László Vári Fábián, a poet living and creating in Transcarpathia [historical region of Hungary, today in western Ukraine], is a representative of contemporary Hungarian lyric poetry whose work possesses an “all-Hungarian validity” [1] – a poet who preserves, testifies to, and establishes values. His poetry spans from ancient, mythical individual and communal experiences of existence to apocalyptic visions built also from the most modern elements of reality, all the while seeking those forces that may sustain both the individual and the community in our time.
In the first decades of his career (the 1970s and 1980s), he drew attention primarily with poems that expressed – in a mediated, often historically allusive and metaphorical manner – the fate and obligations of national minority existence in Transcarpathia, and the experience of living under minority deprivation of rights. Today, however, it is evident that his poetry embraces a much wider and more universal scope.
According to Vári Fábián, even today it may rightly be expected of a poet – for there are still many who turn to him for words of consolation – that he should “place a poem into the pleading hands, not a foul toad.” In his view, poetry, the poem itself, is “a higher form of thinking realised on a deeper level of consciousness” [2], and “must speak in exceptional beauty, for only thus does it deserve attention.” [3] Yet, according to his aesthetic principles, the poem that speaks beautifully and deserves attention must also convey a message, offer an emotional surplus, and thus provide a genuine experience to those who encounter it. [4]
Beginnings (1960s)
Vári Fábián’s literary beginnings in the late 1960s coincided with the emergence of Hungarian literature in Transcarpathia – a process which itself formed part of, and indeed gave fresh impetus to, the awakening of national consciousness among the Hungarian minority who had endured perhaps the most trying and tragic fate in the post-Trianon period [referring to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which dismembered historic Hungary].
It was during this time that a group of young writers came to prominence – first in the literary circle of the Hungarian Department (opened in 1963) at the Uzhhorod State University, then in the mimeographed periodical Együtt (lit. Together), and later in the Komsomol youth paper Kárpáton Túli Ifjúság (lit. Transcarpathian Youth) as well as the regional daily Kárpáti Igaz Szó (lit. Carpathian True Word). This circle, known between 1967 and 1971 as the Forrás Stúdió (lit. Source Studio), comprised such figures as Gyula Balla, Teréz Balla, Balázs Balogh, András Benedek, György Dupka, László Fábián, Tihamér Ferenczi, Géza Fodor, Magda Füzesi, and József Zseliczki. Their foremost aim was to articulate a sense of national identity and to give voice to the concerns and destiny of their community.
The group’s aspirations were supported by the only truly prominent local writer of the time, Vilmos Kovács [1932–1977], whose art – as evidenced by his novel Holnap is élünk (lit. We Shall Still Be Alive Tomorrow, 1965) and poetry collection Csillagfénynél (By Starlight, 1968) – reflected the strengthening of similar preoccupations. His sensitivity to historical and social issues, the archaic and almost sacral rootedness of his poetry, its inspiration from folk traditions, and his surrealist imagery and vision (his best-known poems include Verecke [lit.: The Verecke Pass – a legendary gateway in the Carpathians, through which ancient Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin during the Hungarian Conquest] and Testamentum lit. Last Will]) exerted a personally liberating influence on Vári Fábián.
Together with their university mentor Sándor Fodó, Kovács and the Studio members formulated the tasks of minority self-knowledge, initiated demographic and ethnographic data-collection, and even prepared two memoranda on the dismal state of intellectual life, submitting them to the relevant state and party authorities. These documents, now regarded as important historical sources, may be read as the embryonic – and swiftly suppressed – programmes of national self-organisation among the Hungarian minority in the early 1970s.
The first memorandum, written in the autumn of 1971 in response to László Balla’s article Elidegenedés? (lit. Alienation?) published in Kárpáti Igaz Szó, was itself provoked by that piece – a harsh, ideologically driven critique amounting in effect to a death sentence for the Source Stúdió. Even so, it already demanded improvements in the cultural and educational situation of the Hungarian population in Transcarpathia. The second memorandum, sent in the summer of 1972 to Moscow – to the highest state and party leadership – appealed to the principles of Lenin’s nationality policy, not merely requesting but also outlining a possible plan for Hungarian cultural autonomy in Transcarpathia.
The Hungarian literature of the region thus had to develop “in opposition to those tendencies which, under the concept of ‘Soviet Hungarians’”, sought to confine local historical, cultural, and literary traditions to a terrifying narrowness, “enforcing mandatory optimism and aesthetic dogmatism. Works that resisted these constraints, consciously embraced the universal Hungarian cultural heritage, and sought to convey a truthful image of the life and mood of the Transcarpathian Hungarian community, have proved of lasting value.” [5]
It is no coincidence that the Source Stúdió, operating in this spirit, was rendered impossible by administrative means from 1971–72 onwards, thereby breaking the literary careers of several of its members. László Vári Fábián, who wrote and published his first poems during the Studio years, was expelled from the university in his fourth year and conscripted for two years of compulsory military service. Until the mid-1980s he could barely publish, and his first collections appeared only some twenty years after his beginnings, following the local political transformation: Széphistóriák (lit. Verse Romances, 1991) and Kivont kardok közt (lit. Among Drawn Swords, 1992).
Such an extended period of artistic gestation is almost unique in contemporary Hungarian lyric poetry. Yet, as a result, the distinctive character of László Vári Fábián’s poetry – its vision and voice, its thematic inclinations and poetic ambitions, its defining types of poem – was already fully present in his first volumes (with Among Drawn Swords containing only six poems not already included in Verse Romances), and continues to speak with undiminished validity today.
Even those early volumes already exemplify what literary historian András Görömbei later formulated in connection with Jég és korbács (lit. Ice and Scourge, 2010):
“Within them dwell together the archaic experiences of humankind and the issues of the present. The distinctive hue of his poetic universe arises from a contemporary vision of fate that confronts profound historical awareness with the folk tradition’s human wholeness and richness. The distinguishing merit of his art is the poetic manifestation of historical and present responsibility felt for the Hungarian nation.” [6]
Or, as János Eperjesi Penckófer later summarised upon reading Világtalan csillag (lit. Star Without Light, 2001):
“The emotional relationship of man living in harmony with nature, the order and regularity rooted in the folk culture of the Hungarians, build this poetic world as an ancient wisdom. The reorganisation of mythic and legendary memories reaching back to the beginning of time is enriched by the ever-valid truth of the nation’s struggles for freedom.” [7]
Already in the early poems (Altató [lit. Lullaby], Múlt időben [lit. In the Past Tense], Monda [lit. Legend], Március [lit. March], and Széphistóriák I–IV. [lit. Verse Romances I–IV.]) one observes the formative power of the archaic wisdom preserved in folk poetry – and, more directly still, the influence of folk songs and ballads in their modes of thought, formal structures, condensed expression, and often surreal imagery.
Legend (1971) opens with the lines:
“In the hawk of the heavens / my blood resounds, / guarding, fearing / my outlawed being.”
And the slightly earlier Lullaby, reminiscent of Attila József [1905–1937, poet], begins:
“You drank from the traces of beasts, / that is why you are now so far. / The sighs of deer break toward the sky: / Attila József, sleep at last.”
In the summer of 1969, Vári Fábián set out with members of the Source Studio on his first field trip to collect folk ballads – an experience that bound him for life to the world of folklore. He continued his individual collecting work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and the fruit of these efforts was Vannak ringó bölcsők (lit. There Are Swaying Cradles, 1992), a volume of Transcarpathian Hungarian folk ballads and songs accompanied by the collector’s scholarly introduction.
In several statements he spoke of those who influenced his poetry, and invariably emphasised that it was folk poetry whose spell he has never been able to escape since their first encounter. It is therefore no coincidence that among his poetic forebears he pays closest attention to those in whose works he likewise recognises the imprint of the folk tradition: Endre Ady [1877–1919], Attila József, László Nagy [1925–1978], Sándor Csoóri [1930–2016], István Kormos [1923–1977], the Kilencek [“The Nine”, a late-1960s Hungarian poets’ group], and József Ratkó [1936–1989]. These predecessors he could claim not only for their attachment to folk heritage and to the fate of the people, but also for embodying the poetic legacy of communal responsibility and moral consciousness.
During the era of Soviet socialist deprivation of rights, the articulation of the fate and hardships of the Transcarpathian Hungarian minority, and the strengthening of their national consciousness, could be imagined only through concealed and indirect paths, under the constraints of strict censorship. Alongside the study, recovery, and absorption of folk cultural traditions, for László Vári Fábián (and his contemporaries) another viable poetic route lay in addressing and reanimating the legacy of national struggles for freedom – the ‘kuruc’ uprisings [the anti-Habsburg insurgencies of the late 17th–early 18th centuries], the Revolution and War of Independence of 1848–49, and other elements of national history still vividly present in local memory, connected for instance with Munkács [Ukr. Mukachevo], Huszt [Ukr. Khust], and former ‘kuruc’ villages.
His poems evoking historical periods and figures (Mikes Kelemen [Kelemen Mikes,1690–1761, was a writer and exile, best known for his Letters from Turkey – written during his decades of banishment after the defeat of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi’s uprising], Majtény [Majtény, a historic site in present-day Slovakia, symbolises the defeat of the kuruc forces, where in 1711 they surrendered and ended Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II’s struggle for Hungarian independence], Útban Törökország felé [lit. On the Way to Turkey], Ngs Balassi Bálint a végek végein [Rt. Hon. Bálint Balassi at the Outposts of the Borderlands], Szervátiusz Tibor Dózsa-szobra előtt [Before Tibor Szervátiusz’s Statue of Dózsa], Félegyházától Segesvárig [From Félegyháza to Segesvár], Kikericsek [Autumn Crocuses]) not only contributed to the deepening of national self-awareness but also offered self-strengthening exemplars of responsible and ethical human conduct, of fidelity and steadfastness.
Through the multiplicity of meanings inherent in their situations and phrasing, and through an allusive, transpositional mode of poetic speech, these works also revealed – to readers attuned to implication – the burdens and anxieties of the present age, not only in Transcarpathia.
The words of Rt. Hon. Bálint Balassi… (1978), for instance, express not merely the dignity and composure of the perennial frontier warrior, the eternal duellist-poet:
“Good rebels live by their faith, and never / bow to frail earthly powers. / To the Great High God alone I kneel, / and before the earthly love of Anna Losonczi.”
And in the line “That now in Magyaristan the Turkish moon ascends,” many could readily imagine in place of the Turk the unnameable Soviet moon then ruling their sky.
Vári Fábián’s Mikes Kelemen begins a fictional note or letter, (dated “September 17–21, 1717, On the Road to Turkey”) with these lines:
“Orphaned of both homelands, / yet unbroken in faith, / upon the moon-white canvas of our souls / lies the shadow of God.”
Few readers at the time needed to be told what that unbroken faith was directed toward:
“With mighty faith we still believe / that soon there will be return – / and from the sea we shall regain / our banners, our ramparts, our villages.”
Likewise, the feelings expressed in the poem Ady alkonya (lit. Ady’s Twilight) doubtless conveyed a torment not confined to the poet himself since childhood:
“For my fate a grave is shaped – / the quartered Homeland. / Cool the fire that burns my flesh, / O Tisza and Danube.”
According to literary critic Gábor Nagy, the distinctiveness of László Vári Fábián’s poetry lies in the way
“his turn toward the intellectual past is coupled both with the sensibility of modern life and with the archaism of forms. He reawakens genres that, seen from the perspective of modernity, appear almost archaic indeed: his volumes contain virágénekek [lit. flower songs – early Hungarian courtly love songs] and széphistóriák [verse romances] on love; a József Attila-like outlaw poem (Legend) rekindles our origins; krónikás énekek [chronicler’s songs] such as Before Tibor Szervátiusz’s Statue of Dózsa and March recall history and the guiding stars of our intellectual homeland. Ballad transcriptions (Három árva [lit. Three Orphans]), legends (Vásártéri legenda [lit. Marketplace Legend]), and tales (Mese [lit. Tale]) conjure the voice of folklore, while poetic letters (On the Way to Turkey, Mikes Kelemen, Levél [lit. Letter]) merge lyric and private speech; visions (Összefoglalás [Summary], Földfogyatkozás [Earth Eclipse], Glória az embernek [Glory to Man], Várad felől az alkony… [lit. Twilight from Várad…] evoke sacred texts. This generic richness colours the poet’s generally uniform tone – one that can be called neither elegiac nor hymnic (though akin to both). It is a voice that resounds with the dignity of archaism in every line, in its rich alliteration, restrained rhyming, and iambics quickened by anapaests or blended with Hungarian rhythmic measures.” [8]
Although Nagy formulated these insights in connection with the 2001 collection Star Without Light, nearly all the poems he cites had already appeared in Among Drawn Swords (1992), which summarised Vári Fábián’s first creative period. That volume also contained the intensely personal and emotionally charged poems (Illyés Gyula fejfája előtt [lit. Before the Headstone of Gyula Illyés], Téli táj koporsóval [lit. Winter Landscape with Coffin], Among Drawn Swords, Summary, Earth Eclipse) which speak more directly, without mediation, of the individual experience and suffering of communal burdens – poems in which, as one critic notes, “the lyric self no longer speaks in those collective voices through which the nation (or a fragment of it) might hear its own (historical) sound.” [9]
In Before the Headstone of Gyula Illyés, the poet places at its centre the communal concern for fidelity to the mother tongue, though the opening diction is overtly personal:
“Far from my homeland, / near to your grave, / it is from you I ask – / what, after all, was it for? / And if you did not say it enough, / you said it in vain, / that a thousand times woe / to the tongue forsaken, / for the word already falters / at the corner of the mouth.”
The title poem of the second volume, Among Drawn Swords, likewise distils the decades-long sense of personal threat into a surreal image:
“Thus have I lived these many years, / as one awaiting the headsman’s stroke, // or perhaps the galley at some shore. / I live with my head cradled in my hands.”
In an interview, Vári Fábián revealed the biographical impulse behind one of his most beautiful poems, Winter Landscape with Coffin: he wrote it after finally tiring of the endless bargaining and compromise with the editor-in-chief of Kárpáti Igaz Szó in order to see his work published:
“Above me fire, below me ice, / my teeth close like shackles, / the word stamps a seal upon my tongue – / the word that cannot be spoken – / though it is no cannon’s thunder. / Yet the stars shine forth what I cannot; / the cemeteries murmur it; / the battlefields echo it; / the traitors betray it.”
In Summary, written around the time of the political transformation, and employing concrete autobiographical detail, he formulates with the force of an ars poetica the tasks of the poet and the man alike:
“Encourage my tongue, O God, / shake the heavens above me, / for by Thy grace perhaps / I too was born a poet (…) all that one must endure – / though Siberia may terrify, / man sets forth with head held high, / his principles clenched between his teeth, / he walks the halls of mystery / to forge armour for himself, / for they will take him / as a tank-born hussar / to Europe – far away (…) To protest with word and letter – / here, why, and for whom is it worth it? (…) / there, where that single river roars.”
The closing poem Earth Eclipse, like the opening Napfogyatkozás (lit. Solar Eclipse), broadens the experience of personal confinement into a vision of universal desolation – of spiritual and human depletion, of an age overshadowed by the menace to all existence.
Already Vári Fábián’s first collections (and the later ones no less) reveal a remarkable structural consciousness. Among Drawn Swords, with its framing poems and three internal cycles, gathers the poetic worlds sketched above – realms in which the poet both searches for and reveals the values that, despite all, may still embody sustaining power for himself and for us.
As Gábor Nagy once again precisely observed, this time about Star Without Light:
“A refuge from estrangement and emptiness – that is the poetry of László Vári Fábián as a whole.” [10]
Among the refuges that Vári Fábián’s poetry discovers, one of the most vital is, quite naturally, love (as for his great predecessor Petőfi, “freedom and love”). Poems of love thread through his entire oeuvre, forming distinct cycles in almost every volume. These poems – expressed through strikingly varied idioms and formal structures – bear witness to the poet’s feelings for the beloved, to bodily desire, to joy, and to the consolations sought in union. Yet the archaic affinities remain unmistakable: the folk origins, the verse rhythm shaped by Hungarian accentual metres interwoven with classical quantitative patterns, the stylised play of roles – all recur throughout works such as Ébredés (lit. Awakening), Levél (lit. Letter), Boszorkányidéző (lit. Witch’s Invocation), Verse Romances, Hajnali virágének (lit. Flower Song at Dawn), Görög Szép Katáért (lit. For the Fair Kata of Greece), and Báthori Anna. They reveal, too, the poet’s enduring endeavour to set love as a counterpoint to the degradation and imperilment of existence:
“I am sorrowful now indeed, / the shadow of your skirt lies on my heart. / I would forsake my faith – for none remains; / my grief wanders far away. // Bright-eyed lights die for your sake, / from the leaves arise alarms, / the waters thunder, all is drenched, / only your face keeps blooming.” (Verse Romances I.)
Even within the sphere of love, Vári Fábián’s poetic vision strives toward universality by investing his verse-worlds with a sacred, mythical aura – a tendency that becomes increasingly prominent in his later creative period, particularly in Fecskehajtó idő (lit. Swallow-Guiding Time, 2004) and Ice and Scourge (2010).
Vári Fábián is famously a poet of few words. He might have written little even under freer circumstances, yet in the 1970s and early 1980s the near-impossibility of publication, and in the 1990s his engagement in public and political life – holding various leading positions within the Kárpátaljai Magyar Kulturális Szövetség (KMKSZ [the Cultural Association of Hungarians in Transcarpathia]) – further impeded his creative work.
The volumes published around the turn of the millennium were largely re-selections or reprints; even Swallow-Guiding Time, which contained the most new poems, drew about half its contents from earlier work. As Zoltán Bertha insightfully observed:
“This can undoubtedly be regarded as a form of redundancy, yet book by book – in both cross-section and longitudinal view – we encounter the entire poetic oeuvre. Its internal structures and concentrically expanding circles stand forth with emphasis. The cyclical rearrangements delineate widening dimensions, and in Swallow-Guiding Time the new organisation lends a broader perspective to the defining thematic and experiential spheres.” [11]
Of the four sections of the volume, the opening cycle Számlál az Úr (lit. The Lord Counts) and A szerelem szobra (lit. The Statue of Love) contain most of the new poems. The fine new pieces of love poetry (Az orromból a szél [lit. The Wind from My Nose], Veránkai románc [lit. Romance of Veránka], Mítosztöredék [lit. Fragment of a Myth], and Swallow-Guiding Time) are built upon tangible experience or visual impression, yet these dissolve into the mythic imagery of the larger poetic cosmos.
The four-part cycle A balti szél balladái (lit. Ballads of the Baltic Wind), however, recalls memories from the poet’s military years – the dreams and fantasies born of the lovelessness of conscript life. This thematic vein would later be developed with richer and more varied experience, in his 2011 prose work Tábori posta (Field Post), a long-matured and deeply composed narrative (tracing the journey from conscription to return) that reads as a semi-autobiographical, social-documentary memoir.
For a poet so sparing in words, the appearance of such a capacious prose work was a true surprise – a narrative displaying both artistic control and narrative strength. The world of soldiers in the “socialist camp”, with its global absurdity, its daily madness, humiliations, and senseless demands, provided all who served within it with an acute experience of existential absurdity. This was all the more true for the narrator himself, who, as the work reveals, had been conscripted almost as punishment for his early literary and civic engagement.
Stationed first in the German Democratic Republic – in the valley of the Elbe, near a village called Gardelegen – he spent a year and a half in a multi-ethnic, multicultural environment as an anti-aircraft gunner (and later half a year in Kazakhstan). As he asks, with bitter irony:
“How does a Hungarian mother’s son find himself in the Soviet army, and having borne the red star upon his brow, why must he defend the Soviet homeland – on German soil?”
Already in the opening and closing cycles of Swallow-Guiding Time – The Lord Counts and Ha számot kell adni (lit. When Account Must Be Given) – the impulse toward reckoning, toward poetic self-accounting, becomes strikingly manifest. Of the “widening dimensions” noted by Zoltán Bertha, this is the most pronounced: partly because it unfolds, time and again, before the presence of the Lord, and partly because, while the closing poem (Mint vérző pólya [lit. Like a Bleeding Swaddling Cloth]) intensifies the personal aspect of reckoning –
“Here is my life, the road I have walked. / Set thy seal upon it, if Thou wilt, O Lord.” –
other poems reveal its collective, national, and universal human resonance (Adventi napsütés [lit. Advent Sunshine], Kisasszony-napra [lit. For the Day of Our Lady], Az utolsó előtti napon [lit. On the Penultimate Day], Halottak napja [lit. All Souls’ Day]).
Still more so in the next collection, Ice and Scourge (2010), particularly in the first cycle (Ördöglakat [lit. Trick Lock]) and the title cycle. Both the poems carried over from the previous volume and the new ones bear witness to the decline of individual and universal values, to losses both spiritual and moral – to the approach, or even the very presence, of a kind of cosmic cataclysm.
The sense of menace – “The rabbits miscarry. / The Tartars draw near.” (Kannibál évszakok [lit. Cannibal Seasons]), “The lord of the forest is troubled: / death creeps through the undergrowth.” (A hold kolompja [lit. The Bell of the Moon]) and the experience of depletion – “To be human is nothing; / to see as spirit – horror. / How the velvet head of the tit / is broken against the windowpane.” (Vers-abortátumok [lit. Verse Abortions]) dominate these cycles, as does the spectacle of decay: “The rags fall from me, / my skin in shreds / abandons my body, / its fragments overtake me in the wind.” (Két fénybogár [lit. Two Fireflies])
In the Trick Lock cycle, even God himself gazes darkly upon His work: “And the Lord counts: upon the sea / a billion dead are drifting.” (Az utolsó előtti napon [lit. On the Penultimate Day]).
Amid these apocalyptic scenes of natural disaster (droughts, floods) and human corruption (“With man abides the winter’s breath, / with man abides the summer’s fire. / Beneath a blood-stained, tainted sky / the maddened bird goes wild.” [Cannibal Seasons]), flashes of Christian mythology and Biblical symbolism still promise consolation: “Only the lamb’s heart / glows, throbs,” (Two Fireflies), “and the Lord sent His son / upon the earth,” (A Gikhon partjain [lit. On the Shores of Gihon]), “That star may guide us / through every barrier!” (Karácsony csillaga [lit. Star of Christmas]).
Yet even these intimations seem withdrawn in the title poem that closes the cycle: “The waters strike down upon the earth, / a lock is set / on loins and lips, / and love shall not unfasten / the diabolic mechanism.”
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, Vári Fábián’s poetic vision and sense of existence had become pitilessly devoid of illusion, as though to say that in the vast struggle which humankind – and we Hungarians within it – have always shared, we are on the losing side.
And yet this is not his final word. In the third cycle of the same volume, in the series of poems dedicated to predecessors, companions, and friends, we still discern the imprint of this dramatic struggle – now transformed into a poetry of defiance, of endurance, of protest. It is in itself an artistic gesture of resistance: to give form to the imagery of decline and destruction, to assert creation amid ruin.
Even if song withdraws, as he writes, “into bulb and root” (A páternoszter kosarában [lit. In the Basket of the Paternoster]), even if he “walks with a scourge” (Ice and Scourge), or if “only with blood is it possible” (Változatok a halotti beszédre [lit. Variations on the Funeral Sermon]), still “In the womb of our mother the sea / the poem begins to pulse.” (Ítélet után [lit. After Judgement]).
Perhaps even the bitter malediction of the opening poem, Ajánlás nélkül (lit. Without Dedication) – “You shall be punished, you shall be punished, / unto the seventh generation, unto the seventh” – is but the inverted expression of that same creative gesture.
And the liberated, radiant love songs and drinking songs of the middle cycle, Fragments of Myth (Fecskehajtó kisasszony [lit. Swallow-Guiding Maiden], Fragment of a Myth, Táltosok [lit. Shamans], Kócsagdalok [lit. Songs of the Egret], Mire vagy jó [lit. What You Are Good For], Romance of Veránka) also embody a form of human and artistic response: not merely by reaffirming the timeless value of love, but by expanding and enriching the very scope of his poetic world to at least two directions. For it is in these poems that the familiar archaism and noble pathos of his verse deepen into further mythic, Christian, and sacred layers, while at the same time embracing modern, erotic, even profane and playfully ironic tones of vision and language.
All this attests that László Vári Fábián does possess a valid artistic answer to the challenges of contemporary human existence – and that, even in confronting decay without illusion, his poetry still holds reserves of sustaining strength.
(2012)
- János Eperjesi Penckófer: Tettben a jellem. A magyar irodalom sajátos kezdeményei Kárpátalján a XX. század második felében (lit. Character Revealed in Deed: The Distinctive Initiatives of Hungarian Literature in Transcarpathia in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century). Magyar Napló – Kárpátaljai Pedagógus Szövetség, Budapest, 2003, p. 265.
- Verset, ne ocsmány varangyot! (lit. A Poem, Not a Foul Toad!) – János Penckófer in conversation with László Vári Fábián. In: László Vári Fábián: Jég és korbács (Ice and Scourge), Széphalom Könyvműhely, 2010, pp. 115 and 91.
- A versnek kivételesen szépen kell szólnia, mert csak így érdemel figyelmet (lit. A Poem Must Speak with Exceptional Beauty, for Only Thus Does It Merit Attention). Interview with László Vári Fábián. In: Erzsébet Erdélyi – Iván Nobel: De azért itthon is maradni… (lit. And Yet to Remain at Home…), Tárogató Publishing House, Budapest, 1994, pp. 37–41.
- A Poem, Not a Foul Toad! p. 92.
- András Görömbei: A kárpátaljai magyar irodalom fő sajátosságai (lit. The Main Characteristics of Transcarpathian Hungarian Literature). In: Nemzetiségi magyar irodalmak az ezredvégen (lit. Hungarian Minority Literatures at the Turn of the Millennium). Ed. András Görömbei. Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó, Debrecen, 2000, p. 469.
- András Görömbei: Jég és korbács (Vári Fábián László könyve) (lit. Ice and Scourge [The Book of László Vári Fábián]). Tiszatáj, 2010, No. 10, pp. 77–83.
- János Eperjesi Penckófer: ibid.
- Gábor Nagy: Vári Fábián László: Világtalan csillag (lit.: László Vári Fábián: Star Without Light). Kortárs, 2003, No. 1, pp. 102–105.
- János Penckófer: Emlékültetés, avagy a hűségre gondol egy kárpátaljai. Vári Fábián László költészete (lit. Planting Memory, or a Transcarpathian Reflects on Fidelity: The Poetry of László Vári Fábián). In: Nemzetiségi magyar irodalmak az ezredvégen (lit. Hungarian Minority Literatures at the Turn of the Millennium), p. 490.
- Gábor Nagy: ibid.
- Zoltán Bertha: Szépség és méltóság (lit. Beauty and Dignity). Irodalmi Jelen, vol. 6, 2006, No. 51, p. 18.
http://www.ij.nyugatijelen.com/archiv/2006/2006%20januar/ij4.html (last accessed 27 September 2012).
EPA URL: https://epa.oszk.hu/03200/03297/00070/pdf/EPA03297_irodalmi_jelen_2006_01.pdf (last accessed 7 June 2023).