Category: Arts and Culture

FERENC BÉKÁSSY’S CORRESPONDENCE WITH JAMES STRACHEY

Ferenc Békássy belongs to that small but distinct group of people who before the First World War were “at home” in two languages: Hungarian and English. In fact he wrote poetry in both and could have gone on to write even better poems had he not fallen in 1915 during

WAITING ROOM, DINNING CAR: BALKAN EXPRESS

Balkan or Balkans is an odd word. The term “Balkanise” is familiar to everybody far and wide, being used to designate a social process in which not merely is there a perceptible economic decline but also a coarsening of relations between people. It seeks to imply some kind of deterioration,

LITERATURE AS A BORDERLAND

I’d like to present a new project that finds itself in the borderland – between literature, knowledge about literature and knowledge from the perspective of literature. The project is entitled “Beyond the Horizon of Europe” and it endeavours to tell about the place and the context. About a slightly different Belarusian literature – the literature that emerged in the late 1980s. But to tell it in a different way.Being

MR DRACULA – ON BÉLA LUGOSI

It is a long way from Transylvania to Hollywood. Béla Lugosi began as an uneducated extra and anonymous Hungarian bon vivant, but ended up as a Hollywood legend, writing film history as one of the world’s great mythmakers and horror movie stars. He played an immortal role, gave it his

THE ANTI-WAR WAR MUSEUM

Back when I was a student at the Dresden Institute of Technology in the 1970s, I rarely felt comfortable actually going to an area, ominously dominated as it was by derelict barracks and Russian military vehicles in the streets. There was one exception: the building of the former Saxon Cadet School. This was used as an officers’ mess for the

‘CÉZANNE DID NOT MAKE MISTAKES’: NOTES ON THE CÉZANNE EXHIBITION IN BUDAPEST

On 17 February 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest closed the doors on its exhibition entitled Cézanne and the Past: Tradition and Creativity. With some 180,000 visitors, a 527-page catalogue of scholarly merit featuring articles by the big shots of Cézanne study, and a conference marshalling a bevy of additional invited specialists, the exhibition produced fresh results worthy of further

STRUGGLING WITH WORDS

AB: You live in the North of England, one of the most picturesque parts of the country. I’ve heard that you hate fox-hunting but you like crows. More seriously: your favourite English poet is the famous poeta laureatus Ted Hughes, and your favourite Hungarian poet is János Pilinszky. At the same time,you admit that

AN IRONIC RELATION TO TRADITION – ON THE ART OF PETER MELLER

Peter Meller made his career as a scholar, a professor of the history of art, and was well-known among his colleagues for his erudition and insight. He was also an artist. When he died in 2008, at the age of 85, he left behind thousands of drawings and prints, a