Books and Publications
Sándor Csoóri’s rich literary oeuvre brings together poetry, essays and prose, each complementing the others. His writings are united by personal experience, the heritage of Hungarian folk culture, national self-understanding and the fundamental questions of human existence.
The following selection presents the volumes of his collected works published by Erdélyi Szalon Publishing House, commissioned by Nomád Nemzedék.
Star Gate
Selected Poems for Children
Reading Sándor Csoóri’s selected poems for children, one cannot help feeling that they were written in moments of sheer delight. Playful, teasing and mischievous, they are filled with masterful wordplay, while their lively rhythms seem almost to invite the reader to dance.
This volume is the first in the series devoted to Sándor Csoóri’s collected works. Why should the series begin with a book for its youngest readers? Because children deserve to be addressed with the greatest sensitivity and care. The accompanying CD features Ferenc Sebő’s musical settings of the poems, while the colourful illustrations were created by members of Csoóri’s own family.
The volume is further enriched by the inspired drawings of his granddaughters, Lilla Júlia Molnár and Virág Zsófia Hóvári, and one of his great-granddaughters, Berta Julianna Zimber-Csoóri.
István G. Pálfy on the volume:
I try to picture the author of this book, the man who wrote these poems. In truth, there is little need to imagine him, for we knew each other well. Yet I never really saw the writer of children’s poetry in him. That remained something of a secret. Not because he concealed it: four books for children appeared during his lifetime, two of them amid the fierce controversies surrounding his public writings.
Yet he never lost this gentler voice. What surprises me most is that the hostility and destructive passions directed at him in public life could never take away that inner serenity, that hand reaching tenderly towards the future. Whenever a child was near him, something elemental seemed to stir within him. Perhaps these poems were also letters he wished to send to those who would come after him, telling them that our homeland is one of the deepest sustaining forces in our lives. Zámoly, the village of his birth, appears again and again in new forms throughout these poems. And from these joyful verses comes a simple truth: wherever we may be in the world, we cannot live without a place we call home.
Áron Tamási said this to adults. Sándor Csoóri said it to children as well. In the course of just a few decades, our lives have become so much more uprooted and vulnerable.
Emlékkönyv
Fehér holló feketében
Memorial Volume – A White Raven in Black
A memorial volume can also be a way of bringing a life back into our presence. This book is not only about farewell and mourning, but about everything Sándor Csoóri left behind: poems, ideas, friendships, debates, and an extraordinarily rich intellectual legacy.
As a poet, essayist and public intellectual, he was a major figure in Hungarian cultural and intellectual life for decades. Writers, poets, filmmakers, visual artists and thinkers belonged to his circle of friends and creative companions, while his works reached generations of readers. His life and work were marked by deeply held convictions, intellectual dialogue and, at times, intense debate.
Emlékkönyv evokes this multifaceted personality and body of work. Rather than bringing Csoóri’s story to a close, it gives voice to those who were connected to him personally or through his writings. The volume is both an act of remembrance and a reflection on his legacy – a portrait emerging from personal recollections, literary reflections and photographs.
The book belongs to the tradition of memorial volumes in which every contribution focuses on the person being remembered. The introduction was written by Júlia Balogh, Csoóri’s wife and companion during the last thirty-five years of his life and beyond. The first chapter contains the eulogies delivered at his funeral.
The second chapter brings together texts written specifically for this volume. The third includes poems, essays, scholarly studies and personal tributes by contemporaries who have since passed away. Inevitably, the selection could not be exhaustive. The fourth chapter presents writings by members of the following generation – scholars, poets and readers of Csoóri’s work who closely followed and studied the course of his life and career.
With some three dozen contributions and an equal number of photographs, this exceptional volume was published on the second anniversary of Sándor Csoóri’s death.
Night Sun – Daytime Moon
Unpublished Diaries, 1955–2011
Published in two volumes, Éji nap – Nappali hold brings together Sándor Csoóri’s previously unpublished diary notes written between 1955 and 2011. These writings offer an unusually intimate view of the intellectual and personal world from which his poetry, essays and writings on public life emerged.
The diaries are not conventional day-by-day personal records. They contain thoughts, insights, fragments and moments of self-reflection on literature, history, Hungarian society, friendships, fellow artists and writers, public affairs, and Csoóri’s own inner struggles. Some of these notes later developed into essays or longer studies, while others remained in manuscript for decades.
The two volumes are at once a personal document and a portrait of an era. Seen through Csoóri’s eyes, they trace more than half a century of intellectual and historical change. The notes reveal a writer in continuous dialogue with himself and with his time – with his doubts, joys, passions, and the questions he pursued throughout his life.
Old Bloodstains Still Glow Red
Previously Uncollected Writings, 1960–2008
Régi vérfoltok vöröslenek brings together a selection of Sándor Csoóri’s writings from 1960 to 2008 that had not previously appeared in book form. Spanning several decades, the collection offers a distinctive perspective on the intellectual journey he pursued as a poet, essayist and public intellectual.
The writings bring together questions of literature, history, folk culture, national self-understanding and public life. For Csoóri, these spheres were never separate from one another: he understood literature as part of the life of a community, and culture as one of the most important forces in preserving a sense of identity.
The volume also reveals the richness of Csoóri’s intellectual and artistic relationships. His writings and recollections evoke figures such as János Pilinszky, László Nagy, Imre Csanádi, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Margit Szécsi, Ottó Orbán, György Petri, Domokos Szilágyi, Géza Páskándi, Gyula Illyés, András Sütő, Ferenc Juhász and Ferenc Sánta. The presence of contemporaries with widely differing worldviews and artistic approaches also reflects the breadth of Csoóri’s literary connections.
The volume therefore does more than bring together writings previously scattered across different publications: it also offers a distinctive record of nearly half a century of Hungarian literary and intellectual life.
Collected Poems I–IV
The Poetic Sum of a Lifetime’s Work
Sándor Csoóri’s four-volume Collected Poems offers a comprehensive collection of his poetic oeuvre. The poems trace more than six decades of his creative journey, from his earliest works to the poetry of his final years.
One of the defining qualities of Csoóri’s poetry is the constant interplay between personal and collective experience. His native land, nature, love, history, national self-understanding, human freedom and mortality recur throughout his work. The imagery and language of Hungarian folk poetry merge in a distinctive way with the perspective of modern Hungarian verse.
Taken together, the four volumes reveal not only the chronology of a poetic career but also its inner transformations: from the more direct voice of the early poems, through the rich imagery of his mature poetry, to the more personal and searching works of his later decades. Throughout Csoóri’s poetry, individual fate remains closely connected to the history of the community, while the poem itself becomes a means of bearing witness to lived experience.
Struggling with Reality
Essays in Sociography from the 1960s
In his sociographic writings, Sándor Csoóri explores the world of rural Hungarian society in the 1960s. His attention is focused on village life, the transformation of the traditional peasant way of life, the fate of communities, and the broader social changes reflected in individual lives.
In these writings, the sensibility of the essayist and poet meets the close observation of the sociographer. Csoóri did not approach this world as an outsider: through his childhood in Zámoly, he knew from personal experience the rhythms, traditions and communal bonds of village life. Personal experience is therefore closely intertwined with his observation of social change.
The writings collected in this volume document a Hungary undergoing profound transformation. They evoke a period in which the traditional rural world was changing rapidly, bringing with it changes in ways of life, communities and centuries-old cultural patterns. For Csoóri, sociography was more than social observation: it was an attempt to understand individual lives and the condition of the community.
Fragments on the Ground
Notes on Hungarian Identity, Art, Folk Art and Public Life
Fragments on the Ground is a collection of Sándor Csoóri’s shorter reflections, fragments of thought and essayistic notes. Some of these writings had been published previously, while others remained in manuscript for many years, offering insight into a lesser-known dimension of his oeuvre.
For decades, Csoóri recorded his thoughts in notebooks. He would begin new ones, return to earlier pages, and revisit a sentence or an idea years later. Some of these notes eventually developed into essays and longer works, while others retained their original, concise form. The volume therefore offers an unusually close view of his creative process: the moment when an experience, a question or an observation begins to take shape as a thought.
The notes address many of the central concerns of Csoóri’s work: Hungarian identity and national self-understanding, literature and art, folk poetry and folk art, history, community and public life. These brief texts reveal the same personal, questioning and often passionate mode of thought that is characteristic of his essays.
Reviving Tradition
Following the Path of Bartók and Kodály
For Sándor Csoóri, tradition never meant preserving the past unchanged. He saw it as a living heritage that could be rediscovered and recreated by every generation. The writings in this volume explore this idea through the interconnections of Hungarian folk poetry, folk music, literature and art.
For Csoóri, the work of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály offered one of the most important examples of how tradition could become a modern artistic language. He did not see their work as a repetition of the past, but as a creative process through which inherited culture could continue its life in new forms. He sought the same connection between folk poetry and modern Hungarian literature.
At the heart of the volume, therefore, lies not simply the preservation of tradition, but its continuation as a living force. For Csoóri, cultural heritage remains alive precisely through its capacity to inspire new ideas, works of art and shared experiences. Tradition thus becomes not a closed chapter of the past, but an ever-renewing dialogue between past and present.
No Future Without Literature I–II
I. The Bitterness of Seeing Clearly
II. A Writer’s History of Literature
The two volumes of No Future Without Literature offer a rich summation of Sándor Csoóri’s reflections on literature, poetry, language and the Hungarian intellectual tradition. In his writings, literature is not treated as an autonomous artistic realm, but as one of the most important bearers of collective memory, self-understanding and culture.
The first volume, The Bitterness of Seeing Clearly, focuses primarily on the role of poetry, the relationship to the Hungarian language and culture, and the question of the writer’s responsibility. For Csoóri, poetry was a means of confronting the fundamental questions of human existence: freedom, love, history, community and individual fate all found a place within it.
The second volume, A Writer’s History of Literature, approaches Hungarian literature from Csoóri’s distinctive perspective. Rather than writing a conventional literary history, he looks at his predecessors and contemporaries as a fellow writer. Through portraits, essays, recollections and personal relationships, he evokes the literary world to which he himself belonged.
Together, the two volumes reveal how inseparable literature and national culture were in Csoóri’s thought. He regarded literature as a living tradition that not only preserves language and collective memory, but also challenges each generation to reconsider its own place in the world.
“Without Hungarian poetry, there would be no Hungarian nation, no Hungarian intellectual spirit.”
A Flail Above Our Heads I–III
Historical Essays and Polemical Writings
The three volumes of A Flail Above Our Heads form an extensive collection of Sándor Csoóri’s essays on history, society and public life. Spanning several decades, these writings trace the development of his thought, repeatedly bringing together personal experience, historical questions, national self-understanding and the fate of the community.
One of the distinctive features of Csoóri’s essays is that he does not view history as an abstract process. Behind broader historical developments, he continually seeks the individual, personal fate and the experience of the community. Beginning with childhood memories, observations of everyday life or particular historical events, he moves towards broader social and moral questions.
His essays are deeply rooted in the tradition of Hungarian essay writing. Drawing on the legacy of Endre Ady, László Németh, Gyula Illyés and other predecessors, Csoóri developed an essayistic voice of his own, combining personal reflection with questions concerning the wider community. In his writings, literature, history and reflections on public life frequently intersect.
Taken together, the three volumes offer an important cross-section of Csoóri’s work as an essayist. They document an intellectual journey spanning several decades, centred on the historical experience of Hungarians, national self-understanding and the individual’s responsibility towards the community.
Among Giants
The Joy of Wonder
Among Giants offers a rich intellectual panorama through Sándor Csoóri’s writings on literature, art and culture. At the heart of the volume are the artists, works and ideas that became defining encounters throughout his life.
For Csoóri, art was never merely a question of aesthetics. In literature, folk poetry, music and film alike, he sought ways in which individuals and communities might come to a deeper understanding of themselves. His writings repeatedly return to the relationship between folk culture and so-called high culture, to the continuing life of tradition, and to the question of how art can preserve its significance in an age of mass culture.
The “giants” of the title also represent an intellectual world: masters, predecessors and contemporaries with whom Csoóri felt a personal and creative connection. In writing about them, he also reveals the sources of his own thought. The portraits and essays therefore speak both about others and about Csoóri himself.
One of the volume’s strongest motifs is the capacity for wonder: the recognition that a poem, a melody, a film or an exceptional human achievement can open the world to us anew. Among Giants is a testament to this intellectual curiosity and to Csoóri’s enduring attentiveness to artistic and cultural values.
Letters to Sándor Csoóri
1952–2016
This volume presents a selection from more than six decades of Sándor Csoóri’s correspondence. Around 150 letters by more than 120 correspondents illuminate the poet’s personality, his relationships, and the remarkably rich intellectual milieu in which he lived and worked.
Among the correspondents are many major figures of Hungarian literature, art and intellectual life, including Gyula Illyés, László Nagy, László Cs. Szabó, András Sütő, István Vas, Anna Jókai, Gyula Kodolányi, András Görömbei and Mátyás Domokos.
The letters reveal a more personal side of the world we encounter differently in Csoóri’s essays, poems and public writings. They bear witness to friendships, creative relationships, shared ideas, debates, requests and private confidences. Through the words of others, the figure of the recipient himself often comes into sharper focus.
Letters to Sándor Csoóri is therefore both a literary document and a record of its time. It not only brings us closer to Sándor Csoóri as a person, but also preserves a part of Hungarian intellectual life in which he played a significant role for decades.
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The Girl Danced to Death
The Making of a Stage Production
This volume follows the creative journey of the theatrical production inspired by Sándor Csoóri’s ballad The Girl Danced to Death. It traces the transformation of a literary work from the moment it inspires a new generation of artists to its eventual expression through music, dance, visual imagery and live performance.
Through interviews with actor and director Péter Novák and the remarkable photographs of Levente Váradi, the publication offers a behind-the-scenes insight into the creative process. These conversations not only document the making of the production but also explore how Csoóri’s poetic world can engage with the contemporary languages of theatre, music and dance.
The book is at once an artistic album, a record of a creative collaboration and a tribute to Sándor Csoóri’s literary legacy. Rather than presenting the ballad as a work confined to the past, it reveals its continuing ability to inspire new artistic interpretations decades after its creation.
A Man Under Surveillance
State Security Reports on Sándor Csoóri
The series The Man Under Surveillance presents a selection of documents relating to the surveillance of Sándor Csoóri by the Hungarian state security services. Its editors, historians Barbara Bank and Viktor Attila Soós, examine the surviving archival material and make available reports documenting Csoóri’s meetings, personal and professional relationships, travels and public activities over the years.
The documents offer a distinctive perspective on a period of Csoóri’s life. Although written from the viewpoint of state security officers and informants, the reports also reveal the extensive network of literary, artistic and intellectual relationships surrounding him, both in Hungary and beyond its borders.
The significance of the series extends beyond the personal history of a single writer. The documents provide insight into state security surveillance practices during the Kádár era and serve as historical sources for the study of Hungarian cultural and intellectual life during that period. As the records reflect the perspective of the surveillance apparatus, their interpretation requires historical context and critical examination of the sources.
Together, the volumes form a remarkable documentary series, preserving a record of Sándor Csoóri’s life and times while illuminating a less visible dimension of twentieth-century Hungarian history.
Filmography
Sándor Csoóri’s literary and cinematic work were closely intertwined throughout his creative career. As a screenwriter, co-writer and dramaturg, he contributed to numerous works of Hungarian cinema. His collaborations with filmmakers Ferenc Kósa and Sándor Sára were particularly significant.
His cinematic work explored many of the same themes that shaped his poetry and essays: individual destinies, historical memory, freedom and the sense of belonging to a community.
The following filmography presents a selection of his screenwriting, co-writing and dramaturgical contributions.
Screenwriter and Co-writer
Tízezer nap (Ten Thousand Days, 1967) – Director: Ferenc Kósa • Best Director Award, Cannes Film Festival, 1967
Feldobott kő (The Upthrown Stone, 1969) – Director: Sándor Sára
Ítélet (Judgement, 1970) – Director: Ferenc Kósa
Nincs idő (No Time, 1973) – Director: Ferenc Kósa
Hószakadás (Snowfall, 1974) – Director: Ferenc Kósa
80 huszár (80 Hussars, 1978) – Director: Sándor Sára
Tüske a köröm alatt (Thorn Under the Fingernail, 1987) – Director: Sándor Sára
Dramaturg
Holnap lesz fácán (1974) – Director: Sándor Sára
A trombitás (1978) – Director: János Rózsa
Csontváry (1979) – Director: Zoltán Huszárik
A mérkőzés (1981) – Director: Ferenc Kósa
Documentary Film Contributions
Vízkereszt (1967) – Contributor; Director: Sándor Sára
Karsai Zsigmond, a népművészet mestere (1974) – Contributor
Krónika – A 2. magyar hadsereg a Donnál (1982) – Dramaturg; Director: Sándor Sára
Pergőtűz (1982) – Dramaturg; Director: Sándor Sára
Elátkozva a hatodik napot (1982) – Screenwriter