Literary Journal 2021/2. István Csukás

This year would have been the eighty-fifth birthday of István Csukás, on whose stories millions have grown up. Pom Pom, Süsü, a sárkány (Süsü, the dragon), A Nagy Ho-ho-ho-horgász (The great angler) and the youth novel and film series based on it, Keménykalap és krumpliorr (Top Hat and Spuds Nose), are childhood memories shared by many generations.

‘I have two wings: one is poetry and the other is fairy tales, and I fly so beautifully’, Csukás used to say, yet he became known and successful as a writer of fairy tales and films, an author of young adult fiction, and the poetic dimension of his oeuvre remained in the shadow of his work as a children's writer.

The compilation of the Literary Journal primarily seeks to answer the question of why this happened the way it did, what connects these two dimensions, what is the basis of the oeuvre as a whole, what is it that moves those ‘wings’. The interviews with László Farkas and Ferenc Sajdik explore the poetic life and István Csukás as a colleague and friend, while the interviews with Andrea Lovász and Zoltán Bódis explore the importance of the oeuvre of children’s literature and fairy tales.

There are comprehensive studies on István Csukás’s poetry and the place of his oeuvre in Hungarian children’s and youth literature. In addition to the poet’s autobiography and many of his poems, the journal also republishes an earlier interview with him. Under the title Csukás István-inspiráció (István Csukás inspiration), you can read the accounts of friends and colleagues, including Péter Nyulász, Károly Szakonyi, István Ágh. The collection is accompanied by archive footage, fairy tale illustrations and movie scenes, as well as paintings evoking the world of Csukás.