The Agota Kristof Research Group at iASK presented its one-year report this morning in the Bibó Hall, attended by colleagues in person and online. Ágnes Kovács, Judit Prileszky-Simon and István Sümegi presented the studies, their topics and results, and gave a presentation on their professional work. In May, Judit Prileszky-Simon visited Switzerland to study the Agota Kristof bequest owned by the Schweitzerische Nationalbibliothek (Bibliothéque Nationale Suisse). Judit said that the Swiss national literary archive contains about fifty boxes of partially processed manuscripts and personal documents. The researcher says the writer kept everything, from book reviews and reviews of his books to letters, personal documents, even bills and plane tickets. Some of the special collection has been digitised, but there are manuscripts and texts that still need to be researched.
He is writing a study on the German and French material and has set out the direction of his further research. István Sümegi spoke about his work entitled Kőszegi mennybolt (The Heaven of Kőszeg), from the perspective of ethics, stressing the importance of a historical overview of the reception and the possibility of reading the biography of the author. He described the mission of the research group, iASK’s plans to work. Ágnes Kovács spoke about three studies she has completed in the past year, addressing specific narrative and transcultural issues, such as the representation of the body, statelessness, or the thematisation of the act of writing, which is preceded by language. The authors said that in the future they would work together with the Institute’s research teams, since war memory, emigration or trauma processing are also heavily examined in research in other disciplines, and could therefore be linked to literary studies research at several points. By the end of the summer, a synopsis will be prepared for a possible volume of studies that will examine Agota Kristof’s works in the light of foreign-language literature (English, German, Italian, French) and world literary reception.