Literary Journal 2021/3. Pilinszky

Literary Magazine commemorates János Pilinszky, who was born one hundred years ago and died forty years ago. Pilinszky’s lyrics are still a dominant voice in Hungarian literature, but as directly as the poetry’s power of address is felt by the reader, the way in which its impact operates is as difficult to access for literary scholars.

How to approach Pilinszky’s poetry with academic methods is the subject of a discussion with literary historians Kornélia Horváth and Zoltán Hafner, poet and literary historian László Lator and theologian and literary historian Mária Hernádi.

The interviews also discuss, among other things, how can János Pilinszky’s work be placed in the history of Hungarian literature, to what extent is it related to his contemporaries, in what way did his poetry bring new ideas, and how did its afterlife develop? The editors also interviewed the musicians Balázs Szabó and Benedek Tamás about their adaptations of poems for popular music. Pilinszky’s passion for exploring the ontological and aesthetic context of the gospel led them to devote a separate chapter to the issue of ‘religious metaphysics’. The diversity of the author's oeuvre is illustrated by an overview of his dramatic and publicistic work, and his legacy of manuscripts and personal objects.

The interviews and essays are accompanied by works by artists Pilinszky favoured and contemporary works related to his intellectual ideas.