Miklós Mészöly

Dávid Szolláth's large-scale interpretative work draws a richly layered picture of the career of Miklós Mészöly (1921-2001), one of the most significant writers of 20th-century Hungarian literature, from the "long beginning of his career" through the "dissolution of artistic forms" to the "late variants". Although the monograph's genre of constructing a unified story is far from Mészöly's oeuvre, which followed diverse paths, the author presents Mészöly's work by focusing on the historical turning points of poetic diversity. Szolláth not only makes individual works and career turning points the subject of thorough analysis, but also carefully examines their connection to the given historical and world literary context, and last but not least, he also demonstrates the direct or indirect influence of Mészöly's tradition on contemporary Hungarian literary processes and authors with countless examples. The volume, which also includes a biography of Miklós Mészöly in its appendix, is being published on the 100th anniversary of the author's birth. "The book will have a single hero, the title character, but it will feature relatively many supporting characters, Hungarian and foreign contemporaries, mainly in order to convey the changes in direction of his career from different perspectives. The abandonment of chronological order - at least the frequent deviation from the chronological order of his works - can also be attributed to this. Although there are turning points in Mészöly's career that help with the structuring, what is characteristic of his oeuvre is that different creative principles are present in parallel."