Search: LITERARIUM

A szarvassá változott fiú kiáltozása a titkok kapujából – koncertszínházi előadás

When the name of Mór Jókai is heard by Hungarians in any context, it is highly unlikely to garner a neutral response. Beyond the experience of compulsory reading assignments at school, he has a remarkably rich body of work, and was also an exciting literary character.

When we think about words being used to create art, that can mean two things: literature and song lyrics.

Born 125 years ago, László Németh rightly deserves a place on any list of the most significant authors of 20th-century Hungarian literature. This programme aims not only to commemorate the writer’s diverse oeuvre, but also to encourage the audience to reread and rediscover it by recalling passages, both familiar and lesser-known, selected from different eras of his career.

It did not take long for a chance meeting between Krisztina Tóth, a highly popular, multi-volume poet and writer living in London, and Nikoletta Szőke, a vocalist who has spread her wings on the Hungarian jazz scene in recent years, to lead to a fruitful collaboration. Their uncompromising artistic approaches inspired a unique, remarkably exciting and singular experiment rooted in the dialogue between poetry and song.

And then something suddenly happens; something extraordinary that makes the entire industry and reading community take notice at once: the novel entitled Lesz majd minden (Everything Shall Be) is published by two identical twins, mainly known until then as playwrights.

Katalin Ladik, who has roots in Vojvodina, is one of the most exciting figures in Hungarian contemporary literature. Her long career, filled with surprises, bright ideas and unexpected turns, draws on avant-garde traditions, while incorporating reinterpreted elements of more traditional forms of expression into an original poetic language that places them in a new context.

This provocative artist, who continually steps beyond conventional aesthetic frameworks, has, in recent years, published grotesque, absurd, ironic, and irresistibly entertaining poems under the pseudonym Sándor Posztpetőfi, collected in the volume entitled Szibériai borbély (The Barber of Siberia). Szilágyi Ákos is joined on what promises to be an unforgettable evening by the exceptional guitarist of the Makám ensemble, Zoltán Krulik.

One thing we know for certain about the 21st century is that it will be when the survivors of the Holocaust take their last breath. Every single one of them. Slowly but surely, they are leaving us to our own devices. “Do we want to forget what happened, as if it were a bad dream, or do we want to accept the events as human civilization’s greatest trauma?” the author Péter Esterházy once asked.

The release of the volume A bilincs a szabadság legyen (‘Let the Shackles Be the Freedom’), a collection of the correspondence between Miklós Mészöly and Alaine Polcz, generated a significant level of interest in the writers’ private lives and literary work that, it is no exaggeration to say, continues to this day.

This representative birthday tribute to one of the most significant writers in contemporary Hungarian literature, György Spiró, promises a unique experience for the audience: a memorable encounter with an author who recently published yet another masterpiece, the novel Padmaly.