V4 diaries (Cracow): Ákos Kele-Fodor

It was a great pleasure and honour we could spend these days in such a lovely residence as Villa Decius in Kraków. It gave me a proper frame of mind for the first workshop-session conducted by the kind and very good questioner Sabina Misiarz-Filipek. We were discussing about how the sociological factor of literary field had been changed after the transition in the 90’s and after the millennium in each nations (polish, czech and hungarian).

We did it as the apropos of a new anthology –of treatise on the connection of polish literary field, criticism and sociological processions– edited by her. She gave us the very same questions had been analysed in this book: relation of money and profession, depreciation of prizes and political engagement, political movements in literature, changing book market etc. It was pretty clear that we are all suffer from quite similar symptoms, and the causes trace back to the period of transition and the post-communist form of capitalism.
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The next session was about the participants’ own picture of the V4’s history of literary avant-garde. It turned out Hungary and Poland have a lot of correspondence in the features of our avant-garde movements, such as social sensibility and a desire of establishing of a whole new concept of reality and aesthetics, and later it became an anti-culture of the communism, while Czecho-Slovakia and Czech Republic experienced a different form of avant-garde, and it has a completely different contemporary state of the this legacy. So it looked like the differences didn’t exclusively related to the transition but the similarities did. It is very fascinating and it would need a further research and analysis in the context of our personal heritage as writers and our own features of aesthetics.