Literary Journal 2022/1. Ágnes Nemes Nagy

The Literary Journal offers a comprehensive summary of Ágnes Nemes Nagy’s oeuvre, who was born a hundred years ago. The secrets of one of the greatest personalities of 20th century Hungarian literature are revealed through interviews, studies, analyses and personal testimonies, whose creative character and moral stance have served as a point of reference for her generation and those that followed.

The study of her poetic language opens up new horizons for literary studies on a theoretical level, and the values of her poetry – her mediumistic ability to evoke nature and her poetic way of thinking, which carries the experience of the in-betweenness – are presented by contemporary approaches, building on the results of the reception of the past decades, yet placing them on new foundations.

The editors have also paid attention to Nemes Nagy's work as an essayist, which is paradigm-shifting in its emphasis on understanding literature from a text-centred perspective. They have also included in their compilation all the aspects – from the Újhold [New Moon] spirituality to children's poetry and literary translations, to the author's pedagogical views and the presence of her works in public education – that mark out the milestones of the research on her oeuvre so far, but also the professional tasks of the coming decades, including the further processing of her legacy.

In addition to numerous archival portrait, object and documentary photographs, the issue is illustrated with the poet's own pen-and-ink drawings, works by artists she favoured, prints and paintings created exclusively for this compilation, and classical and contemporary images that resonate with Nemes Nagy's works.