Category: The Arts

“‘And yet I believe in the mission and greatness of art’, Ferenczy wrote in the year he suffered a stroke. This creed is duly reflected by his performance as an afflicted artist. In the last reckoning, he succeeded in bringing worthy closure to an impressive oeuvre – not quite according

Feri Pap came to the city from Törtel to conquer the cinema scene. Physically, that village is barely a hundred kilometres from Budapest, but in another sense he came a lot further than that. Yet he did not bring with him baggage or handicaps as he waved goodbye to the

“The most important external reference point was the memorial to the 1956 Revolution, which for me is a sacred place. I felt that I had no right to cover it up; I couldn’t interrupt its connection with the heavens. So, it was clear that we wouldn’t build over it, but

Not many people know that in the Northeastern city of Eger, in early 1945, the local activists in cultural life launched a literary monthly by the name of Nemzedékek [Generations], according to its subtitle a “people’s democratic periodical”. When I was in Eger a couple of years ago (i.e. in

“In retranslating Tsvetaeva’s Lorca translations, I have tried to keep in mind who Lorca was for readers in the Soviet Union. In 1936 near the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he had been murdered by nationalists though probably not Falangists. In the struggle with fascism, he became a martyr,

IV  The garden at Széphalom that came to fruition during Kazinczy’s lifetime tells us the story of unfulfilled plans and a difficult-to-maintain lifestyle, when we reconstruct his desired and completed plans from the wealth of surviving documents. It does not take much brain work to figure out what the main

The other day, a film forum open to the general public in Belgrade hosted an interesting dispute. The opponents debated whether the title of “greatest Serbian film director ever” should go to Dušan Makavejev, deceased last January, or Emir Kusturica, who is still among us and seems to have conclusively

There is only one event of interest in life, and that is none other than death. Gyula Krúdy Hungarian symbolism has rich and previously unnoticed particularities. As a movement, it exerted an influence far more profound than earlier supposed, inspiring a generation of Hungarian artists who had just turned their

The Battle of White Mountain marked the end of the opening, “Bohemian”, phase of the Thirty Years’ War. The re-imposition of Habsburg rule and of Catholicism was swift. 27 prominent Protestants were executed in New Town Square. All other Protestants had either to convert to Catholicism or leave the country.