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• Aeneas at the Europa Hotel: Canon and Nostalgia in Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Novel Grand Hotel Europa

  147–157.

  József Krupp

  Views:

  72

  Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s novel Grand Hotel Europa (2018), through its explicit and structural references to the Aeneid, not only affirms the canonical status of Virgil’s poem but also raises fundamental questions about the significance of cultural traditions in general. The novel emphasises Aeneas’ status as profugus, connecting him to Europe’s refugee crisis during the 2010s. This essay examines the intertextual character of the novel and the concept of ‘nostalgia’, which proves to be central to its vision of European culture.

• Die Grenzen der Bukolik

  179–191.

  József Krupp

  Views:

  221

  Szilárd Borbély (1963–2014) wrote long narrative poems in the last years of his life. The poems and the novel Nincstelenek (The Dispossessed, 2013) depict the life of a family in an East Hungarian village during the author's childhood years. In constructing the literary landscape, Borbély draws on ancient myths to paint a hierarchical picture of the village from a socio-economic perspective. Borbély planned to publish the poems under the title Bukolikatájban. Idÿllek (In a Bucolic Land. Idylls), although these are rather a palinody of a pastoral idyll. This essay examines how Borbély uses the word "gods" in the poems. Two poems (The Deucalion Collective Farm, Echo on the Veranda) serve as examples to show the role the reception of myth played in the construction of the "bucolic" world.