The collected plays of Tibor Gyurkovics appeared as the 5th and 6th volumes of the series of his Collected Works and contain both popular and less known plays by the author, from the drama Estére meghalsz (You Will Die Until the Evening, 1969) to the play Háború hármasban (Threesome War, 1995), enriched by documents, critical writings and photos. Gyurkovics the dramatist functions like a psychologist as he shows everyday people in absurd situations: the old man at his family’s mercy (Hospice, 1970), the cold-hearted Csóka family hunting for inheritance (Condolences, 1975), generations living together (Hungarian Bride, 1979) or the couple in a permanent struggle (Threesome War, 1995). According to critics, Gyurkovics’s best play is the absurd and static Hospital Round (1972) which was not well-received by the Communist authorities. The play is about a hospital room in which four men struggle with their desperate illnesses while they are continuously talking—not with each other, but only as monologues; thus we get to know the story of their lives. Gyurkovics has written many fine theatre adaptations, among which the best are the Kreutzer Sonata (1976) based on Tolstoy and Anna Édes (1983) based on one of Dezső Kosztolányi’s novels.

 

“Gyurkovics is the follower of the Eastern European absurd, combining a dark worldview with moral responsibility....His main concern is: what it means to be a Hungarian today”

                                                                       -Erzsébet Ézsiás

“The painting was only a cover” says one of the poems in this verse collection, the subtitle of which is “Painter’s Poems” because it combines the reproductions of famous paintings combined with beautiful poems. Gyurkovics is at home in corresponding arts (not only was he an actor in one of his own plays, but he also directed a radio musical program), and he proves that paintings and poems complement each other, especially so when the poet is able to enter into the spirit of such masters as Hieronymus Bosch, Klee, Lajos Gulácsy, József Egry, Monet, Rousseu or Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, examining many different characters and periods of art. The continuation and answer to this volume is Extázis (Ecstasy); here are found 2 times 107 paintings and poems, combining transcendent art with erotic experience.

 

My life’s ascending day by day

the sun grows on a hill

then falls and then deep in the depths

it slowly tucks up still

How many nerves have snapped and cracked

the air crackles like bone

I’m not Sisyphus any more

I am the stone. 

                                               (from “Sisyphus”)

 

This is how the poet depicts about his method of writing; he has written almost fifty volumes in different genres, but he still considers himself primarily a poet.

The recurring topic of his poems is love:

 

The water’s beating like a drum,

it swallows up the sun.

I love you, by heaven and earth.

Conditions? There are none

                                                (from “Drum”)

 

And, as a parallel, love of his country, in spite of the fact that he feels not only patriotic sentiments, but also anger. And how are poems created? Here are a few sentences from an interview: “Yes, inspiration is a fact, a kind of meditative concentration that borders on the land where poems are born. There’s a sea from which sometimes the subconscious jumps out—like some Loch Ness monster— it is you, living in your own depths, but you can’t measure those depths or even imagine them....I usually meet my monster in the mornings: you wake up, light comes in faintly through the blinds, the subconscious gets into motion and you are now able to grab this shiny thing, like the fisherman catches the fish, and pull it out from the depths of the subconscious. And then that special thing is created. It becomes aware of itself.”