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14 May 2014

Réka M. Cristian

Lamp of Memory – On András Sütő’s Advent in the Hargita Mountains


When I was a child, I used to meet Sütő András bácsi [uncle András Sütő] in Marosvásárhely close to where he lived around the town’s small railway station. Our house was just a couple of streets away from his which meant I would bump into him from time to time. I still remember the very day my father introduced me to András bácsi, who, as my mother said, was a wizard with words. Though we usually greeted each other quite formally, on one lovely spring afternoon I will never forget how he greeted me, calling me by a nickname only my family members knew. “Szervusz kis Réka” [Hello little Réka], he said with a warm intonation and smile, before he continued on his way into town. That was the moment I began to believe in his magic with words, way before I started getting to know his literary works.

Years later, I found myself part of a large crowd applauding his stunning drama Star at the Stake [Csillag a máglyán] superbly staged by the Hungarian Company of the Marosvásárhely National Theatre. Needless to say, I was soon enchanted by his other plays too, all vibrant allegories of the out-of-joint world behind the Iron Curtain in which we lived. Although publication of his works was banned in his home country during the last years of communist dictatorship, that didn’t stop him emerging as a key figure for Transylvanian Hungarians both at home and abroad. After almost a decade of forced silence during the 1980s, I again had the pleasure of hearing András bácsi talk when he delivered a powerful and uplifting speech to an enormous crowd during the early days of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Soon after I would see him for the last time at a silent protest for equal rights in Marosvásárhely on 10 February 1990, part of a sea of marching people full of hope and holding candles and books in our hands. Then during the Black March ethnic clashes of 1990, he was set upon and seriously injured by a mob and lost his left eye.(1) Although we never met again, I closely followed the news about András bácsi, including his departure from Marosvásárhely, his life in Hungary, and his death in 2006.

Now, each time when I go back to my native town, I walk the streets of my childhood with a lamp of memory and gratitude for the magic of Sütő’s words that still live on in my mind and heart. The power of his words and sentences has been a constant companion for me on my many journeys through the Szeklerland and beyond, none more powerful than in his famous play Advent in the Hargita Mountains.

András Sütő (1927–2006), whose “name and work had become associated with the most consistent battle for individual and collective rights of the Hungarian national minority, for the preservation of one’s own language with all the cultural values embedded withit”,(2) was born into  a peasant family in the small Transylvanian village of Pusztakamarás (Kolozs county). He studied at the famous Gábor Bethlen College in Nagyenyed and then at the Reformed Gymnasium in Kolozsvár, where he began writing before starting his studies in directing at the city’s Szentgyörgyi István Theatre Academy. After a short period of time in Bucharest as editor of Falvak Népe [Village folk], he moved back to live in Marosvásárhely, where he wrote most of his works. At the beginning of the 1990s it was in that city, divided almost equally between Hungarians and Romanians that, as he said, “feelings ran highest […] on minority rights”.(3) Sütő claimed that his duty as a writer was first of all to be part of the history of Transylvanian Hungarians and second, to tell the stories of this community and the special features of its minority status.(4)He was true to his word: he became a human rights advocate, an emblematic author and public figure who spoke up for Transylvanian Hungarians.

Sütő started out as editor of the literary magazine Igaz Szó [True word] before moving to a similar journal, Új Élet [New life]. A prolific writer, he authored a considerable number of fiction and numerous plays. Among his most celebrated pieces of fiction is Anyám könnyű álmot ígér [Mother promises a light dream] (1970), a semi-autobiographical, experimental diary-novel, conceived as a lyrical collage knitting together official documents, letters and speeches.(5) It was Sütő’s signature work of fiction and shone a spotlight on the life and literature of the Hungarian minority in Romania. The book, adapted to film in Hungary nine years later,(6) together with a non-fiction book Engedjétek hozzám jönni a szavakat [Let the words come to me] (1977), were the first major works to deal with the increasingly fraught situation of ethnic Hungarians buried deep within a hostile political environment and facing the anti- Hungarian nationalist doctrines of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist dictatorship. The books warned about the tragic evils of the regime including the creeping elimination of the Hungarian language from education and culture in general.

Besides his fiction and non-fiction works, Sütő’s plays have been just as important in preserving the purity of the Hungarian literary language as in bolstering the fading voice of the Hungarian–Transylvanian minority. From the 1960s, his dramatic literature was the most direct form of subversive cultural activity. Many of his works, including Tékozló szerelem [Prodigal love] (1962), Pompás Gedeon élete, halála és feltámadása [The life, death and resurrection of Gorgeous Gideon] (1967), Egy lócsiszár virágvasárnapja [The Palm Sunday of a horse dealer] (1974), Csillag a máglyán [Star at the stake] (1975), Vidám sirató egy bolyongó porszemért [Merry lament for a wandering mote](1977), Káin és Ábel [Cain and Abel] (1979) and A szuzai mennyegző [Wedding at Susa] (1981),(7) employed a special, highly metaphorical language to get round the ever alert communist censorship: these were signals of the author’s serious concern over the deterioration of the Hungarians’ situation in Ceauşescu’s Romania. Disguised as historical dramas, satirical or mythological plays, his dramatic oeuvre covertly described the dangers of assimilationist policies, forced urbanisation and cultural genocide. In his plays, Sütő revealed the omnipresent censorship and pervasive anti-minority propaganda. He ingeniously described the sense of perpetual fear induced by the ubiquitous secret police that led to the gradual eradication of free speech and internal dissent.

Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, the editors and translators of the English- language volume Silenced Voices. Hungarian Plays from Transylvania – comprising translated plays of András Sütő, János Székely, Géza Páskándi, Csaba Lászlóffy and Géza Szőcs –, remarked that “literature in general and theatre in particular played a role in Transylvania” during the years of communist dictatorship that went “far beyond entertainment or art”.(8) In fact, concealed behind the mask of entertainment, the remaining few Hungarian-language theatres scattered through Transylvania were the main institutions, along with the Roman Catholic Church, Reformed, Unitarian and other smaller Neo-Protestant Churches, that held together the Hungarian community and where the mother tongue was allowed to be used in public. In addition, the few journals and books in Hungarian that were permitted were not only highly censored but also decreased considerably in number through the 1980s. In this desperate climate of intense state control, the communist government also saw fit to ban the publication and performance of works by certain writers, including those of Sütő’s in 1983. As a result, his 1980s oeuvre was only ever published in Hungary.

Sütő finished his most famous play, Advent in the Hargita Mountains (1984), a year after his works were banned in Romania. He wrote most of the text (which had a working title Bird of Ice) while he was in Sikaszó, part of the village of Zetelaka, which lies – as the playwright himself described it – at the knees of the Hargita Mountains.(9) Sütő was inspired by the works of Balázs Orbán and Áron Tamási but also by the sublime atmosphere of the local countryside. Not even there was there an escape from the presence of the Securitate [secret police]. Agents entered his summer house by force one day as “uninvited guests” to search it and plant microphones to monitor the family.(10) Not coincidentally, the setting of Advent in the Hargita Mountains is a log house in the heart of Hargita, situated between two enigmatic places with special significance: the first is “at the head of a chasm called ‘Little Destruction’”, while the second lies at the head of “another dizzying chasm in the rocks called ‘Great Destruction’” – both covered “by snow”,(11) in a frozen time of a seemingly perpetual winter. The names of these mysterious neighbourhoods along with the other names and events of the play are, according to the translators of the drama, Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, “transparent metaphors” for the communist “tyranny”, alluding to the “state-sponsored efforts at ethnocide”,(12)which pervade the play.
 
Great Destruction is endowed with various connotations: it symbolises the personal and collective inferno, and alludes to the restrictions on everyday life and the dangers of liminal existence. The toponym stands for remembrance and memory; it signifies a country ruled by a destructive regime. The snowtowers of Great Destruction are constantly present throughout the play so as to remind everyone of its all-pervasive power. One of the characters, Vencel Bódi, describes the overwhelmingly depressive state induced by these chasms by claiming that these abysses stand, paradoxically, “above” all humans, all characters so “that underneath [their] whispers crawling on the earth should create fear”(13)in the hearts and lives of those who dare to approach them.
 
The implied political reality however is even grimmer: Vencel Bódi and Dániel “Miracle-Seer” Zetelaki, the two elders of the play, from the beginning talk about the harsh rules which govern their lives. In a witty and animated dialogue, Bódi and Dániel comment on the risks of talking loudly. This, in the context of the play’s setting, denotes the threat of avalanches descending from the snow-covered winter mountain peaks after loud sounds that humans make but the ironic mode of their dialogue reveals the other side of the coin: the severe restrictions imposed on free speech, where talking “loudly” or publicly was forbidden. Bódi and Dániel also talk about the restrictions on their hunting and shooting activities, an allusion to the regime’s harsh gun control policy that also hints at the limits to free speech and dissident thinking by banning for example subversive publications that could encourage the dangerous “temptation of shouting”, or worse still, a possible revolt.
 
Bódi and Dániel also allude to how during the last two decades of the Romanian communist regime it was easier to count what was allowed rather than what was not:
 
BÓDI: […] Great Destruction is above your head and you’re shouting. DÁNIEL: Earlier, we were allowed to shout. Only shooting was forbidden. BÓDI: Now, both are forbidden.
DÁNIEL: Then what is allowed?
BÓDI: Everything apart from what is not. (A distant sound of an avalanche.)
DÁNIEL (crosses himself): Lord save us from avalanches and temptation.
BÓDI: You didn’t include the temptation of shouting.(14)
 
While Great Destruction is a fictional place, Little Destruction is a real topographical point north of Madarasi-Hargita, the highest peak in the Hargita Mountains, and the remains of a volcanic crater still prone to occasional seismic activity. Little Destruction – although seemingly less “innocent” than Great Destruction – represents the possibility that an authentic natural “revolt” could lead to adevastating earthquake. In this literary context, the implied seismic activity symbolises the threat of rupture and encodes the poetic vision predicting a forthcoming miracle, a change, an upheaval, that is, a revolution. In the last part of the play, by the time the twenty-sixth Advent in a row has come round, Bódi has lost all hope. As he puts it:
 
[W]e have no hope of any more miracles. And even if we did, our unsuitability for miracles stands fully revealed. Miracles ran away from our vicinity like the winged snow bunting, which had no peace from human talk. Everything – what have been good for us – escapes far away especially from our speech, which has been mutilated by Small Destruction and Great Destruction into a ground-crawling whisper and a pale memory of speaking out loud.(15)
 
As the word Advent in the title suggests, the play’s time span coincides with a long period of expectancy, when the characters are waiting for someone important to arrive or something to happen. The Advent, marked by the liturgical rites of one Christmas after another and performed by a chorus of carollers, dancers, musicians and mummers has another meaning however: the wait for the birth of Jesus Christ the Saviour is also a wait for the salvation of the community as a whole. Interestingly, the 1989 protests against Ceauşescu’s communist dictatorship in Romania started during Advent on 16 December 1989 in Temesvár, as a reaction to the removal of László Tőkés, the Hungarian pastor of the Reformed Church, who openly criticised the human rights abuses and the Village Systematisation Program (which, beginning in 1974, led to the razing of around 3,000 villages across Romania, with a planned total of 8,000 by 1988). In a 1989 video recording, Tőkés said that “for many years” the regime had “systematically, step by step, crushed our institutions, our culture, and our schools”, attacking “every form of common ethnic or communal life” including both the Catholic and Calvinist Church, which had to face a “frontal attack” during the final phases of this destructive process. He urged solidarity between Hungarians and Romanians, especially with regard to the forced removal of populations from “selected” rural and urban areas and raised his voice against the “razing of villages”, which had “a subjective and human rights aspect”. Tőkés stressed that what “happens in the minds and souls of men cannot be measured or broadcast worldwide to make the headlines;” it rather needs a road leading “through a great many human tragedies, family tragedies, and defeats suffered by the soul”.(16) Following the mass riots that spread quickly from Temesvár to other cities, the dictator (and his co-ruling wife) were tried and executed for genocide and other crimes on Christmas Day, 1989.

Advent in the Hargita Mountains, completed five years before the Romanian Revolution of 1989, is a collage combining “the liturgical season of Advent with folk tale-like plot elements, ballad-fatality, magic transformations, folk songs, folk customs and rituals, including Christmas games”,(17)archaic and semi-archaic language, historical and political elements, all highlighted in the personal story and tragedy of each character and closely related to various manifestations of Transylvanian–Hungarian identity. Hence, all the characters present different identity markers that blend into a specific, seemingly apolitical context, but which are packed with implicit meaning telling us about the many unspoken problems faced by a frustrated minority.

At the beginning of the play, Vencel Bódi, the “waiting hedgehog”, counts six tiny little Christmas lamps he has made for his daughter Mária, who left the house against her father’s will six years before, to marry a stranger, a “sailor”. She never returns. For Bódi, who waits for her at home year after year, Advent after Advent, Mária’s absence is an impossible situation for him to grasp; she has thrown away her mother’s words as a mountain bird drops her feathers letting them fall into garbage by replacing, as Bódi says, “Hargita for the sea”. “Hargita”, symbolising both the land of her ancestors and her mother tongue, is exchanged for the foreign, unknown realm of the “sea”, the maritime edge of the country, which signifies the remote end of the(ir) world. In this context, Mária stands metaphorically for Hungarians who left their native land due to the assimilationist homogenisation policy of the communist regime that relocated people through the systematisation programme or deliberately sent the younger people (particularly university graduates) to remote Romanian-majority parts of the country in order to “blend” minorities into the majority ethnic fabric; she is also a symbol for those who had to emigrate abroad, be it legally or illegally. While Mária represents the wider Hungarian diaspora, her father, a typical Szekler góbé, a crafty highlander, embodies the enduring tradition of Szeklers of remaining and surviving, against the odds, in their native lands. Accordingly, Bódi’s log house, full of guiding memory lamps, is a metaphor for safe refuge in a threatening world, offering protection and shelter for those daring to walk on the peripheries of both Little Destruction and Great Destruction alike.
 
The other elderly Szekler, “Miracle-Seer” Dániel Zetelaki, is also concerned about his child. The family name, meaning “from Zetelaka”, discloses his place of origin, which coincides with the larger place in which the drama itself was conceived: the centuries- old village of Zetelaka in Hargita county. Like Lazarus, Daniel was resurrected from the dead but despite being named the “miracle-seer” he is no more than a “living dead”, failing to see the real wonders of life because, in a heightened atmosphere of suspicion, he suspects everyone who comes into contact with Gábor his son. Dániel wants to see his son find his right place in life at a time when “all our children are going away”.(18) But Gábor Zetelaki, a talented wood-carver who makes Szekler gates and tomb headboards and who has been in love with Réka Árvai since his childhood, does not seem able to find his inner peace. He feels betrayed because Réka’s widow mother, Borbála Árvai, engaged her daughter to Antal Stég, a strange gamekeeper, who “sold” himself to the state – and Réka, at first, followed her mother’s ill-fated advice: she left with her fiancé only to yearn constantly for Gábor, her true love. While Gábor is an untainted, uncorrupted man of moral integrity, Stég embodies evil temptation and stands for moral compromise: for a well-paid state salary he becomes a gamekeeper, keeping an eye on and informing on local people. Moreover, his name, meaning “pier”, is also symbolic: he is the path that leads people into troubled waters, and his love, Réka, into the “sea” of a desolate, prearranged relationship. Unlike Mária, who runs away from her father’s harsh patriarchal domination, Réka obeys her mother and accepts Stég. Aghast at Mária’s choice, Gábor disappears from the world for twenty years, into the “gorges” of Great Destruction. Much later the penitent Réka searches for him at the foot of Great Destruction, moving even “more snow with her own hands” than Gábor’s own father. She has always been closest to Gábor, her childhood love, and finally refuses to marry Stég, despite having had a daughter with him. Upon his miraculous return, Gábor discovers that Réka left Stég before their illegitimate child, little Réka Stég, was born.
 
The most complex character of the play is Réka Árvai. Her nickname, “Red-headed, blue Bird of Ice”, alludes to the figure of the kingfisher, which, in turn, symbolises peace, prosperity and magical experience; it is also a solitary winged creature that plunges into unknown waters, just like the fearless Réka. Her name is of old, untranslatable Hun descent, popular among Transylvanian Hungarians. Her family name, Árvai, meanwhile hints at her orphan (“árva”) status, personifying the isolated, secluded nature of the Transylvanian Hungarians in communist Romania. Árvai has a daughter, called Young Réka (Kisréka, or “little Réka”), who takes after her mother. According to the playwright’s instructions, Réka and Young Réka must be played by the same actress to emphasise their striking similarity. The actress in Réka’s role embodies the threefold image of the archetypal woman through time, which becomes the play’s ultimate symbol of life, creation, pain, forgiveness, hope and, ultimately, salvation. Réka and Young Réka, the mother and her child, are the authentic messengers of unadulterated faith by bringing the spirit of holiday and Nativity with their presence and their Christmas songs in the wilderness of the Hargita Mountains. They also help to assuage Bódi’s grief by replacing somewhat his own absent daughter and granddaughter; moreover, they both love Gábor. Hence, each Réka becomes her own mother when they are with Gábor: while Réka enacts Borbála, Young Réka becomes, against her will, her own mother’s younger version. The end is inevitable: whatever they do, both have to face the loss of the loved one. After twenty years, Gábor returns and, unknowingly, betrays Réka with Young Réka, as Réka had betrayed him with Antal Stég before. Full of despair, on a tragic Christmas day, Réka plunges into the wild followed by Gábor, who runs out into the mountains after her in the direction of her voice. In the end, the noise triggers a fatal avalanche from Great Destruction, the huge power outside their control, that kills both of them. Young Réka and Uncle Vencel Bódi continue on, just about getting by in anticipation to “look after each other among the living” as long as they live, hoping that they will have, as the playwright’s poetic closure shows, “enough lamps for the waiting”.

Since Sütő’s works were banned from publication in his native land, Advent in the Hargita Mountains was first printed in the 1985 December issue of the Szeged-based literary journal, Tiszatáj.(19) The journal also contextualised what was a dissident work in a group of articles that appeared at the time of the play’s premiere. These included “Sütő András a Nemzeti Színházban” [András Sütő in the National Theatre], written by Ferenc Sík, the director of the play’s first performance in the National Theatre; “Esemény” [The event] by Imre Sinkovits, who was cast in the role of Vencel Bódi; and an essay by András Görömbei, the author of the 1986 Sütő András monograph, on another of the playwrights’ works, Star at the Stake. The play was then republished by Püski Publishing in New York (1986) and issued in a revised edition by the Budapest-based Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó in 1987. Today, both versions of Advent in the Hargita Mountains are part of the complete digitalised works of András Sütő available online in Hungarian on the website of Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum, Digitális Irodalmi Akadémia [Petőfi Literary Museum, Digital Literary Academy].(20)

The premiere of Advent in the Hargita Mountains sparked a diplomatic row. According to the Romanian communist authorities, the play gave a distorted image of how the Hungarian minority lived,(21) and as a result, Bucharest officials protested vehemently against its performance in Hungary. From “fear of offending the communist government of Romania”, the communist government of Hungary first tried to “officially block its scheduled premiere in Budapest” because both parties “rightly discerned the play’s politically dangerous image of people trapped by forces beyond their control”. However, following a “large, sustained protest”, after which even some prominent Hungarian officials were convinced of the importance of the event, the play was allowed to be performed on 2 January 1986,(22) soon after the original date of 15 December 1985. On premiere night, it played before a capacity audience at the Hungarian National Theatre in Budapest. The historic performance was directed by Ferenc Sík, with music by György Orbán, setting by József Bakó, choreography by Ernő Pesovár, costumes by Judit Schäffer, and with the following cast: Anna Kubik (as Réka Árvai and Kisréka), Frigyes Funtek (Gábor Zetelaki), Imre Sinkovits (Vencel Bódi), Anna Götz (Bódi’s daughter, Mária) and Gábor Agárdi (as Dániel Zetelaki). As Sütő wrote on the occasion of the 100th production of the play (on 2 May 1988), these artists turned his solitary dream into a powerful stage reality.

The first performance then was a huge success, as were the many ones which followed in Hungary and later in Romania. Those who were “unable to get inside” to see the first public performance of Advent in the Hargita Mountains “crowded into the theatre foyer where one of them began spontaneously to read the play out loud to the others”(23)from the Tiszatáj journal, which ran out of copies shortly after it was published. At the National Theatre in Budapest, Advent in the Hargita Mountains received “a thirty minutes ovation”, with Anna Kubik (Réka) going into the auditorium “as if in search of the missing playwright”, who could not attend the premiere of his play since he was denied his passport by the Romanian authorities; however, after making his absence visible to the audience “she returned to the stage, took off her shawl and spread it centre stage where it stood in for the playwright to tumultuous applause”.(24) Sütő finally saw himself the performance of Advent in the Hargita Mountains only later after the opening performance in Budapest on a recorded videotape which was sent to his home in Marosvásárhely.

The premiere also triggered changes in the political attitude of Hungarian authorities towards the fate of the Hungarian minority in Romania. As Enikő Bollobás wrote in her review of Silenced Voices. Hungarian Playwrights from Transylvania, subsequent performances of Advent in the Hargita Mountains “contributed prominently to the history of resistance to totalitarianism in the whole region”.(25)

 

1 For more on these events see Sherrill Stroschein’s book Ethnic Struggle, Coexistence, and Democratization in Eastern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially the chapter entitled “Local Violence and Uncertainty in Târgu-Mureş”, 94–116.
2 Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, “Introduction: Falling Through the Cracks”. In Silenced Voices. Hungarian Plays from Transylvania. Selected and translated into English by Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse (Dublin: Carysfort Press Ltd., 2008), 7.
3 András Sütő, “Democracy has no nationality”. Transcript of the television interview broadcast on 19 March 1990 published in The New Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. XXXIV, No. 118 (Summer 1990), 12.
4 Ibolya Cs. Nagy, “Bevezetés”. In Sütő András világa, Ed. Ilona Karádi (Budapest: Officina, 2010), 7.
5 Lajos Kántor and Gusztáv Láng, Romániai magyar irodalom 1945–1970 [The Hungarian literature of Romania] (Bukarest: Kriterion, 1971), 165.
6 Anyám könnyű álmot ígér [Mother promises a light dream] (1979, 102 minutes) was a television film directed by Ferenc Sík with the following cast: István Szilágyi, Emil Győry, Ferenc Zenthe, Mari Törőcsik, Sándor Szabó, Antal Páger, Hilda Gobbi and József Bihari.
7 Pompás Gedeon élete, halála és feltámadása [The life, death and resurrection of Gorgeous Gideon] was directed by György Harag and presented by the Hungarian language company of Marosvásárhely Nemzeti Színház in Marosvásárhely in 1967 but was banned after six performances. Egy lócsiszár virágvasárnapja [The Palm Sunday of a horse dealer] came out in Igaz Szó (1974/3) and was first performed in Hungary at Csiky Gergely Theatre in Kaposvár in 1974, directed by Gábor Zsámbéky; the same year, the play had its premiere in Transylvania at Kolozsvár’s Állami Magyar Színház under the direction of György Harag. Csillag a máglyán [Star at the stake], published in Igaz Szó (1975), was first performed by the theatre company of Madách Színház in Budapest (directed by Ottó Ádám) and had its opening afterwards in Kolozsvár (dir. György Harag). Vidám sirató egy bolyongó porszemért [Merry lament for a wandering mote] was staged by the Hungarian language theatre company of Marosvásárhelyi Nemzeti Színház in Marosvásárhely in 1977; Káin és Ábel [Cain and Abel] (1979) had its premiere in Kolozsvár, directed by György Harag. A szuzai mennyegző [Wedding at Susa], published in 1981, was performed during the same year in Kolozsvár (directed by György Harag) and then at Nemzeti Színház [Hungarian National Theatre] in Budapest (directed by József Ruszt). Álomkommandó [The dream commando] was presented in 1987 in the Budapest-based Vígszínház, while Balkáni gerle [The Balkan dove] premiered in 1995 at the National Theatre in Budapest. In Romániai magyar irodalmi lexikon [Encyclopaedia of the Hungarian literature of Romania], Vol. V/1 S–Sz, Gen. ed. Gyula Dávid (Erdélyi Múzeum Egyesület: Kolozsvár and Kriterion Könyvkiadó: Bukarest–Kolozsvár, 2010), 226–227.
8 Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, “Introduction: Falling Through the Cracks”, 4.
9 Quoted by Ibolya Cs. Nagy in Sütő András világa, Ed. Ilona Karádi (Budapest: Officina, 2010), 85.
10 Ibolya Cs. Nagy’s “Sikaszó” and András Sütő’s diary excerpts. In Sütő András világa, Ed. Ilona
Karádi (Budapest: Officina, 2010), 86, 87.
11 András Sütő, Advent in the Hargita Mountains. In Silenced Voices. Hungarian Plays from Transylvania. Selected and translated into English by Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse (Dublin: Carysfort Press Ltd., 2008), 26.
12 Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, “Introduction: Falling Through the Cracks”, 6.
13 András Sütő, Advent in the Hargita Mountains, 81.
14 András Sütő, Advent in the Hargita Mountains, 27.
15 András Sütő, Advent in the Hargita Mountains, 97.
16 “Tumbling the wall of silence. The Rev. László Tőkés Speaks”. Talk videorecorded at the manse in Temesvár and broadcast by Hungarian television, as part of its “Panoráma” programme, on Monday night, 24 July 1989. Its edited and abbreviated transcript was published in The New Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. XXXI, No. 117 (Spring 1990), 12–13.
17 Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, “Introduction: Falling Through the Cracks”, 5.
18 András Sütő, Advent in the Hargita Mountains, 71.
19 András Sütő, Advent a Hargitán. In Tiszatáj, Vol. XXXIX, No. 12 (December 1985), 2–31.
20Sütő András digitalizált művei [The digitized works of András Sütő]. Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum, Digitális Irodalmi Akadémia. 17 September 2013. http://www.pim.hu/object.a01eb5ca-c949-49d4-82b4-87845bcacdf5.ivy
21 In Romániai magyar irodalmi lexikon [Encyclopaedia of the Hungarian literature of Romania], Vol. V/1 S–Sz, Gen. ed. Gyula Dávid (Erdélyi Múzeum Egyesület: Kolozsvár and Kriterion Könyvkiadó: Bukarest–Kolozsvár, 2010), 228.
22 Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, “Introduction: Falling Through the Cracks”, 6.
23 Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, “Introduction: Falling Through the Cracks”, 7.
24 See László Ablonczy, Nemzeti lélekharang: Jászai Maritól Bubik Istvánig. Beszélgetések, jegyzetek, történeti töredékek [National soul bell: Interviews, notes and historical pieces from Mari Jászai to István Bubik] (Budapest: Codex, 2007), quoted by Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse, “Introduction: Falling Through the Cracks”. In Silenced Voices. Hungarian Plays from Transylvania. Selected and translated into English by Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse (Dublin: Carysfort Press Ltd., 2008), 7.
25 Enikő Bollobás, “Silenced Voices. Hungarian Plays from Transylvania”. Hungarian Review, Vol. II, Nr. 6. (18 November 2011). http://hungarianreview.com/article/silenced_voices


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