“Egy olvasó naplója blog is my Hungarian written project about contemporary literature and historical fiction. The title of the blog means “a reader’s journal” (or “a reader’s diary”). “Olvasónapló” is a popular literature-related keyword in Hungary for various reasons, therefore I tried to include the word to the title of my blog.
It fits to my activities, because over those years I was active active as literary critic, I often referred to myself also as a “professional reader”.
On the other side, in the early period (2014-18), this blog was rather a “writer’s journal” or a “journalist’s journal”. I started the project when I was the most active in the Hungarian literary life both as literay critic and cultural journalist. I was working as a freelance journalist for 5-6 cultural websites, and published at least a few articles in most of the most acclaimed offline magazines. (Which is, by the way, not that big thing, when you consider how small is the cultural/literary life in this small and realtively poor EU-country.)
But the problem about publishing on different websides, especially on the ones, where the editors don’t have the required knowledge about the nature of digital publications (many of them are thinking as they still would be an editor of an offline magazin) is
that your body of work, your complete and complex text-universe, the coherence of your way of thinking remains invisible or becomes shattered.
Especially in a small and toxic community where the personal relations are overwriting the professional ones again and again. Many of the members of this community read only stuff about themselves, their closest friends or the people they’re hating the most.1 They’re rarely approaching their own job from its professional side (But I think, unfortunatelly, that’s the way things are working, when almost the entire literary life of a country is sponsored by taxpayers money and have little connection to the private market).
Thus when someone, like me, who tried to work professionally in this deeply unprofessional environment, needed a little trick to try to get my work acknowledged.
Creating new original articles where I’m frequently referring to my other publications, connect them, putting them in a coherent, logical order.
I used to write lot about the young (under 40) part of this literary life, not because of private reasons, but because I like to discover new “uncut gems”. So I created blog entires about the Hungarian young literature in general. I used to write about those rare events about the connection between this community and the private market. So I wrote about it in several articles in my special blog too.
And so on.
After I left Budapest in 2018, I had to re-think the concept of this blog. Although I did not want to have any personal connection to that community more, still intended to write about theire works and any other topics important in my professional life, like of course the genre of historical fiction or my love for the 18th century. Egy olvasó naplója blog now is like a hub of all my literary activities written in Hungarian. There are a few “outlets” of the blog, but if someone wants to know what are the most important topics of my professional life, the Egy olvasó napója is still the best starting point.
- I’m not exagerating saying this is a very toxic community. Several people tried to humiliate me for not wanting to take part in this game. One person even tried to intervene in my most private life, he just simple thought he has the right to decide which men I’m allowed to meet. No he hasn’t. [↩]