Warsawa/Dresden

Cities and Architecture in János Térey’s Poetry

Abstract

The essay focuses on the representation of architecture and urban space in the first phase of János Térey’s career (until the turn of the millennium). After an introduction on the connections of the oeuvre and depictions of the built environment in the context of literary history, the paper interprets the city images of Térey’s works, distinguishing three paradigms: (1) that can be called visionary, in the texts of the 1990s, where the city is an unsettling, transitory, but, in terms of the unfolding of the personality, inspiring space; (2) in the period around the millennium, where the city appears as a social issue, and the questions of ruins and the destruction of buildings come into the foreground; and (3) from the second half of the 2000s onwards, where the representation of cities focus on the interrelationship between individual and social memory: archaeological exploration of the history of buildings is a means of self-understanding and common way of dealing with the past; the rhetoric around city images is increasingly focusing on heritage conservation. The essay then takes a closer look at the first two paradigms: firstly, the volumes A természetes arrogancia and A valóságos Varsó, then Drezda februárban and Paulus (with Warsaw and Dresden as the two most important cities), interpreting the different patterns of interconnectedness between history and identity, destruction and construction.