Péter Esterházy home to become artist's residency
On May 22, the mayor of Óbuda-Békásmegyer announced that the district will buy the former home of Péter Esterházy for the purpose of turning it into an artist’s residency. The residency will be run by a foundation created by György Dragomán, Daniel Kehlmann, and Miklós Vámos specifically for this purpose.
News that the house on Emőd Street was up for sale surfaced earlier this year, and was met with an outpouring of sadness and frustration, as people committed to Esterházy’s legacy pondered the possibility that the home he had immortalised in many of his writings might cease to exist.
‘It is time that we turn from the conditional to the affirmative’, reads the official announcement. ‘In the last six months we have read and heard over and over again: if this was a normal country, the home of Péter Esterházy would be bought by the state in order to open a literary centre in it’.
The 3rd district where the house is located has shown its dedication to preserving the writer’s memory in many ways. In the spring of 2020, the district’s cultural journal published a special edition focusing on Esterházy; in 2021, they put up billboards across the district with Esterházy quotes; in 2022, the local train station was decorated with a picture of him; and in 2023, the fence of the nearby beach was decorated with even more quotes (some of which specifically described the writer’s fond memories of climbing over that very fence).
As the mayor pointed out, while the district and its associated organisations have many competencies, running a literary centre or an artist’s residency is not one of them. This is why it was a turning point in the efforts to save the house from an unbefitting end when György Dragomán and Miklós Vámos signalled their readiness to take charge.
‘The literary foundation they have created is a guarantee that the house will be in good hands, that a literary residence of the highest quality will be opened, and that the district will be one cultural institution richer’, said the mayor.
Dragomán remembered the time a scholarship took him to Helsinki. He did not think at the time that the memory of Finland would ever resurface in his writings – but years later he noticed that the time he spent there had seeped into his prose. This is what he thinks the new artist’s residency will accomplish, in addition to being a respectable casing for contemporary Hungarian literature.
Marcell Esterházy, visual artist and the son of Péter Esterházy, added that those who frequented the house in his father’s days remember that it was always filled with life: his siblings, their dogs, but also the friends and colleagues of his father, writers, artists, musicians. He hopes that the artist’s residency will be a worthy continuation of this legacy and become a creative space in service of the greater community.
Péter Esterházy described his home and the neighbourhood surrounding it in many of his writings. The following section is from his 1990 novel, The Book of Hrabal, which was translated by Judith Sollosy:
‘There was a café of sorts and two rival taverns, which everyone called by their old names, the Beerhall and the Kondász (old man Kondász was still kicking, he had his own table in the corner and ordered beer by the pint, an unknown quantity for the succession of ever new barkeepers, it’s a pitcher and a dash, son!half a litre plus the missing ‘dash’ to make it a pint, until they got fed up and compromised on a full pitcher); there was also a beauty parlour, a boutique, formerly a shoe repair shop, and there were the natives, and there were the newcomers. Everyone did not know everyone else, the way custom and propriety dictates in a village, but there was a shared knowledge of things, of the fact that time passes – which may have meant no more than that there was a public opinion making itself felt through the usual channels, the market, the post office (via the mailman), the butcher’s shop, the square in front of the church.’
All in-text photos by Gergely Máté Oláh
https://hlo.hu/news/peter-esterhazy-home-to-become-artists-residency.html
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