Új és új hősöket. Az 1957-es Ady-ünnepség mint emlékezeti hely

Résumé

The 1957 Celebration of Poet Endre Ady as a Lieu de Mémoire

In this dissertation, I examine the process of cult creation in the context of the nationwide celebrations of Hungarian poet Endre Ady organized in Romania in the 1950s. More broadly, I research how the post-war state-socialist power introduced its hero types in literature and theatre, thereby creating its own places of remembrance. Examining the ‘lieu de mémoire’ used in the sense rendered by Pierre Nora, it seems important that the new places of remembrance created by the power - museums, statues, heroes, oeuvres, literary evenings of theatres, etc. – create a sense of continuity, but in reality, they convey a radically new message, and try to achieve this mainly through a hero placed at the centre of the cult. In the retelling and activating of history (and the story), the disappearing difference between the ‘real’ and ‘would-be’ gives birth to a compulsion to repeat, which after a while leads to the emptying of the contents and the formation of double speech.