Architect, writer, poet, visual artist, film director, theoretician, a prominent protagonist and an important catalyst of the unofficial neoavantgarde movement appearing in Hungary with new forms of expression at the second half of the sixties.
In 1947 he began his training as sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, but he left soon due to the takeover of socialist realist approach, and continued his studies in the studio of Dezső Birman Bokros. From 1947 to 1951 he studied architecture at and graduated from the Technical University in Budapest. During the fifties and early sixties he worked as an architect at different companies, and besides he began experimenting with painting and graphic art, as well as writing poems and shorts stories.
During this period he became acquainted with the former members of the Európai Iskola (European School - among others Endre Bálint, Dezső Korniss), with the representants of the so called "surnaturalism" (among others Tibor Csernus, László Lakner) and, most importantly with the graphic artist Béla Kondor, the poet János Pilinszky and the painter Sándor Altorjai, with whom he began a lifelong friendship. In 1959 and 1963 he became enrolled at the Academy of Theatre and Film in Budapest, but he was advised to leave before the term to began, both times.
In 1966 he published a study on montage theory, where he emphasized the role of repetition and change, introduced the principle of “meaning negation” and its admission of the role played by intuition and inspiration. Since this publication some of his theoretical writings were published in Hungary (but none of his literal works). His first recognition as a writer and poet was the Kassák Prize of the Magyar Műhely (Hungarian Workshop) magazine issued in Paris. On this occasion they published his collected poems as well in 1974 (this was his only book printed during his lifetime).
He worked out a technology to create large decorative wall-covers called photomosaic, which provided him financial independence during the seventies and the eighties. Due to his interest in natural history, philosophy and language theory he turned toward conceptual art. In the late sixties and early seventies he took part in a number of then peripheric, but later canonized exhibitions and programs (Iparterv, Chapel Studio of Balatonboglar etc.) with his “textual actions” and photo-series accompanied by texts.
His interest in scientific thinking, researches in artistic and scientific cognition and the underlying affinities he found between them, his openness to old and new traditions and his intention to reinterpret them led him to state that his artistic activity is a continuous protest against the information blockade observed by him during the seventies. In his art he aimed to reveal, make easily accessible otherwise complex, unclear relationships. He also began to make films, based on his montage theory, in the framework of the Béla Balázs Studio, although none of his films was shown officially in Hungary until the eighties.
During 1975 and 1976 he ran a series of so-called "creative exercises". From these activities grew out in 1978 the INDIGO (in Hungarian: INterDIszciplináris GOndolkodás, “interdisciplinary thought”) group, which was conceived as an experimental teaching studio, drawing on modern artistic processes, educational methods influenced by Eastern philosophical traditions and many other sources. The problem-solving exercises, open to new and unusual pehnomena provided an important forum for a new generation of Hungarian artists, such as András Böröcz, Ildikó Enyedi, László László Révész, János Sugár, János Szirtes, among others.
It was only in the eighties, however, that Erdély achived public recognition for his work. He participated in several larger scale exhibitions with his drawings, paintings, and installations, and gave several lectures. His first solo exhibition opened in 1986, but he could not attain the opening due to his ingravescent illness.-
Umístění:
- Budapest, Hungary
Between 1953 and 1963, she worked with László Lajtha collecting folk music, religious folk songs, and folk prayers in Transdanubian counties in Hungary. Although Lajtha had permission from the government to use his own discretion in collecting, their work was not completely safe and they were constantly under government supervision.
Erdélyi’s first book, Hegyet Hágék, Lőtőt Lépék (an archaic Hungarian proverb referring to wandering), which contained archaic prayers, was published in 1974. The book’s title comes from a line in an archaic prayer. The introduction was written by Gyula Ortutay, folklorist and Minister of Religion and Education in 1947–1950. In the 1970s, scholars began writing many articles about Erdélyi’s extraordinary work.
Her collection of archaic texts is unique because she drew a parallel and proved the connection between archaic and folk texts. Her work shone a light on the fact that these religious texts were still very much alive.
She died on 13 February 2015.
Ferenc Erős (1946-) is a social psychologist who has done pioneering work in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, and the question of Jewish identity after the Holocaust.
He graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in psychology in 1969. He has been working in the Psychological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) since 1973. In 2002, he became a doctor of the HAS. In addition to his work as a researcher, he has also been an active contributor to educational work since the 1970s. The journals Thalassa and Imágó Budapest are edited by him, and he plays an important role in scholarly life in the public sphere. The primary focus of his research is the social-psychological examination of identities, social discrimination, structures of power, authoritarian systems, and the history and theory of psychoanalysis.
In an interview in 2005, he mentioned that some of his former teachers had had a significant impact on his career. His literature teacher gave him books about psychology, for example, the works of Sigmund Freud, and he also read István Bibó’s book on Jewish issue. Furthermore, his Jewish origins and his family involvement motivated him early on to learn as much as he could about the Holocaust. When he was 17 years old, he tried to do research on the deportation of his family and the local Jewish community of his birthplace, but he did not get any support, so as a very young man he saw how difficult it would be to pursue the study of the topic he had chosen.
His course of study was formed by his teacher, Ferenc Pataki, who taught social psychology, and László Garai, who dealt with Marxist philosophy at the university. In social psychology, he was interested not so much in empirical research, but rather in theoretical approaches and social criticism. These fields were not the most popular. He noted this himself: “I was a little bit on the periphery, however, I never felt that anybody would have supplanted me. Rather, I would express that I was marginalized by myself.”
A six-month scholarship at Columbia University in 1976 was an important event in his professional development. He met a group of second-generation Holocaust survivors, and this experience had a strong impact on him. He was motivated both by his personal impressions and by works about the aftermath of the trauma of the Holocaust, mainly Helen Epstein’s book Children of the Holocaust. The psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytical issues concerning this phenomenon were an essential reference point for him.
Together with psychologist András Stark, Erős began doing interviews with second-generation Holocaust survivors and researching the question of Jewish identity after World War II in the late 1970s. The history and remembrance of the Holocaust were suppressed taboos under the Kádár regime. One could talk about the Shoah with family memebrs, but it was not an acceptable topic in public discourse or scientific research. For Erős and Stark, the questions which arose in the course of this work also touched on their personal lives. As children of Holocaust survivors, they were curious to know how widespread their experiences were.
Although Ferec Erős was not a member of an oppositional group, the focus of his research (repressed Jewish identity and social critical social psychology) led him to the oppositional cultural community of late socialism. Initially, his findings were known only to the professional audience, but then they began to become familiar the so-called second public sphere through lectures which were held at the so-called “flying university” and articles in samizdat publications. Erős and András Kovács (who was one of the main organizers of this second public sphere) published a paper together with Katalin Lévai in the journal Medvetánc, which was the most important critical, intellectual forum of the 1980s. (Erős, Ferenc, András Kovács, and Katalin Lévai. “Hogyan tudtam meg, hogy zsidó vagyok?” Medvetánc, no. 2-3 (1985), 129-144.). This paper was considered a decisive empirical analysis. Furthermore, together with Bea Ehmann, Erős devised a narrative model of Jewish identity (Erős, Ferenc, and Bea Ehmann. “Jewish Identity in Hungary, A narrative model suggested.” In Ambiguous Identities in the New Europe, 121-134. Budapest: Replika, 1997).
In one of his lectures, Erős made the contention that to ask someone how she or he learned of her or his Jewish origins is to touch on the anxieties and discomforts of a whole generation. Doing an interview about this subject meant breaking the silence, and it also constituted a significant act of memory policy. It acknowledged the existence of a subcultural identity which was fed by a sense of belonging to a discriminated group. When Erős began to deal with the concept of identity, this was an awkward and sensitive topic, because “everybody had a type of identity which often caused shame”. This stigmatization and discrimination also exist today, according to Erős: “If someone freely accepts his or her identity, he or she can suffer discrimination.”
Ferenc Erős is very active. He published a book titled “Psyche and Power” in 2016 (Erős, Ferenc. Psziché és hatalom. Tanulmányok, esszék. Budapest: Pesti Kalligram, 2016.). Moreover, he reflects sensitively on current social phenomena. For example, he held a lecture with met with considerable attention on the social and psychological dimensions of the so-called migration crisis on the occasion of a meeting of the Hungarian Psychological Association in November 2015.-
Umístění:
- Budapest, Hungary
Péter Esterházy (1950–2016), was a Hungarian writer and an inventive, influential, and internationally celebrated author, one of the most talented ones of his generation, who managed to renew contemporary Hungarian prose both in the late communist era and after 1990.
Born in Budapest in 1950 in the darkest era of the Hungarian Stalinist dictatorship, Esterházy was a scion of one of Europe’s greatest aristocratic dynasties on his paternal side and an assimilated Hungarian Jewish intellectual family on his maternal side. He finished his secondary school studies in 1968 at a Piarist monastic church school. He then studied mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. For several years he worked as a mathematician in the Informatics Institute of the Ministry of Furnaces and Heavy Machinery, and at the same time he also began to write. His first stories were published in 1974 and his first book in 1977 won the critics prize as the best prose work of the year. In 1978, he began to make his living as a freelance writer.
Esterházy achieved international fame in 1979 with A Novel of Production, a hilarious pastiche of the Stalinist morale-boosting “production novel” in which an absurdist account of a young engineer’s struggles with bureaucracy is juxtaposed with an account of the everyday life of the author in the words of a fictional literary secretary.
Three years later, his A Little Hungarian Pornography was a more explicit attack on communism. The book contained little actual pornography. Rather, it was a meditation on its essence. As Esterházy later recalled in his preface to the English translation, published in 1995, “Let us imagine, if we can, a country where everything is a lie, where the lack of democracy is called socialist democracy, economic chaos socialist economy, revolution anti-revolution, and so on.” Esterházy’s most famous book, Celestial Harmonies, was written over the course of nine years following the end of communism and was published in 2001. In the first half of the book, which is a kaleidoscope of stories, previously existing texts, vignettes and mood portraits, Esterházy related the fate of his family through the central figure of “my father,” a term which he uses to refer to his father, grandfather, great-grandfater, etc. back to the dynasty’s beginnings. Meanwhile, in the second half, he evokes the trials and tribulations of the family during Hungary’s twentieth-century political upheavals through the life of his father, Count Mátyás Esterházy. Péter’s father gets by as a manual laborer and then as a translator. “No, son, we’re not poor,” he explains, “we’re just living in poverty.” Count Mátyás, nonetheless, emerges as a man whose humanist values survive the family’s decline under totalitarianism. So it came as a shock to Esterházy’s readers when in 2002 he published an addendum to the book, Revised Edition, in which he revealed that his father had been an informant for many years during the communist era.
Many of his other works also deal with the experience of living under a communist regime and in a post-communist country. His collection of essays, entitled Troublesome Delights of Liberty, was published in 2013. His later books, such as No Art, Please (2008) and his last work of prose fiction, a touching chronicle of his fatal illness entitled Pancreas-diary (2016), also testify to his heroic efforts to preserve hope and his spirit of liberty together with the joy of living in spite of painful losses and disillusionment. He died in Budapest in 2016 at the age of 66.
Though all his writings before 1990 were published by state publishers and in legal newspapers in Hungary, Esterházy had a major role in loosening the strict control of communist censorship with his taboo-breaking subjects, his irresistibly sarcastic criticism of the regime, and his personal courage as a writer, which served as an example to be followed for many younger members of his “rebelling generation,” who received his works almost as unparalleled revelations. Following the fall of the regime, he managed to preserve his independent mind and critical attitude, and thanks to his international success as a writer, he remained an authentic and prominent East Central European intellectual not only in his native country but also in the post-communist and Western world. Throughout his life, he was always ready to raise his voice in protest against misuses of power, injustice, lies, and self-deceit, and he never stopped passionately urging a moral, radical revision of public affairs.Péter Esterházy won numerous prizes, and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Those available in English include Helping Verbs of the Heart (1985); The Transporters (1983) The Book of Hrabal (1990), The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube) (1991), She Loves Me (1993), and Celestial Harmonies (2004). He was awarded several literary distinctions in Hungary, including the prestigious Kossuth Prize in 1996, and he has received awards for his work in France, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, and Poland.
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Umístění:
- Budapest, Hungary