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Three Hungarian Guest Authors In Salzburg

Péter Esterházy, Imre Kértesz, Péter Nádas

Three guest authors in Salzburg! But is it not rather the other way round: that we, lovers of literature, are the guests of these great writers, and that it is an honour and a privelege for us to meet them and be introduced to their work?
In any case I'm sure that it will prove an exhilarating experience for us to be thus confronted with contemporary works that are of the highest standards in Europe today. World literature is always related to a specific place, a particular setting, a real history. But it is never bound to these things. Literature derives its strength and depth from the sources from which it originates, but at the same time these sources, no matter where they may be located, account for its openness and accessibility to the general reader and listener. In his Anführungszeichen von Mittel-E Péter Esterházy proclaims: "... of course we need courageous and able writers, but we need courageous and able readers even more." And this is no chimera, as will be proved to us by the works of these three authors: without striking poses or whispering nebulously in corners, they openly present and interpret the activities and experiences of the world in a playful but meditative manner - insistent, disturbing, so that all barriers are overcome because none are acknowledged or permitted. This literature will transcend the passing of time because it has subsumed our time and our times. Imre Kertész's Novel of a Man Without Destiny is the best example of this effect: like its subject-matter it is truly "offensive" and therefore truly unlike any other work about Auschwitz. The Hungary of these three authors - all three were born in Budapest - is also our Hungary because they make it so. Just as the history of Europe is engraved in the face and on the soul of this country, so has this history also shaped us. And still affects us. All the horrors and all the hopes of that ruinous epoch are part of our thinking, part of our imagination's world, part of our feelings. In short, part of our hearts. But it is the writers who give expression to these things. Their mystery can only be experienced, not explained. We feel it along the heart as we read Péter Nádas' Book of Recollections, a novel that suddenly becomes a book about one's own remembrances, too, because the variety of perspectives adopted by the narration keeps bringing the reader back to a consideration of himself.
The distress goes hand in hand with great astonishment and we discover that literature always has many traditions to rely on - including the playful.

Hermann Beil

The three guest authors at the Festival in 2001 (from left to right, Péter Esterházy, Imre Kertész and Péter Nádas) - in cooperation with the Berlin publishing company. In addition to individual appearances, Esterházy, Jertész and Nádas will be presenting together Three Authors - Three Stories - Many Worlds in the Landestheater in Salzburg on 19th August, 2001. Tickets for this many-worlds-charting performance are available at 200 to 600 ATS from the ticket office of the Salzburg Festival. Photo: Martin Fejér

PÉTER ESTERHÁZY

On August 18th, 2001, Péter Esterházy reads from his new novel Harmonia caelestis, on which he has worked for the last ten years. It describes in episodes and scenes the history of an aristocratic family from the 17th to the 20th century. Tickets at 200 to 600 ATS still available. Tickets at 200 to 600 ATS are also still available on 15th August for 97 Variations on 'A Woman'. Readings, recitations and singing by Wolf Bachofner, André Jung, Jürg Kimberger, Johannes Krisch, Robert Meyer, Michael Ranste, Branko Samarovski, Ernst Stötzner, Thomas Thieme, Ulrich Tukur and Christine Schäfer. Photo: Martin Fejér

PÉTER ESTERHAZY was born in 1950 in Budapest into one of the oldest aristocratic families in Hungary. His grandfather, who still owned large estates, was Prime Minister of Hungary in 1917/1918. After the communists took over power in 1948 the family was stripped of its possessions and deported in 1951 to a remote village where they lived under miserable conditions. Like most of the aristocrats who remained, the family could have left the country during the 1956 revolution, but the Esterhazys remained with their four children in Budapest. ("Hungary is a land of the imagination. In addition to the real, existing country we also invent another one. Allegedly we are a football nation, but we have never won the world cup; I read that we are a world power in literature, but not a soul in the world reads our works; between the two world wars there was a monarchy here, but there was no monarch. It is a land of illusions.") Péter Esterhazy went to a secondary school run by religious - it was one of the few ecclesiastical schools that was not closed down. From 1969 to 1974 he studied mathematics at the science faculty of Eötvös Loränd University in Budapest. From 1974 to 1978 he worked as systems organizer in the Department for Data Processing at the Ministry for Engineering. Since 1978 he has been living as a freelance writer in Budapest. In 1978 he spent an extended period in West Berlin on a DAAD Artists' Programme scholarship.

Péter Esterházy has received many awards, including the József Attila Prize in 1996, the Vilencia Prize for Central European Literature in 1988, the Premio Opera di Poesia in 1993, the Kossuth Prize in 1996 and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1999. He is a member of the German Academy of Language and Poetry.

Works: Productions Novel (1979), The Auxiliary Verbs of the Heart (1985), Who is Responsible for the Lady's Safety? (1986), Small Hungarian Pornography (1987), Coachmen (1988), Hrabal's Book (1991), Down the Danube (1992),
A Woman (1996), Farewell Symphony, a comedy (1996), Thomas Mann Munches Kebab at the Foot of the Holstentor (1999), and Harmonia Caelestis (2000, in German 2001).

IMRE KERTÉSZ

Imre Kertész reads notes which K. (the author) made about travel scenes, reminiscences, photographs. Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays works by György Ligeti. On August 16th, 2001, in the Landestheater. On August 14th Imre Kertész reads passages from his reality novel, Galley Diary, followed by readings by Johanna Wokalek from his Novel of a Man Without Destiny. Tickets at 200 to 600 ATS are available for both performances. Photo: Martin Fejér

IMRE KERTÉSZ was born in Budapest in 1929. Together with 7,000 Hungarian Jews he was deported in 1944, at the age of fifteen, from Budapest to Auschwitz and in 1945 he was liberated from Buchenwald.
From 1948 on he worked in Hungary as a journalist with the daily Világosság, which was converted into a "party organ" after the communist takeover. He was dismissed in 1951 and conscripted into the army for two years. Since 1953 Kertész has been living as a freelance writer and translator of German literature (Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Hofmannsthal, Canetti). His literal imprisonment was followed by a metaphorical one: the internment in the concentration camp was succeeded by 40 years of communist dictatorship. For the writer and his wife, the 28 sq. metres of a one-room flat in Budapest constituted a voluntary "prison cell" for 35 years.
His first book, Novel of a Man Without Destiny, was at first rejected by a state publishing company. It appeared in a limited edition in 1975 under the title Man Without Destiny. It was disregarded and denied all publicity. During the decades that he worked on this autobiographical novel Kertész supported himself by writing light pieces for the theatre. The novel appeared in German in 1990. This work, which tells of the deportation of a 15-year-old to Auschwitz, is the first where Kertész traces down the past. Galley Diary (1992) covers the years 1961 to 1991. In his novel Fiasco (1988; German, 1999) the hero, a journalist, bears the unmistakable traits of the author. With Kaddish for an Unborn Child (German 1992) the "trilogy of those without a destiny" is complete. In 1998 Kertész presented a second diary:
I, A Different Person documents the years 1991 to 1995 and a new existence for the author: "The door of the cell where I was kept for forty years opened slowly, if screechingly, and perhaps that was enough to bewilder me." Together with Péter Esterházy he published a volume of stories, A Story, Two Stories (1994). The volumes of essays entitled The Holocaust as Culture and A Thought-Long Silence, While the Execution Squad is Re-loading, reflect the themes of his life, as do the narratives Looking for Traces, The English Flag and Protocol.

Kertész was awarded the Brandenburg Literature Prize in 1995, The Book Prize for European Understanding, Leipzig 1997, the Darmstadt Academy Prize in 1997, the Order "pour le mérite" and the World Literature Prize for 2000.

PÉTER NÁDAS

An exhibition entitled Annual Report from a Tree, showing 500 photos taken by Péter Nádas, will be opened on August 13th, 2001 in the KunstRaum at Vierthalerstrasse no. 11. At the same time Julia Stemberger and Max Hopp read parts of Nádas' hallucinatory novella, The Lovely History of Photography (all tickets 400 ATS). Peter Nádas' great novel, Book of Recollections, gives a picture of the last century that is still with us. On August 17th the author, together with Michael Maertens and Otto Sander, reads passages from this work. Tickets available from the ticket office at 200 to 600 ATS. Photo: Martin Fejér

PÉTER NADAS was born in Budapest in 1942. "My Jewish ancestry, my baptism later, my peculiar social origins - my mother came from a poor working-class family, my father was well-to-do middle class - account for the contradictory nature of my experience", he tells us in a sketch he drew of his life.
He lost both parents when he was a teenager. He attended a technical college for chemistry, apprenticed himself to a photographer and worked first as a photographic reporter for a large magazine and later as a journalist with a provincial newspaper. In 1967 he published his first volume of stories. One year later, when the Warsaw Pact troops marched into Czechoslovakia, he gave up his work as a journalist. A second book of stories appeared in 1969, after which Nadas was forbidden to write any more.
In 1973 he spent an extended period in East Berlin doing theatre studies. It wasn't until 1977 that the book appeared which he had completed in 1972 and which was to make him famous in Hungary and abroad: End of a Family Novel. The work was seen as a "manifesto of a new generation of Hungarian authors". Nádas spent the year 1981 as guest of the DAAD Artists Programme in West Berlin.
On returning to Budapest he published pieces for the theatre in 1982 and essays and theatrical reviews in 1983. In 1986 The Book of Recollections followed. The author had worked on it for eleven years ("beaten and blessed by all the fury and stillness of the European way of thinking") and it was received as a "milestone in European literature".

After the appearance of The Book of Recollections in German in 1991, Péter Nádas was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize for European Literature; in 1992 the Kossuth Prize, the highest award granted in Hungary for art and literature; in 1995 the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding.

Péter Nádas lives as a freelance author in Budapest and in Gombosszeg, a town in south-west Hungary.

Works: Love, a narration (1979, German 1996), Of Heavenly and Earthly Love (1991, German 1994), End of a Family Novel (new translation 1993), The Life-Runner (1989, German 1995), Minotauros, narrations (1967, 1979, German 1997), Dialogue. Four Days in the Year 1989 (with Richard Swartz; 1992, German 1994), The Lovely History of Photography (1995, German 2001), Without Pause, three theatre pieces (1999), Homecoming, essays (1999), Some Light (1999).