This paper on Sándor Márai’s 1952 novel Béke Ithakában [Peace in Ithaca] centres on the political zoology of the Third Book . It shows that in this case Márai questions the nature of man and the difference between man and animal more sharply than in his earlier works—not independently of his experiences of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and WW II. In the novel, the ancient bucolic tradition is the vehicle for these issues, which also correspond to contemporary developments in European thought.
This paper examines the poetics of decay and the philosophy of language in the oeuvre of László Krasznahorkai, arguing that his prose unfolds as a sustained process of transformation, repetition, and self-reflection. His novels appear as variations on a single metaphysical theme—the impossibility of total expression and the ceaseless reconfiguration of meaning. Through recurring motifs and shifting perspectives, Krasznahorkai’s writing enacts the tension between the longing for linguistic precision and the inevitable failure of language to convey transcendence. Ruin emerges as a central metaphor, embodying both existential disintegration and aesthetic renewal. In dialogue with Anselm Kiefer’s visual art and Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, Krasznahorkai’s work aligns with a Romantic and post-metaphysical tradition, thus also connecting to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic visions—where melancholy functions as a generative creative force. Ultimately, Krasznahorkai’s art reveals a poetics of perpetual self-dissolution, where what collapses philosophically is redeemed through aesthetic form.
This paper explores the cognitive foundations of bibliotherapy and their implications for literary bibliotherapy, emphasizing why therapeutic reading, particularly of literary fiction, is uniquely effective. Drawing from cognitive literary studies, reception aesthetics, and modern neuroscience, the discussion highlights how embodied cognition, and the asynchronous nature of reading processes contribute to the therapeutic outcomes of bibliotherapy. By integrating emotional, sensory, and intellectual engagement, literary texts facilitate empathy, self-reflection, and personal transformation. The paper distinguishes between bibliotherapy as clinical therapy and as counselling, focusing on literary bibliotherapy’s reliance on fictionality and narrativity. Unlike self-help books, literary fiction fosters cognitive and affective empathy through its narrative and mimetic qualities, enabling readers to process complex psychological and social issues. Cognitive mechanisms, such as embodied simulation, emotional processing, and motor representation, are shown to play pivotal roles in creating therapeutic effects. Additionally, the text underscores the significance of literary quality, narrative complexity, and the reader’s intent in the bibliotherapeutic process. Empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of literary bibliotherapy is analysed alongside neurocognitive studies, which reveal the physiological and emotional impact of reading literary texts. The paper argues for the societal importance of promoting bibliotherapy, especially amid contemporary mental health challenges. By establishing a scientifically grounded framework, this paper aims to validate the role of literary bibliotherapy as a critical interdisciplinary practice that merges literary studies and therapeutic intervention to support mental well-being and personal growth.
This paper analyses travelogues published in the 1950s and 1960s by travellers visiting Egypt during this period, focusing on their role in shaping representations of colonialism, capitalism, and socialism. The narratives used in the travelogues served as a power instrument to depict the socialist regime as the “true path to development” and, in turn, to criticize the “exploitative” nature of colonial regimes and the capitalist system. The study shows the power that travellers’ narratives had in shaping the views of Czechoslovak citizens about events beyond their country’s borders, along with their influence on shaping colonial discourse, even though Czechoslovakia was never an active participant in colonial events.
Today, thanks to the climate change and the bicentennial, the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano and its effects on the Western World is a fairly well-researched topic. However, looking at Hungary, almost nothing is known about the impacts of the Tambora eruption, nor the cultural impacts of it. In this study, after listing the (mainly English) literary reverberations of the Tambora eruption, I deal with such works from Hungarian literature. Two contemporary and two classical authors’ works can be linked to the “Year Without a Summer”. In Janka Fábián’s historical novel, The Lovers of the Anna Ball, I present the determining role of weather and the appearance of further effects of the volcanic eruption. I briefly touch on the Villa Diodati Fragment cycle of the volume The Atlantis Tram by Zsolt Attila Pap, as it shows the atmosphere of the 1816 summer. In the case of the Eskimo scene of The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách, I describe the play’s connection with ‘Darkness’ and thus with the “Year Without a Summer” as a mistake. Finally, I discuss in more detail two late apocalyptic poems by Mihály Vörösmarty and their peculiar reception history, arguing that ‘The Old Gypsy’ and the ‘Prologue’ can be linked to the “Year Without a Summer” of 1816 for several reasons.
The paper focuses on earthquakes as one of the representations of crisis in the early modern Bohemian literature of the pre-White Mountain period (1590–1620). The earliest extant texts discussing an earthquake to have happened in the Bohemian lands date back to 1590. These five texts, written in Czech and Latin and including sermon-like treatises, news, epic and elegiac poems, relate to the earthquake that occurred in the Bohemian lands in 1590. They are surprisingly concurrent in dealing with this natural disaster, giving it an important religious meaning, i.e., God’s warning and punishment. This strong religious message remained the central theme in earthquake discourse throughout the entire pre-White Mountain period, in which four other earthquakes are said to have happened, and was included even in a university thesis. Besides the five 1590 texts about the earthquake, a further nine sources describing or mentioning an earthquake have survived from the pre-White Mountain period, all of which will be analysed in this paper. Employing a series of examples taken from Czech and Latin source material, provided herein with the author’s English translation, this paper considers the main points and transformations of the earthquake discourse as presented by contemporary Bohemian authors, who appear to have mostly belonged to the broader University of Prague milieu, and thus were non-Catholic. Importantly, the position of the earthquake discourse among discussions of astronomical phenomena and other disasters is assessed.
The most frequent allegories of the journey of human life included in the early modern period are the Tablet of Cebes, the Pythagorean Y and Hercules at the crossroads. They all, in their own way, depict the crisis of choice. Their popularity in Europe is reflected in moral philosophical and emblematic literature, as well as in book culture and the visual arts. However, the Tablet of Cebes (Tabula Cebetis) rarely appears in the literature of the Bohemian lands and is documented first in the mid-seventeenth century in the works of Johannes Amos Comenius. Before that, perhaps the intellectual influence of the University of Wittenberg on Bohemian Humanists played a role in the lack of interest in this allegory. However, by a peculiar mistake of the editor, probably Beneš Optát, the term Tabula Cebetis was used in Bohemia and Moravia for the multiplication table, more commonly called Tabula or Mensa Pythagorae. The place of the Tabula as an allegory of the journey of life in the Bohemian lands was taken by the Pythagorean Y throughout the long sixteenth century, and to the greatest extent by the moralizing story of Hercules at the crossroads. The accompanying Latin text to the engraving of the Tabula Cebetis from 1640 is published in the appendix of the article.
The reflection of external and internal crises in premodern travel literature has not been systematically researched, especially in the Eastern European and Nordic context. This case study presents a Latin travel account in an academic speech, Oratio de vitae decore per prudentiam et patientiam comparando et conservando, by the exiled and learned Livonian nobleman Christoph von Sturtz (1557–1602), who visited his homeland in 1599 after 26 years of exile. Contextualizing this hitherto neglected text from the late sixteenth century in its historical and biographical background, and analysing its content and rhetorical strategies, this article demonstrates that travel literature had remarkable potential not only to detect and reflect crises or to react to them properly, but also to analyse the reasons for them, to assess them, to propose guidelines on resolving them, and to prevent them from spreading elsewhere.
This paper presents the multicultural, multilingual milieu of Hungarian literature in Vojvodina, focusing on the works of Dezső Kosztolányi and Danilo Kiš. The multicultural milieu of Subotica is important for both authors, but they do not have the multilingual experience of the Subotica milieu, the couleur locale. In Kosztolányi’s case, the assimilationist linguistic approach prevalent during the Monarchy, but in Kiš’s case, the cultural politics of Yugoslavia determined the representations of multilingualism. The paper poses questions about the changes in literary language in the wake of historical events in the twentieth century, the way multilingual literature gains legitimacy, and the ideological constraints it was subjected to in the Yugoslav context, additionally addressing the question whether there is any monolingual literature at all.
The political and moral crisis experienced by the noble estate of the Crown of Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth century found its sincerest expression in the laments of the Republic. Beginning from the 1522 Epitaphium Reipublicae by Andrzej Krzycki, this literary tradition drew on classical, particularly Ciceronian imagery of a sick and dying body politic. Over the next decades, this imagery became intertwined with political discourse, as evidenced by parliamentary speeches from 1562–64. In the same period, Jan Dymitr Solikowski penned Facies Rei Publicae, an immensely popular narrative of the healing of the body politic, and created figurative representations of Sick and Sane Republic; while Stanisław Samuel Szemiot, writing over a century later, craftily adapted Hippocratean concepts in a poetical necropsy of the body politic. Most importantly, the aforementioned authors all shared a genuine belief that their political community was in decay, and their own life imperiled. A careful reading of the textual pathologies they created allows for a diagnosis of historico-philosophical roots of their anxiety.
Denmark experienced one of its most acute crises during the Danish–Swedish wars 1657–60 leaving the country plundered, impoverished and diminished. After the war, the Danish king, Frederick III, seized the opportunity offered by the political circumstances to change the constitution and take absolute power. Consequently, three documents were produced in the royal chancelleries, all initially referring to the recent crisis as a base for legitimising the introduction of absolutism in Denmark–Norway: The Sovereignty Act (Enevoldsarveregeringsakten), 1661, and two versions of the Danish–Norwegian constitution entitled The Royal Law (Kongeloven), 1665, a Latin draft and the official version in Danish. The Sovereignty Act focuses on the king as saviour of the kingdom basing the legitimacy of the king’s absolute power on the people’s gratitude to him. In the Latin draft, on the contrary, the Danes are saved by God’s hand that comes down from heaven, crushes the enemy and inspires the Estates to confer absolute power upon the king who is now completely passive. The highly dramatized passage with allusions to both stoicism and classical theatre reflects the humanist rhetorical tradition. In the Danish version of The Royal Law, the people are still divinely inspired to transfer the absolute power to the king, but the dramatized style is considerably reduced and the stoic terms replaced by Christian expressions and God as the fatherly saviour of the state. The texts thus offer three different interpretations of the crisis, all of them expressions of movements that were indicative for the early modern period: natural law, humanism and Christianity.
The Swedish brothers Magnus (Johannes, 1488–1544 and Olaus, 1490–1557) are best known as the authors of two enormous works on Swedish and Scandinavian history. They spent a considerable part of their lives in the shadow of the advent of Lutheranism in Sweden, which was a crisis on a political, religious, and personal level for the brothers, being devout Catholics. Johannes arrived in Sweden in 1523 and was soon elected archbishop of Uppsala. Only three years later, however, he left Sweden and never returned, and Olaus joined him. The brothers were to spend the rest of their lives abroad, in Poland and in Italy. The entire time they kept trying to convince the Pope and the cardinals to help them reinstate Catholicism in the northern countries, and to make the Swedish king, Gustavus Vasa, mend his Lutheran ways. These two campaigns of persuasion both involved representing the advent of Lutheranism as a crisis, which is visible in Johannes Magnus’ extant letters and the works of both brothers. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the brothers represent crisis in their works and writings and how their depiction relates to that found in a few other works from the Reformation period.
Almost all the poetic output of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640) is a response to a crisis, whether external—political or religious—or arising from his personal experience. It spans a strong commitment, a call for action (e.g. a fight against the Turks) and an attempt to achieve independence from the vagaries of Fortune. This paper deals with the imagery used by Sarbiewski to describe crisis in selected odes and epodes of his collection Lyricorum libri IV. Epodon Liber Unus alterq[ue] Epigrammatum. One of the examples is his use of the motif of flight over the earth. From a celestial perspective, maintaining distance, the poeta-vates observes and describes the tragedy happening on the stage of the theatrum mundi. The view is so poignant, and at the same time his desire of being with God in heaven is so strong, that he prefers not to come back to earth. Another example of imagery is the use of aquatic metaphors. The poet, for example, develops a vision of the Flood, which is a consequence of a moral crisis and at the same time a radical attempt (not necessarily successful) to solve it. Drawing inspiration from both the Bible and the works of classical authors (for instance, he likes to use the figure of the adynaton), Sarbiewski creates his own reinterpretation and actualisation of the deluge as an image of the crisis affecting civilisation and of the cataclysm destroying nature.
In the field of early modern historiography, and generally in the history of Reformation, the Wittenberg view of the past is the given name of the historical thinking which became predominant in the areas influenced by Luther’s and Melanchthon’s teachings. The main components of this universalist world view were the belief in the imminent Apocalypse; the idea of four Empires; the organic cycles of world history; and the firm conviction that the Turkish conquest of southeastern Europe and parts of Hungary was God’s rightful punishment for the innumerable sins of Christianity. It is well known that Protestant eschatology had deep medieval roots. The idea of divine punishment, however, was also reinforced by other sources in the first half of sixteenth century. This paper aims to demonstrate through the works of various German and Hungarian historians and religious thinkers of the period (Johannes Sleidanus, Samuel Budina, Ferenc Forgách and others) that this concept and its literary use was also influenced by Erasmian moralism based on the rediscovery of certain forgotten, mostly Platonic ideas, which in Christian humanism could be harmoniously combined with the prophetic messages amplified by the Turkish threat and the Reformation.
