Jenő Dsida (1907–1938) was a poet and translator and a central figure of Transylvanian Hungarian literature in the interwar period. This study examines the relationship between modernism and faith in his poetry, with particular attention to the crisis of identity and language. It explores how the disintegration of the self and the human body reflects a fractured worldview shaped by secular modernity. Images of death, corporeal decay, and linguistic failure are interpreted as key manifestations of modern existential doubt and anxiety. The analysis situates Dsida’s work within pastoral traditions, late modernist poetics, and religious worldviews, emphasizing poetry’s growing skepticism about its own expressive capacities. At the same time, it identifies an alternative poetic mode grounded in childlike faith, playfulness, and an intimate relationship with the divine.
This study analyzes the thematic and structural features of seventy-seven Hungarian folktales drawn from Gyula Illyés’s Hetvenhét magyar népmese, to assess their contemporary relevance and their value for children’s moral and imaginative development. Each tale was assigned to one dominant genre—Fairy/Magic Tale, Silly/Trickster Tale, Hero Tale, Animal Tale, Legend/Ballad-like Tale, or Realistic/Novella Tale—prioritizing functional narrative logic and cultural context. Findings reveal substantial variation across genres, illustrating the breadth of Hungarian folklore tradition. Recurring features include the underestimated hero, the reciprocity of good deeds, culturally distinctive motifs such as the ash-baked scone (hamuban sült pogácsa) and the magical steed (táltos paripa), and imaginative preambles that explicitly mark the tales as fictional creations intended for enjoyment. Rather than uniformly reinforcing gendered mate-selection narratives, the tales emphasize resilience, wit, reciprocity, and moral agency. Interpreted through an ethnographic lens, these narratives function as culturally embedded expressions of communal values and worldviews. The study concludes that Hungarian folktales retain significant pedagogical and relational value: their imaginative power, moral clarity, and performative vitality make them well worth retelling to today’s youth, especially within interactive storytelling contexts that strengthen adult–child bonds.
This article traces the evolution of American Studies in Hungary from its early institutional beginnings in the 1960s through the decades of state socialism and into the post-1990 period of academic pluralism. It situates the emergence and delayed institutionalization of the field within the political constraints of Kádár-era Hungary and the epistemic frameworks that shaped American Studies internationally during the Cold War. By juxtaposing the “respect mode” of Old American Studies with the critical “attack mode” of New American Studies, the essay demonstrates how political censorship and epistemological suspicion converged to marginalize the discipline before 1990. Drawing on institutional history, intellectual history, and personal experience, the article documents the gradual consolidation of American Studies through programs, departments, professional associations, journals, and conferences. It concludes by surveying the contemporary Hungarian Americanist landscape, characterized by theoretical diversity, interdisciplinary breadth, and international integration, and argues that the field’s current vitality is inseparable from its historically hard-won intellectual and institutional autonomy.
This article analyzes the music of the Vojvodina-based Sógor Együttes, active between May 1986 and the end of 1990 in both Yugoslavia and Hungary. The innovative musical fusion that became known as “sógorism” blended Hungarian folk songs and popular music (“sláger”) from different periods, Hungarian rewrites of American rock’n’roll and Balkan folk songs with original compositions by band members. This blend became an immense success in the final decade of multinational and multiethnic Yugoslavia. The authors argue that the music of Sógor Együttes was an expression of the Vojvodina Hungarian minority’s unique and hybrid identity, which is defined in this article as a tripartite identity. In a time of rising ethnic nationalisms both in Serbia and Croatia, when even music became ideologically manipulated along ethnic division lines, the music of Sógor Együttes promoted the fading ideals of Yugoslav civic nationalism (Ignatieff) based on inclusion and equal rights while debunking any claim of ethnic and cultural purity. The violent breakup of the Yugoslav state in the early 1990s sadly coincided with the end of the band’s activity, yet the legacy of their music lives on.
