Songs of Despair in Times of Contempt. On the Poetic Cycle of Márciustól Márciusig by István Vas

Abstract

The article offers an interpretation of the poetic cycle Od marca do marca [From March to March] by István Vas, a Hungarian poet and writer of Jewish origin. The author treated each of his poems as a notebook, where he recorded his reflections on the situation of Hungarian Jews, the human condition, the siege of Budapest, etc. For Vas, each piece is a separate testimony to the time of the war. The entire cycle is steeped in irony and a harsh judgement of the society’s moral fall. Vas wrote his poems during the period of Nazism but published them during the communist regime, when he wanted to answer a question about the role of art in the process of recovering historical memory, and whether a literary text could offer protection from the hostile reality.