That he could be a guardian; that within the “consciousness of the Hungarians of Transylvania” he, too, could stand guard as a guardian – this can be understood by András Sütő himself as both the purpose and justification of literary existence. In the confessional speech he delivered in Sopron on his seventy-fifth birthday (2002), he emphasised the indispensable service-nature of writing for him: “In the dual relationship of life and literature, life must have priority, for art is its handmaiden” (“Őrző lehettem a strázsán” – I Could Be a Guardian on Watch). He represented this creative stance in a literary public sphere where the aesthetic value of literature-as-text was elevated almost exclusively on the basis of its formal structure, while the concepts of authorial vocation and the compulsion to express fate are pushed into regions deemed beneath the aesthetic value – everything that aspires to be more than text: that seeks to be a message, perhaps even a communal message, at times a spiritual-moral support, a signpost. “In contemporary poetic interpretation, the Siamese-twin relationship of the I-consciousness and the We-consciousness is cut in two. How is this? I! I! I! – cries the subjective poet as a law of nature, only to continue thus: no one, nothing else, only I! I, and always only I have been and am, like God, by myself and for myself. I! I! I!” – he writes elsewhere (Pohárnyi köszöntő – Görömbei Andrásnak – A Glassful of Greetings – To András Görömbei, 2004). And in contrast, speaking of himself, he states: “If of my efforts and of the written torments of my sleepless nights there remains even such a tender trace or memory as that of a bird rising from fresh snow – this may already be a justification for the fact that for a little while I, too, was here, lived here on this earth with you, with my fellow sufferers in a Grand Principality forced off the map, which we so many times travelled together on a dream-carriage of the wish for human justice, fairness, a life without fear and humiliation, and the eternal right to remembrance” (Bevezető helyett – Instead of an Introduction, 1992).

He therefore asserted that, as a writer living in post-Trianon Romania, his task was to elevate into literature a community constrained by linguistic, cultural, and historical necessities: his task was to be a participant and an actor in this community’s history, and to tell this history to others. In the Romanian dictatorship of the 1970s he spoke of how the particularity of a coerced situation – the daily experience, acceptance, and endurance of this particularity – can itself grant moral dignity. Sleeping Beauty must thus be awakened from her slumber, the distinctive marks and symptoms of minority existence must be preserved, revealed, torn from the grasp of time, yet at the same time elevated to a height lying outside the concrete “coordinate system of space and time.”

His oeuvre took shape in the spirit of this intention, according to its imperatives. The concepts of the “personality-oriented” and the “freedom-oriented” cannot be set in opposition without mutilating or distorting either: aesthetic value is not measured within the framework of mission-driven writing or universalism, nor according to their units of measure. At the same time, it is also difficult to refute the assertion that “a writer bears responsibility for shaping the spiritual and moral condition of a community” (András Görömbei). In András Sütő’s oeuvre, the traditional elements of fate-literature and the formal components of aesthetic creation appear in an exceptional unity: experience and stylisation, communal determination and artistic transfiguration. The “outer zones of reality and moral impulses” are built into the inherently aesthetic medium of representation, and within the intellectual and formal world of the completed work they open “strikingly suggestive perspectives” through the profound system of interrelations between artistic beauty and moral implication (Zoltán Bertha). According to Árpád Farkas, “we would be poorer for the lack of the substance, the essence of the sentences and words he has carried to us, without his universal demand that stretches from civil courage to artistic boldness, binding together every value in Transylvania that threatened to crumble, and turning the mother tongue into a rich foliage”; both Transylvanian literature and, at all times, the universal Hungarian literature would be poorer without the literary representation of the András Sütő-like experience of life and sense of fate.

His prose and dramas, which function as signal flares, break apart earlier, canonised forms and languages of prose and drama, and become distinguished examples of modern, metaphorised prose and drama. In newer Hungarian prose, his works perhaps most clearly exemplify “the practice of expanding meaning and creating multivalence through metaphor” (Sándor Olasz). Over the course of his creative periods, starting from the traditional short-story type, he took possession of numerous formations in the history of poetics, and he is able to speak about moral and ethical questions, about possible attitudes in response to the specificities of minority existence, in such a way that ideology – which ultimately takes shape from situations of dignity, indignity, humiliation, or indeed moral opposition – is able, in the most contemporary poetic realisation, to highlight and place within the realm of aesthetic experience the determinants of fate of the Hungarian minority in Romania. These appear together with the hereditary, universally typical situations of our shared human condition: localising the universal and placing the concrete beneath the vast arch of the universal. His visualising, symbol-creating narrative and dramatic language enriches multilayered, metaphorically expandable dramaturgical situations with multiple interpretive possibilities, and offers those who take possession of the work the experience of the aesthetic pleasure of language use.

The earliest pieces of his literary career were published from 1948 onward in Utunk in Cluj (Kolozsvár); his first published short story was Hajnali győzelem (Victory at Dawn) in Utunk (1948). In 1950 his first drama, Mezítlábas menyasszony (The Barefoot Bride), co-written with Zoltán Hajdú, appeared. His first short-story collection, Emberek indulnak (People Set Out), was published in 1953, followed by a second volume of stories and sketches, Egy pakli dohány (A Packet of Tobacco), in 1954. Based on his critically spirited short story Félrejáró Salamon (Salamon Goes Astray, 1955), a film was made under the direction of György Turcu; after its Bucharest premiere the work was banned in 1956 as an “enemy production”. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he wrote several stage plays: Fecskeszárnyú szemöldök (Swallow-Winged Eyebrow, 1958); Szerelem, ne siess! (Love, Do Not Hurry!, 1961); and Tékozló szerelem (Prodigal Love, 1962), which was a fusion of the two preceding plays.

Critics describe the beginnings of his career as a writer of short stories – his early literary presence – in tones of complete disagreement. Some claim that this period shows András Sütő as the storyteller and playwright of the Communist Party; others maintain that he was the most critical writer of the 1950s, the first to articulate a critique of the spirit of the age. In the developmental process that unfolded in the young Sütő’s personality, outlook, and craftsmanship, there are indeed works that can be forgotten: simplified pieces weighed down by an “anecdotal” tendency that attempts to compensate for the lack of self-recognition (as noted by Zoltán Bertha). But there are, especially by the end of this early period, works of era-defining value as well – pieces that already sweep aside ideological preconceptions, transforming experiential material into artistic form. Alongside several powerful early stories that depict human – and particularly poor people’s – vulnerability with dramatic force (Egy csupor zsír [A Jar of Fat], Egy pakli dohány [A Packet of Tobacco], Virágot megette a kanyar [The Bend Devoured Virág], Jön a tenger [The Sea Is Coming]), the short novel Félrejáró Salamon (Salamon Goes Astray, 1956) may best represent this initial phase. This latter work is a diagnosis of a power that humiliates a person to the point of nausea yet cannot destroy him morally or mentally. Its reach extends toward the late 1960s as well, when the play Pompás Gedeon (Magnificent Gedeon) would be born. “Humanity laughs as it parts with its past. But who can tell whether the tear beneath its eye comes from laughter or rather from crying?” – writes Sütő about this tragicomic age and its cheerful games. Although he drew amply on the repertoire of folk theatre and earlier writers nourished by it – on elements of farce, commedia dell’arte, student theatre, following in the footsteps of Csokonai, Áron Tamási, and Gyula Illyés – he blends robust humour with a satirical spirit and the sharp social critique born of growing situational awareness. Magnificent Gedeon (1967) is an outstanding work of this period: because although Gedeon has victims, he is a victim himself. His error is an error, writes the author – a tragicomic figure, a human being who has lost his personality and congealed into a role. Even the writerly tools of situational and character-based comedy cannot strip him of the alarming traits of depersonalisation and the withering of the self. After the plays that embedded the bitterness of minority existence in a fairy-tale-like, surrealistic yet satirical framework, his later work Vidám sirató egy bolyongó porszemért (A Merry Lament for a Wandering Speck of Dust, 1976) fused the necessary bitterness with the earlier “Fügedes” stories, becoming a literary depiction of a community that has “lost its hoops” – fallen apart.

A new chapter began in András Sütő’s career in 1970, and one of its radiant creations is his essay-novel, diary-novel Anyám könnyű álmot ígér (Mother Promises a Light Dream): the epic prototype of anxiety wrapped in a smile, of bitterness disguised as cheerfulness. Because of the simultaneous presence of direct depiction of reality and literary intention, the work deservedly received the title of the “Mezőség version of People of the Puszta” (as Olasz Sándor described it). Its objectivity and realist elements, passing through the filter of authorial reflection, are tinged with fairy-tale, ironic and anecdotal qualities. Yet this happens in such a way that the loving, gentle cheerfulness that often characterises the narrator’s tone and stylisation does not diminish or invalidate the inherent tragedy within the elements of reality. Irony and self-irony are themselves mental traits of the depicted community, characteristic markers of its worldview and mode of existence. After the publication of Mother Promises a Light Dream in 1970 – still his best-known book – some readers then and now claim that Sütő’s humour conceals and neutralises tragedy: they believed that the novel’s brilliant linguistic humour and comic stories essentially resolve the existential tragedy of the Mezőség world it depicts. However, the humour of András Sütő’s outlook and language stems precisely from the fact that this worldview is not the dark and hopeless perspective of Greek tragedy. Sütő’s characters, even when conveying metaphorical messages, are flesh-and-blood, worldly human beings, bearing all the dramas, comedies and tragicomedies of earthly existence, wandering and error – and all the cheerfulness and unextinguished hope of life. Sütő’s humour does not cover things up; rather, it opens a gap, a passage through which we can step back from the stories, for it grants us the possibility of external contemplation, of the necessary distance. This humour creates distance, and this distance is exactly what is needed for a more sober, realistic and clearer interpretation of the situation – one that strengthens the authenticity of the portrayal. “Wedding: front side and reverse side” – he would later write as the subtitle to the drama Balkáni gerle (Balkan Dove). And indeed, his humour truly presents the front and the reverse together. This is one of the elements that make Sütő’s prose language modern: the spaciousness of representation, the sense of perspective, the sparking together of opposites, the dialogic situations. In this way he is able to elevate the dramas, comedies and tragicomedies of individuals into a communal existential condition – and conversely as well: great ideas become authenticated for us through the sometimes traumatic human destinies embodied within them. For Mother Promises a Light Dream is indeed a laugh-inducing read, a treasury of linguistic and situational comedy – but does this in any way diminish the reader’s recognition that the work is, sociologically as well, an accurate portrait of the Mezőség, Pusztakamarás Hungarian minority compelled to fight daily life-and-death struggles for the use of its mother tongue, its mother-tongue cultural practices, and its experience of national identity? The work has an enormous critical reception, which – in addition to emphasising the modernity of its genre-crossing form – highlights, among other things, the “richness of epic perspectives”, the harmony of the “subjective self-portrait” with “analytical regional sociography”, the unity of historical-generational distance with social immediacy, and the lyricism and sensitivity of the narrator’s voice. András Sütő created an individual literary form in which the “existential depth of narration” and the “conceptual elements of autobiographical confession” form a strong synthesis with the factual elements that appear on the narrative level. Mother Promises a Light Dream is “the intellectual concentration of unassailable social insights” (Zoltán Bertha).

In the increasingly oppressive dictatorship of the 1970s, under the ever more dehumanising conditions of minority life – and in response to the “strong intellectual demand” (as Görömbei put it) that was becoming increasingly prominent in Romanian Hungarian drama – András Sütő’s sequence of historical plays was born one after another. The creative anxiety that weighed on and haunted the author – the problem of the conflict between power and the person who, as a minority, is forced into a subordinate relation to that power – grew beyond the message-bearing possibilities of the earlier comic plays; these dramas address the present through historical parallels. Egy lócsiszár virágvasárnapja (A Horse-Groom’s Palm Sunday, 1974), Csillag a máglyán (A Star on the Pyre, 1975), Káin és Ábel (Cain and Abel, 1977), and the somewhat later Szuzai menyegző (The Wedding at Susa, 1980), whose intellectual foundations had already been outlined in the 1972 essay Perzsák (The Persians), all evoke significant moments of human history and mythology, “from the only possible point of view, which is that of the Present, for we belong to it with every nerve fibre,” Sütő writes. In the dramas, the fundamental behavioural conflict appears as “the clash between a person who is sensitive to the sovereignty of his personality, who walks with head held high, and the submissive individual who merely wishes to survive, who in fear has grown cowardly” (András Görömbei). In different ways in each work – differently in the case of Mihály Kolhaas, of Calvin and Michael Servetus, of Cain and Abel, and differently in the individual and collective struggle of the mothers who, after the political alliance symbolised by The Wedding at Susa, nevertheless insist on teaching their newborns their mother tongue – yet ultimately, in every play, the “moral–philosophical questions of how to remain” are examined. The author seeks ethical models of behaviour that are universally valid and capable of resolving the concerns of both individuals and communities. In his notable essay (The Dramaturgy and Philosophy of the ‘Head Held High’, 1978), Ernő Gáll – referring also to a thought by Imre Mikó – analyses the idea and philosophy of the dignity of distinctiveness, the dignity of conduct, and the defence of human dignity, and finds these in András Sütő’s historical dramas. That is, the moral–ideational messages that span centuries: messages of the person who resists degrading and anti-human power, a power that seeks to crush the personality, and who bears the distinctiveness of his situation – his minority existence – with dignity.

Cain and Abel stands out in the tetralogy through the modernity of its depicted fundamental situation. The play represents the very first, the primordial trauma. The first to resist, the first to disobey a command – Eve – creates a chain of conflicts and actions around herself. Every character in the drama acts and decides under the impact of traumatic experiences; and because trauma wounds, they defend themselves against the shock of experience through substitute actions, talking around things, compulsive behavioural and verbal automatisms. The play can be described as a model work of trauma theories, demonstrating that a methodological approach rooted in the therapeutic procedures of psychoanalysis and later integrated into aesthetics offers excellent possibilities for understanding and interpreting the psychologically credible characters the author constructs. The inner-turning drama of consciousness, the “conflict situations unfolding in the soul” (Zoltán Bertha), unlike the classical dramatic structure, does not arise from a clash between strong and weak, good and evil, the subordinate and the directing, the dominated and the dominating. There is no adversary and no enemy in the work: God is neither. The struggle against the transcendent, Cain’s struggle, cannot be victorious by definition. The figures do not fight; they merely relate in one way or another to a metaphysical force that surpasses them under all circumstances. This consciousness-drama form, which rejects traditional dramatic-poetic devices and relies primarily on the power of words, is a highly significant authorial choice. For the mythic-biblical dramatic situations of the first humans – helpless against transcendental power, with activity limited and tending towards passivity – this form provides a fitting frame, just as it suits the consciousness-struggles of modern humans suffering in the philosophical uncertainties of existence. Human beings cannot separate themselves from God even in the new millennium, yet after the centuries of certainty have passed, they essentially ask the same questions as the first doubter, Cain, and his dramatic precursor Adam, who addressed the Lord in resigned fashion, no longer expecting an answer. This doubt, searching for certainty, has once again become a defining trait of modern humanity. The play is also a drama of the history of faith. From the theological and psychological basic situation of dependence and unquestioning, blissful humility, it leads toward the modern human’s necessarily transformed image of God: in “three cries of woe”, over the course of a brief two hours of stage time, the author traverses many millennia. The drama displays archetypal situations, feelings, temperamental and emotional reactions. Human history from then on is essentially the repetition of these same emotions, tempers, existential situations. Cain and Abel matured into András Sütő’s most modern drama; it was brought to that maturity by humanity’s sense of time-created individual exile, and by the level of conceptualisation that reaches beyond mythological life-situations, enabling the attunement of the mythic, the sacred past and the profane present (Zoltán Bertha). The past carries the present and vice versa: the present becomes the metaphorical manifestation of the drama’s past. A work thus “clothed” can speak validly as long as humans are capable of defining, interpreting, and experiencing these archetypal situations and emotions.

From here, from the historical tetralogy, from the most serious, summarizing dramas of the oeuvre, the path opened in two directions for the playwright András Sütő.

On one branch, the historical baseline – though one that draws ever nearer in time – remained in place as a kind of warp thread. The 1987 drama Az álomkommandó (The Dream Commando), by linking the dimensions of dream and reality and employing a play-within-a-play structure, suggests the timelessness and universality of fascism’s historically documented terror and the universality of existential peril. It does so with unmistakable contemporary political signals: the play opens a passage between vision, dream, hallucination and real events through the dramaturgical situations of both the Romanian regime’s terroristic acts of brutality – aimed at destroying minorities and otherness – and the dream images.

Although Az ugató madár (The Barking Bird) – the next drama – had its first version completed as early as 1985, the play, awakened from its “Sleeping Beauty dream,” appeared only in 1993 in Tiszatáj. Writing in 1989 about the then still dormant drama, designated by the genre label “Magyars in Three Acts,” András Sütő confessed in a note: “A drama that may be called historical about the Székely martyrs (1852) – about the Vásárhely years of the Bach era, when the Hungarians of the town (those who accepted office) were all servants of the regime and at the same time participants in the secret conspiracy. This is the framework and the historical material; the soul of the drama, however, is the author’s present sense of existence in the current condition of Transylvania.” And this sense of existence, once again, was decidedly lacking the cloudless cheerfulness unburdened by the oppressive concerns of the paths of survival, of their limited possibilities and their price.

The other well-trodden dramatic path for Sütő led toward folklore, fairy tale, and the creatures and locales of the balladic and mythical world: toward the landscapes of modern yet folklore-compatible surrealism found in the 1985 Székely legend Advent a Hargitán (Advent in the Hargita Mountain), and in the 1986 peasant mystery play Kalandozások Ihajcsuhajdiában (Adventures in Ihajcsuhajdia), whose scenes evoke not only the raucous humour of folk plays – darkened into a kind of Great-Ida laughter – but also the fairy-tale world of the Romanian Creangă. On the one hand these works draw nearer to the present; on the other hand they smooth the daily burdens of existence into the timelessness of the tale. Sütő wrote Advent in the Hargita Mountain “in hope conceived in sorrow,” to ease the painful constriction of the throat, with a heart longing for relief. “I have sown immense sorrow on paper as I pondered the perils of the Great Ruin,” he confessed, once more sending the play along a Calvary-like theatrical path. Despite all its surreal, fairy-tale, poetic suspension and timelessness, the present-day Zete-Mountain setting of Advent in the Hargita Mountain, the Hargita house chosen as the stage location, the dwindling, morally eroding community fearing the destruction of its mother tongue and weakening in both ethical and communal strength, the villagers condemned to silence at the foot of the mountain called the Great Ruin, the parent mourning a child who has emigrated, travelled “to the Sea,” assimilated, the girl bereft of her beloved – all speak clearly and warningly of the already life-and-death struggle of Romanian Hungarians in the raging dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. The admonition is grave: the villagers condemned to silence and the girl mourning her lover unto death may indeed breathe life back into the young man lost in the snow – with balladic dramaturgy. But time has passed! That life is no longer the same life. The miracle required balladic intervention – but in our everyday lives, deprived of miracles, we must think carefully before allowing anything of value to perish: communal, personal, love, homeland, language. There may be a possibility to correct fate – but nothing will ever again be the same. In this play there are no heroic protagonists or heroic deeds; the waiting of those who remain, the mountain people, is the most positive behavioural option. And the adversary no longer shows itself with the clarity found in the historical dramas: here the snow-laden mountain of the Great Ruin becomes the symbol of fate and danger. The system itself is the adversary: nowhere and everywhere at once. The heroes of earlier dramas disappear; there is no longer any possibility for personal, individual, head-held-high resistance. Hope would lie in communal strength, yet its diminishing may lead to the destruction of the community. We witness a shift in outlook in the play: signs of a sensitive acknowledgement of the changes taking place in the conditions and behavioural possibilities of minority existence. The alternating dramatic layers between tale and real existence – the real and imagined space and time, the realistic and the unreal event-elements and processes, the moral-political-mental specificity seeping in from the present alongside the arche-forms of cultural anthropology – all appear in the play as a striking, singular alloy.

The message that lies beyond the fairy tale in the 1986 fairy-tale drama Kalandozások Ihajcsuhajdiában (Adventures in Ihajcsuhajdia) is similar. This work, too, speaks of nothing other than the struggles of a human being and a community whose fundamental rights are obstructed, who are forced into silence, whose freedom is restricted. It depicts a world whose minority condition and situational absurdity the writer signals through a tale turned entirely into its own opposite. The play suggests that we can no longer trust even in God; thus, the only remaining human possibilities are cunning, defiance, and the courage to endure one’s own misery with humour. Yet how far this already stands from the dignity of distinctiveness! As the historical and political atmosphere darkens, the struggle for existence of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania becomes ever more absurd in Adventures in Ihajcsuhajdia, ever more deheroised, and increasingly driven by circumstances rather than by inner moral need or steadfastness.

Until he arrives at the tragicomic fundamental situation of Balkáni gerle (Balkan Dove, 1999): the play is a model drama of the human being and the community stripped once and for all of the dignity of action, morally devalued, forced into petty cunning, ashamed of themselves. “A person can lose everything, but they can be destroyed in their moral being only if the last spark of their sense of human dignity is extinguished” – said Sütő when speaking of the “head-held-high” heroes of his historical dramas. In the 1980s, the Romanian dictatorship strove to bring the Hungarian community of Romania precisely to this state of lost self-respect. The novelty and merit of Balkan Dove lies in its depiction of this tragically self-esteem-crushing condition, emphasised by its motto: “Vivere non est necesse! Mentiri necesse est” – it is not necessary to live, but it is necessary to lie. The historical dramas and the plays that followed them still offered behavioural models: increasingly diminished in heroism and dignity, yet nevertheless followable, even if woven together from strands of reality and unreality. In Balkan Dove, however, the defence of home, of family and community, of individuality – indeed, the very possibility of remaining in one’s homeland, of staying in place – has become almost impossibly difficult, and the forms of action that might still serve these aims, with their petty deceptions, lies, and self-humiliating tactics, are anything but standards or examples to follow. One must lie: this is not the dramaturgy or philosophy of the head held high. The play is a catastrophic diagnostic portrait of the minority condition.

Meanwhile, the seventies and eighties were also the years of the birth of the great essays.

Engedjétek hozzám jönni a szavakat (Let the Words Come to Me, 1977), the “novelised treatise on language protection” (as Sándor Olasz put it), leads the reader into the bell-resonant vastness of the mother tongue, and its notes on the birth of speech offer the subtly nuanced beauty of an authorial style that, within contemporary Hungarian literature, is uniquely expressive and represents a modern linguistic version of archaic figurative language. The work embodies one variation of the essay-novel organised around a single conceptual core. The great essayistic discourse on language as a force preserving community is Nagyenyedi fügevirág (The Fig Blossom of Nagyenyed, 1978), and the late-career collected volumes mentioned earlier also abound in essays that traverse the landscapes of the mother tongue. Idő markában (In the Grip of Time, 1984), Sikaszói fenyőforgácsok (Pine Shavings of Sikaszó, 1987), and A lőtt lábú madár (The Bird with the Shot Leg, 1988) likewise stand among the distinguished works of Hungarian essay literature, in which the crafted linguistic form, the clear and finely drawn elaboration of ideas, the broad intellectual reference network, and the ever-present inspiration of “community-national morality” (Károly Alexa) articulate, through the writer’s demand for artistic and creative sovereignty against power, an inner compulsion of fate-expression.

In the final creative period of his career, he published partly diary notes (Szemet szóért (An Eye for a Word, 1993); Heródes napjai (The Days of Herod, 1994)), and partly volumes composed of essays, journalistic writings, articles and conversations (Erdélyi változatlanságok [Transylvanian Immutabilities, 2001]). His last book, published posthumously, Létvégi hajrában (In the Final Sprint of Existence, 2006), likewise contains essays, notes, conversations and letters. These works are, on one hand, raw and concrete proofs – free of symbols and metaphors – of the continuous intellectual participation of a writer who never withdrew from the daily events of minority life or from the broader social, intellectual and political public sphere. Alongside belles-lettres, Sütő also became a participant and interpreter of his era in the language of essayistic publicism – giving, with these texts whose messages were clear even without decoding, far more ammunition to political censors than with his drama texts, which required complex interpretation and symbolic deciphering. On the other hand, these books were created with the intention of gathering intellectual goods, and in their generic diversity – from large-scale essays to short salutations – they bear the marks of the fullest intellectual preparedness and linguistic refinement. Yet Transylvanian Immutabilities, beyond all this, represents “the perfect knowledge and practice of that wisdom-discourse form which generally characterises András Sütő’s work of the past quarter century, and particularly this new book, maintaining more or less similar proportions among those modes of discourse which, according to Paul Ricoeur, are the original expressions of revelation” (Béla Márkus). Thus, the foregrounding of the wisdom-discourse form – and, correspondingly, the sidelining of the narrative, storytelling mode or of the emblematic, thesis-like tone of the historical dramas – marks this final station of András Sütő’s oeuvre as a distinct phase also in prose-poetic terms. His urge to speak for others, the communal determination of his outlook, the direction of his interests – these remain the constant elements amid the changes of poetic form, showing that even in the final sprint of existence his exceptional talent and preparedness sustained in him the capacity for aesthetic self-renewal.

András Sütő is indeed a metaphor of the ethnic minority fate, who – owing to circumstances as well as to ideological consistency (as Csoóri Sándor noted) – created from the intolerabilities of minority existence those valid and universal symbols of human existence that can be applied to the fate of humankind as a whole..

[2012]