{"id":11781,"date":"2020-09-23T01:09:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-23T01:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=11781"},"modified":"2020-09-23T01:09:02","modified_gmt":"2020-09-23T01:09:02","slug":"tibor-fischer-intellectual-red-bull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=11781","title":{"rendered":"Tibor Fischer-Intellectual Red Bull"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

L\u00e1szl\u00f3 F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi\u2019s essays are a collection that will leave you feeling sharp and more cultured, says Tibor Fischer<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

hat remains to fill the place of God, when God has been exiled and history and progress have also proved undeserving of trust?\u201d asks L\u00e1szl\u00f3 F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi in the preface to his collection of essays, the wonderfully titled Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel In <\/em>Siberia And Bursts Into Tears<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel In Siberia And Bursts Into Tears<\/em> By L\u00e1szl\u00f3 F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, Yale University Press, \u00a318.99<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi is a professor at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest and despite the elegant preface, the essays gathered here, written over a period of 15 years, clearly weren\u2019t composed as part of any masterplan and have the feel of lectures given a turbo-charge. A lot of play with light and darkness is woven into these reflections as F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi knows his art history, and he has a taste for the big questions: What is happiness? Has history ended?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For someone who has a post at the Film University, there\u2019s surprisingly little about film here. Professor F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi likes to read. A lot. One of the reasons I can rarely bring myself to read books by British academics is that, despite a sometimes esoteric vocabulary, they have a feeble command of language and a very limited cultural range (Barthes, Foucault, Zizek, climate change). I can\u2019t think of anyone in this country (anyone alive, that is) who has the sweep F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi demonstrates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I worry when I see the name Hegel. Without indulging in the poetic excesses of Nietzsche, one of my main reservations about Hegel is that it\u2019s often very hard to understand what he means. There\u2019s plenty of room for interpretation, which partly explains his popularity in the arts faculties of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The star turn in the collection is the eponymous piece about Dostoyevsky. F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi speculates that Dostoyevsky, reprieved from death row, banished to the back of beyond, nevertheless might well have got hold of a copy of Hegel\u2019s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and read the passage: \u201cWe must first of all eliminate Siberia \u2026 the whole character of Siberia rules it out as a setting for historical culture and prevents it from attaining a distinct form in the world-historical process.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I doubt that Dostoyevsky needed Hegel to break the news that he had fallen off the edge of the world, as he was freezing his arse off in the absolute zero of culture, but, of course, ironically, his time in Siberia probably made him as a writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hegel also dismisses Africa as not worthy of consideration, and here F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi gets a bit \u201cacademic\u201d and takes off into space. \u201cBehind Hegel\u2019s vehement repudiation of Africa and Siberia lies his secret wish to assassinate God,\u201d he writes. F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi then attempts to justify this statement but didn\u2019t manage to convince me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first and final essays feature Elias Canetti. I\u2019ve tried and I\u2019ve tried over the years, but I can\u2019t fathom why Canetti is considered a great writer (admittedly I\u2019ve only read him in translation).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, Antoine Artaud has always struck me as a near-charlatan (you mean theatre doesn\u2019t have to be actors in togas declaiming Racine under a floral proscenium arch? Why didn\u2019t anyone think of that before?). However if you teach at the Theatre University, I suppose you can\u2019t really ignore him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a good piece on Heinrich von Kleist and his famous suicide, although I reached the point decades ago when I decided I didn\u2019t want to read about Kleist\u2019s suicide ever again. If you write an essay, as the young von Kleist did, with the title \u201cA Sure Way to Find Happiness And To Enjoy It Even in the Greatest Tribulations\u201d, you\u2019re just begging for the cosmos to give you a good kicking. However, suicide seems to be very beneficial for a writer\u2019s career for some reason. I\u2019d wager if Virginia Woolf had hung on through the war years and ended up tending roses in Cheltenham in her eighties, she\u2019d be out of print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oddly, Hungarians hardly appear in these pages. The Nobel Laureate Imre Kert\u00e9sz gets a couple of walk-on parts to talk about Auschwitz and democracy, and there\u2019s a mention of B\u00e9la Hamvas, an essayist Hungarians have, unsuccessfully, tried to persuade me is a genius.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel In Siberia And Bursts <\/em>Into Tears<\/em>, smoothly translated by Ottilie Mulzet, is a book that will leave you feeling sharp and more cultured, a sort of intellectual Red Bull. However, I\u2019d argue the late Mih\u00e1ly Szegedy-Masz\u00e1k was a more original cultural commentator and that if Yale is looking for another volume to translate from the Hungarian they should consider Szegedy-Masz\u00e1k\u2019s Word, Picture, Music: An examination of the similarity of the arts<\/em>.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

L\u00e1szl\u00f3 F\u00f6ld\u00e9nyi\u2019s essays are a collection that will leave you feeling sharp and more cultured, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-letters-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lediemchihue.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/110.jpg?fit=637%2C571&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7bhGG-341","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11783,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11781\/revisions\/11783"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}