A Budapest Interview with Tibor Fischer

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Notes

1 The major regime-change of 1989–1990 ending the era of Soviet-style Socialism and the one-party system in Hungary and East-Central Europe.

2 The story referred to is ‘Ice Tonight in the Heart of Young Visitors’. Fischer, Don’t Read this Book, 148–55. (See bibliography for a complete list of Fisher’s published works in the English original and Hungarian translation.)

3 In actual fact, Crushed Mexican Spiders, the writer’s second short-story collection, has not been translated into Hungarian; on the other hand, How to Rule the World has not only been translated, but has appeared in print since this interview was made; see Bibliography.

4 Voyage to the End of the Room is now slated for publication in Hungarian later this year by MCC Print.

5 Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) is a Budapest-based college of advanced studies founded in 1996 with the intention of becoming ‘the leading talent promotion institution in the Carpathian Basin’ according to the mission statement of the institution. (See https://mcc.hu/en/presentation.)

6 Slavoj Žižek (1949–) a philosopher and public intellectual promoting Marxist theory with a Freudian twist and making frequent pronouncements on political issues of current interest. He is employed in very senior positions by several institutions of higher learning in the UK, his native Slovenia and elsewhere, including the University of London and the University of Ljubljana.

7 In the 2010s Fischer served as Programme Director for the M.A. in creative writing at Canterbury Christ Church University.

8 érettségi: ‘matura’ examination; (secondary) school-leaving exam (the Hungarian equivalent of the GCSE).

9 Gondolta a fene – ‘The hell I thought that’.

10 A reference to Roland Barthes seminal essay of 1967 ’The Death of the Author’ (originally ‘La mort de l'auteur’). David Lodge contested the theory in the ‘Introduction’ to his essay-collection After Bakhtin, claiming ‘a sort of personal responsibility’ for the novels he writes (London: Routledge, 1990. 15).

11 See the photo taken by Yuliia Terentieva in figure 1.