise that a significant part of the writer’s oeuvre to date is based on the interplay of cultural differences, introducing the reader to a world that in literary theory is best described in terms of the familiar or the familiar stranger. In the case of the novel, the problem of the found text, a postmodern topos, comes to the fore: the identity of the female narrator-translator is altered in the process of interpreting the diary of a foreign woman which appears in the novel. The act of translation reflects on the translator’s own life, experiences and perception of the world. This is why the paper emphasises that the novel Méhe nélkül a bába (The Midwife Without a Bee) represents, with particular linguistic sensitivity, how translation from one culture or language to another can become a process that defines and shapes (female) identity in a multilingual and multicultural region. The intimate relationship between the translator-narrator and the found text also emphasises that a more «credible, more truthful» translation is not enough to accurately reproduce the source text, something else, something more is needed.

Птичьи метафоры в повести М. Месея "Высокая школа"

The article examines how the presentation of birds in the text of Miklós Mészöly’s short novel “High School” changes and how the original meaning of the title is deployed in it. The author of the article also briefly points out to the specific literature on the Hungarian writer’s books. “High School” contains different species of birds, which form a natural hierarchy with predatory falcons on its top. The author addresses this issue from a different angle analysing the images of birds both by their own bird characteristics and by their similarity with the human world. She emphasizes that this short novel is not a realistic or ornithological description of natural birds, but the rethinking of traditional cultural connotations. Mészöly’s innovative metaphorization builds a completely unique hierarchy. Much of the article presents the new interpretation of such images as different types of falcons, which play an important role in Hungarian mythology, culture and life, as well as other birds, primarily, herons, pigeons, crows, etc. This question cannot be referred only to the national or cultural aspect, as Mészöly examines universal human problems both ethically and philosophically. However, the focus of the author’s observations in the article is the metaphorical level of Mészöly’s text. As a result of the poetic analysis, the author reveals that the text of the short novel, contrary to the original task of writing a report on the “high school” of falcons, has become completely metaphorical, representing a “high school of writing” rather than “survival”. The conclusion is that Mészöly, through the narrative image of the writer, emphasizes not only the problem of “murder and slavery”, but says that with the help of one’s own poetic language all sorts of ideological languages (including those of authorities and falconers) leading to a cut-off both in life and discourse can be overcome. The author notes that so the “high school” gets a completely new meaning: the experience of acquiring this word by the subject of the text. She also notes that the searching for this word becomes a real act in the short novel, which expresses the history of selfunderstanding through language. The discursive perspective of the analysis reveals that the metaphorization of bird images contributes to this process of getting existential experience by criticizing “the others’ word”. Bird metaphors create a new poetic word, by which Mészöly’s short novel deservedly became a masterpiece of 20th century Hungarian literature. The author of the article in the analysis demonstrates this contribution and innovation of the writer.

Kosztolányi Dezső „Édes Anna” című regényének színpadi adaptációja a Marosvásárhelyi Nemzeti Színház Tompa Miklós Társulatának előadásában

“Édes Anna”, the novel by the famous Hungarian writer Dezső Kosztolányi, written in 1926, has had twenty-seven stage adaptations throughout the Carpatian Basin in Hungarian. It is about a female servant in the 1920’s in Budapest, who serves at a middle-classed family, and finally she kills her masters. On the 19th of September 2003, the Miklós Tompa Company of the National Theatre of Târgu-Mureș staged their own adaptation of the novel which was directed by László Gali, based on the script by Tibor Solténszky. This adaptation had already been staged in Komárom two years earlier. What were the particularities of the performance in Târgu-Mureș? In my paper I will outline this question in the context of other Édes Anna adaptations and show the peculiarities of this one in light of Hungarian theatre history, that are not sufficiently visible at first sight.

Заметки к переписке Н. М. Карамзина в контексте сравнительной литературы

The Notes to the Correspondence of N. M. Karamzin – In the Context of Comparative Literature. This paper treats the letters of N. M. Karamzin to I. I. Dmitriev, written between 1787 and 1826. The aim of the author is to investigate the connections of private life, literature and history in the correspondence of the two poets and point out the common motifs with the novel of the Hungarian writer, Mór Jókai Freedom under the snow (1879). The novel deals with the revolt of decabrists in 1825, in which the real hictorical figures, like tsar Alexander I and Pushkin, play an important role. The author of the paper comes to the conclusion that the similarities in the characters can be interpreted as the common spiritual attitude of Karamzin and Jókai, and in the other hand, as the Hungarian writer’s great interest in the Russian history and his profound knowledge in that area.

Women’s affective transactions and the memory of Hungarian (historical) affairs: Istvan Szabo’s The Door (2012)

ABSTRACT The article highlights the cinematic portrayal of a woman’s exceptional affective agency against the backdrop of historical trauma, more specifically, of the Holocaust in Hungary, in Hungarian director Istvan Szabo’s The Door (Az ajto 2012) based on Hungarian writer Magda Szabo’s eponymous novel The Door (Az ajto 1987). Through a juxtaposition of the cinematic and the literary text, the article discusses central protagonist Emerenc Szeredas’s affective transaction to save the life of a little Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Budapest. Emerenc’s ‘affective bargain’ through which she sustains the ‘cruel optimism’ (Lauren Berlant) of love and compassion pits her gendered capital against devalued Jewish life. The film conveys the costs of such an affective transaction and Emerenc’s ultimate failure to achieve ‘the good life’ (Sara Ahmed) of societal expectations. What transpires in The Door at the convergence of cinematic discourse and literary text is female agency constrained within the severely limited terrain of patriarchal economy. In terms of Istvan Szabo’s cinematography, The Door instantiates yet another engagement with the Holocaust as Szabo’s lifelong preoccupation, and it stands for a significant intervention into the current post-Holocaust memory discourse in Hungary.

ПОРЯДОК ТРУДОВЫХ ЛАГЕРЕЙ («ОДИН ДЕНЬ ИВАНА ДЕНИСОВИЧА» А.И. СОЛЖЕНИЦЫНА И «БЕЗ СУДЬБЫ» ИМРЕ КЕРТЕСА)

Авторы настоящего сообщения рассматривают общие приемы создания лагерного мира, поэтических средств (фразеологизмов, метафор и сравнений) изображения работы заключенного в таких выдающихся произведениях лагерной прозы, как «Один день Ивана Денисовича» А.И. Солженицына и «Без судьбы» Имре Кертеса. В фокусе анализа находится хаотический поток и уничтожающий человека порядок, каторжный труд и мирная жизнь. В ходе анализа внимание авторов статьи концентрируется на мотивах, образах и тропах, связанных с эпизодами работы в повести «Один день Ивана Денисовича». Отбираются те конструкции, которые в известной мере перекликаются с самым известным венгерским произведением лагерной литературы. The author of this paper examines the general methods of creating metaphors and similes for the manifestation of experience in the outstanding works of camp prose “One Day of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and “Fatelessness” by Imre Kertész. The analysis focuses on such contrasting images of the presentation of campmen and guards, as the chaotic flow and murderous order, hard labor and peaceful life. Solzhenitsyn’s frugal camp prose is balanced not only by the stylistic peculiarities of the narrator’s speech, but also by the tropes that reinterpret traditional poetic means. In our analysis, the focus is on the tropes in the text of the novel “One Day of Ivan Denisovich.” We selected the verbal constructions that echo the most famous work of Hungarian camp literature. Thus, metaphorization serves in modern literature also for intertextual tasks. But the Hungarian writer, on the other hand, faces the problem of how to tell his own story, which is shared by millions of people, without the cliches of the literary canon. “Staying in Hell” is how the character’s days in the labor camp are described. The protagonist of “Fatelessness” by Imre Kertész, is Gyuri Köves, an adolescent, who must understand the purpose of his hard work in the camp. For this he first has to familiarize himself with the alien world and master the terms and reinvent them. This process is presented through similes and metaphors related to human actions. It may seem strange to compare the works of two writers who have little in common: both Nobel laureates are writing about genocide, both writers experienced the horrors of concentration camp life. At first glance, the authors talk about different camps: Imre Kertész depicts the deportation of Hungarian Jews to fascist concentration camps ordered by the German occupiers, in Solzhenitsyn’s story the place of action is one of the Gulag camps, in which there were political prisoners, “unreliable” people, condemned as enemies Русская и зарубежная литературы: сопоставительные планы 93 of the Soviet people. However, with a seemingly obvious difference, the essence of the camps is the same: in both cases it is a mechanism of repression, a means of physical and moral destruction of a human being. In the works of Russian and Hungarian writers, a common place is found — when depicting the life of prisoners, the authors pay a lot of attention to the description of the work. For Solzhenitsyn and Kertész, labor becomes a means of revealing the personality of the prisoner, it is in the situation of work that the philosophy of the hero, his attitude to the world and to others is revealed. Thus the typological similarity of the two authors lies in the fact that they show their characters in the circumstances of unfreedom and labor for them becomes the essence of being primarily human and, of course, social.

Образ Синей Бороды в эпоху символизма

The article examines the symbolics in the play “Ariana and Bluebeard, or Vain Deliverance” (1896) by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck and in the libretto “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” by the Hungarian writer Béla Balazs (1911). There is a transformation of the Bluebeard story from folklore to the field of symbolist and neo-romantic literature, where it undergoes significant changes, being transformed into a “new age myth.”

On the History of Relationships between David Samoilov, Ágnes Kun, and Antal Hidas

Based on fragments of poet David Samoilov’s correspondence with Ágnes Kun, a translator and writer of Hungarian descent (one letter from David Samoilov to Ágnes Kun and six letters from Ágnes Kun to David Samoilov from 1960 to 1982) found in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the authors examine the long professional and personal relationships of the two correspondents. For Samoilov, his epistolary contacts with Бgnes Kun also included a relationship with her husband, Soviet Hungarian writer Antal Hidas, whose personality is indirectly present in the correspondence. It may be stated that Бgnes Kun and Antal Hidas discovered the Hungarian classical and modern poetry and Hungarian culture for David Samoilov through its translation. With the help of the word-for-word translations made by Ágnes Kun, he translated such Hungarian poets as Endre Ady, János Arany, Mihály Vцrцsmarty, Antal Hidas, Gyula Illyйs, Attila Jуzsef, Miklós Radnуti, István Simon. But, as it can be seen from the correspondence discovered and published in the auto-documental evidence of David Samoilov (diaries, memoirs, and essays), his communication with Antal Hidas was very uneven and concentrated almost exclusively on the professional: all the letters found are about translations, verses, books, and section headings. The same conclusions can be made about his diaries. Finally, the article introduces one letter of David Samoilov and three letters of Бgnes Kun that have never been published previously.

Mrs Vachott's Haunting Memories: Walter Scott and the Female Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Hungary

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on a ghost story originally published in 1861 and then incorporated into a memoir published in 1887–9 by the Hungarian woman writer and editor Mária Csapó (1828–96), better known as Mrs Vachott. With the examination of the ghost story's changing publications, the paper clarifies the process during which this apparently independent ghost story became a powerful metaphor for Mrs Vachott's strenuous life with haunting memories, as recorded in her published memoir. It appears that this same ghost story had been influenced by a Hungarian translation of Walter Scott's “The Tapestried Chamber” (1829) that Mrs Vachott read in a collection of short stories issued in 1836. Thus, the successful combination of the two narratives, the ghost story and the memoir, not only makes Mrs Vachott's experiment truly remarkable, but also gives valuable insights into Scott's influence on nineteenth-century Hungarian women's writing, and into the changing possibilities of the ever hybrid form of the Gothic.

Inside Animalinside, Ottilie Mulzet's Translation of László Krasznahorkai’s Állatvanbent

László Krasznahorkai is now the best-known Hungarian writer in the English-speaking world (perhaps in the world, period). But what is the precise nature of the relationship between his Hungarian works and their English translations that have been, on the whole, so well received in Britain and especially the USA? This article takes a very close linguistic look at one his shorter works, ÁllatVanBent, in a version by Ottilie Mulzet, co-recipient with George Szirtes of the translators’ share of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, which recognized Krasznahorkai for his “achievement in fiction on the world stage.” I argue that Ottilie Mulzet’s translation is in a hybrid English that in some places evidences a misunderstanding of the Hungarian, and in others claims to be a foreignized, “Krasznahorkai-English” that is, however, insufficiently justified by the original. More broadly, the article thus takes issue with the increasingly widely held view that the translator is not merely a co-author but enjoys a kind of authorial autonomy that implies that the translation can be judged without close reference to the original. As Krasznahorkai’s known views on translation suggest the acceptance of this notion, he is therefore, to a degree, complicit in the partial misrepresentation (and hence misconstrual) of his work.

Orientalist Perspective in the Letters of Lady Mary Montagu and Kelemen Mikes

An English aristocrat, poet and writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was a privileged and distinguished woman traveller in her time. During her sojourn in Ottoman Istanbul, she noted down significant details as regards the Constantinople and seraglio through her vivid descriptions as a liberated woman in her Embassy Letters. Another significant oriental work, Letters from Turkey by Kelemen Mikes (1690-1761), who was a Transylvanian-born Hungarian writer and political figure, is centered upon Mikes’s life in exile between the years 1717 and 1758 within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. In Letters from Turkey, we can feel his strong sense of Hungarian identity and his steadiness in maintaining his cultural and religious customs and values in his elaboration of his own and the “other” culture, while his praising the benign and merciful ruling style of Ottoman Sultans offers a different view of orientalism in favour of the “other” culture (Ottoman Empire). Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the Letters of Lady Mary Montagu and Kelemen Mikes from their political, ethnical, religious and personal perspectives and trace several relationships that has allusive discussion relativity in the discourse of Orientalism. After having explained the specific letters of both writers, I will attempt to use the scope of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Enlightenment Orientalism discussed in Sirinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, as a magnifying glass to different oriental images and conceptions contradictory with the reality in the eighteenth century. This study will mostly make use of Edward Said’s account of orientalism as well as Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of Self Fashioning in order to explicate the differences as to how the Orient is perceived by the authors from different cultures but from the same period. In order to highlight how the definition of Orient changes, this paper attempts to define the Orient in accordance with the works of Lady Montagu and Kelemen Mikes.

КУЛЬТУРНЫЕ УНИВЕРСАЛИИ В РАССКАЗАХ А.П. ЧЕХОВА И И. ТЁМЁРКЕНЯ: ГЕНЕТИКА И ТИПОЛОГИЯ

For a long time Hungarian literature has been influenced by Russian literature. A.P. Chekhov’s works have been drawing a specific interest among Hungarian readers. In this regard, the question about genetic and typological ties between Russian and Hungarian literature arises. The issue in the article is considered on the example of the short story “Ferko” by the Hungarian writer, ethnographer and folklorist Istvan Temerken and the “steppe” works of A.P. Chekhov. For many Hungarian writers Chekhov’s literary works became a model which they relied on during the search of new art forms. I. Temerken grew up in a steppe region of Hungary and the “steppe” theme was especially close to him. The story “Ferko” is written in Chekhov’s manner. The place of the action is the steppe, the main character is a boy, as if separated from everyone who is next to him, the image of the road and a number of other elements of the art world of the short story allow you to notice strong similarities in the story “Ferko” and “steppe” works of Chekhov (especially in the story “Steppe”). However, Temerken could not read “Steppe” translated into Hungarian, since the story was translated after the writer’s death. It means that apart from a direct orientation to the Chekhov’s style and poetics, there should be something in the field of typological rapprochement of cultures, which explains this similarity. A.N. Veselovsky called this phenomenon “counter courses”. And modern researchers explain then as archetypes or cultural universals common to all cultures. In the works of Temerken and Chekhov such are the images of a child, steppe, sun, etc.

Az örök látogató – Konrád György (1933–2019) by Károly Szarka

0 challenge, and it can also be a way to seek identity and catharsis. The sometimes-complicated twists of the narrative mean that it benefits from a rereading. The threads leading to the revelations at the end become clearer, and an understanding of the narrator develops. A rereading does not dampen its disquieting and mixed tone, however, nor does it reduce the impact of the psychologically threatening situations that the narrator faces. The book is unsettling and remains so. Prospective readers should expect to be presented with a narrative world in which answers are actively hidden from the narrator while pushing for explanations leads to cruel rebukes. This does not mean that there is no room for a cautious optimism within the narrative, though, and this optimism is provided by writing. Rachel Franklin Nottingham, United Kingdom Leeya Mehta A Story of the World before the Fence Georgetown, Kentucky. Finishing Line Press. 2020. 46 pages. LEEYA MEHTA’S remarkable recent verse collection charts one woman’s attempts to isolate and identify a sense of heritage, a lineage that she may hold close in the midst of the push and pull of her own profoundly dislocating life. This book is ultimately a work of the refugee, and one that illuminates the fastening , unfastening, and refastening to location, language, and people that the refugee must endure. The larger question , however, is what will sustain an exile through these seemingly endless changes. What is immutable? What is real? The collection begins with a dramatic vision of the migration across the Arabian Sea that brings Persians to India, but even as the boat pounds over the waves and the priests light their sacred fires, we are told that “all the joy and blood that had come before” is already “turning to myth.” Once in India, the migrants struggle to adapt while maintaining their own sense of community : “they are told: keep your stories whole but separate . . . keep your fire lit . . . but do not take our children into your temples.” It is as if a people unmoored are already fated to an obscure decline. Moving deftly through time, the speaker considers India’s first nuclear test through the troubling thicket of identity. If these warmongers are indeed her people, “belonging,” we’re told, feels like “loving a corpse” and yet: “don’t my children need to know who we are?” As the collection coalesces around a single voice that brings us into the present day, its scenes range from Maine to Japan to Washington, DC, charting a record of family lost and friends gone and love sparking into life, fading, and sparking again. Mehta’s poetry is by turns euphoric and despairing, as though she feels at moments something like the truth of her life rising to the surface of her experience, only to fall back once more into shadow, “close enough to hear, but not to see.” And what is that truth? It is a sense of belonging that both sustains and frustrates the poet, one that is intuited and yet impossible to locate. Can she find it in her husband, who does not share her heritage? Her children, who understand it even less? Could it be in her friends, women who are so firmly of their own place and time, so much like the speaker and yet so different? Does it indeed reside in the Bombay that she would call home, or does it depend on the vanished empire her ancestors fled over a thousand years ago? Mehta’s answer to this fundamental question—only made manifest in the final poem, providing the resolution to a tension that has been building so subtly throughout the book that only its ecstatic release fully illuminates the work in total—is something earned, lived, and offered up in the hope that it may sustain us, as much as it may indeed sustain her. Cameron MacKenzie Roanoke, Virginia Az örök látogató – Konrád György (1933–2019) Ed. Károly Szarka Budapest. Noran Libro. 2020. 264 pages. THE HUNGARIAN WRITER György Konrád passed away in September 2019 at the age of eighty-six. His death is commemorated in a book of reminiscences and tributes...

Doświadczenia kryzysu rozwojowego w biegu życia u XX-wiecznych pisarzy. Sándor Márai i Maria Kuncewiczowa

Experiences of a Developmental Crisis in the Course of Life in Twentieth-Century Writers. Sándor Márai and Maria Kuncewiczowa The subject of this study is the psychological analysis which uses a biographical method to analyze the last stages of a long life and the crisis “between life and death”of the two outstanding writers of the twentieth century: Maria Kuncewiczowa and Sándor Márai. The analyzed data giving insight into the life events and the personal experiences of the last few years of their lives was sourced from the last texts published by the writers. In the case of Maria Kuncewiczowa, these are: Notatki włoskie: Przezrocza (Italian Notes: Transparencies, 2010) and Listy do Jerzego (Letters to Jerzy, 1988). In the case of the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai, it will be the final part of the 5th Volume of the Diary 1977–1989, pp. 345–387 (Márai, 2020). The tasks and challenges at this stage of life, which is one immediately preceding the inevitable death, are as follows: functioning at the late old age in a changed life situation after the death of the spouse and the manner of responding to one’s own death. The analysis of experiences related to the life situation, mainly carried out with use of the conceptual apparatus of the psychology of the course of life (Bühler, 1999), allows us to observe the coherence of life events and subjective experiences in the examined period of life, which is an expression of the creative activity and the spirituality of these outstanding writers, as well as constitutes their life experience in preparation for the death.

Destroying necessity with necessity – on László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango

ABSTRACT In this article, I read and analyse the novel Satantango (1985) by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s. Set in a small community in rural Eastern Hungary – before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet regime – where the rain is falling incessantly, all hope has been lost, history has ended before it even began, and the houses are crumbling from the inside out, the novel is, for obvious reasons, often considered to have a tone of brutal and bleak pessimism. Robert Boyers thus talks about Krasznahorkai’s ‘pessimistic virtuosity’ and literary realism, the sole purpose of which is disillusion. In this article, however, I would like to contest this claim and look for some paradoxical glimpses of hope hidden in the anatomy of hopelessness that the author undoubtedly makes manifest trough a radical materialism; a hope against hope. I argue that Krasznahorkai destroys necessity with necessity. To that end I will bring in the work of Ernst Bloch as well as Jacques Ranciére’s book on filmmaker Bela Tarr who has adapted several of Krasznahorkai’s novels for the screen.

An Exceptional Case of Women’s Self-Advocacy in Interwar Hungary: Cécile Tormay

A Hungarian writer who became a prominent public figure in the Horthy era, Cécile Tormay’s (1875-1937) fame and success was principally due to her memoir, Bujdosó könyv [‘The Hiding Book’], a work published in 1920-21 that depicts the two Hungarian revolutions following World War I. This popular work enjoyed several editions during the interwar period and was translated into English and French for propaganda purposes. After World War II, Bujdosó könyv was among the first works banned by Hungarian authorities for its anti-Semitism. Hailed as the most notable female author of the interwar period, Tormay’s name rose anew after the fall of socialism in 1989. Fueled by the official biography written two years after her death in the Horthy era by the conservative professor of literature, János Hankiss, a revival in the cult surrounding Tormay’s work has taken place in recent years. Hankiss portrayed Tormay as a woman of Hungarian noble descent whose deeds were motivated by sheer patriotism. This paper contends that Cécile Tormay was embraced by the interwar elite for her active role in the counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the First Hungarian Republic.

The capabilities of realism: Some reflections on the “new” novel of Lajos Mesterházy

The realism as a basic principle to refl ect on and to understand the reality, incorporates the achievements from many epochs of the development of literature, adding a philosophical, analytical approach, irony, conven-tionality and fi ction. The eff ectiveness of realism has been convincingly demonstrated by most national literatures of the 20th century, among them the literatures that by tradition have not been in the focus of gen-eral attention. One of the undisputed peaks of realistic literature of the 20th century is the novel of the Hungarian writer Lajos Mesterházy “The Riddle of Prometheus” (1973), which can be used as an example to show almost all the strengths of realism. This novel is the peak of the creative path of the Hungarian writer. Recently his fi rst and unpublished novel “The Pancake Day” (1943) was discovered, in which one can already see the features of his future skill. When reading this rather voluminous book that still shows some immaturity, one cannot help noticing the features that attest his inborn talent, but most importantly, the humanist nature of his worldview. He does not only sympathize with the poor, but also strives to uncover the roots of evil that dominates in the modern social order and to lead the readers’ thought into a constructive direction.