Tamás Gusztáv Filep posterity, identity

Zsigmond Zalabai’s lifework stems from the Hungárián relations of Czechoslo-vakia in the sixties, seventies, and eighties; and bears the traces of the spiri-tual situation of the era on himself. Obviously, it’s no official aesthetic trend that is reflected in him, since he was one of those who worked consistently on its fali. Almost to the very last, in Zalabai’s lifework that system of idea is pres-ent with which he was in conflict.

If there is any Zalabai-myth, then Tamás Gusztáv Filep is probably its first propagandist, since he wrote a book on Zalabai. The short monograph’s pur-pose is not to foster this myth. It was simply necessary to weigh the lifework of the more important members of the older and middie generation of the Hungárián literature in (Czecho)Slovakia.

In Zalabai’s lifework the positive attitűdé towards the Hungárián literature is many times present. In his work Who is going to see us? from 1978 he expressly criticises that attitűdé that identifies the “Hungárián” poetry with lyric poetry written and published in Hungary, regardless of the fact that the language is the basic matériái and médium of literature, mother language of all of us, that is one and unanimous.

Zalabai, as the first person, examined the renewed world of poetry of Árpád Tőzsér and Lajos Zs. Nagy. Nottalking about László Cselényi, whose works were relatively hardly approachable/understandable on the levél of thattime’s idea and understanding of verses, and Zalabai was again the first person who wrote the first extensive and comprehensive analysis on them.

Through Zalabai’s life the last fifty years of minority history can be seen. His career and work is not primarily (or not only) the subject of theory, but of historiography: the history of idea, education, and institution.

Obviously, the judgement of somé of the lifework by ruling aesthetic dog-mas is not purposeless, but we cannot think that an array of relatively new the-ories will not be of history after a time. The author thinks that it was a great loss that in the aesthetic issues of the last decade – of which one of the stakes is the legitimate existence and relevance of Zalabai’s norms – Zalabai could not participate.