THE LAYERS OF CULTURAL MEMORY IN ANNA LESZNAI’S GARDEN OF EDEN

Abstract

The paper analyses Anna Lesznai’s volume Édenkert (Garden of Eden), published in 1918, in which the deep layers of cultural memory are given great emphasis. The volume moves about within a broad framework both in time and space, combining through cultural hybridization ancient and mediaeval reminiscences with Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist elements. The keywords of the book are exile, homesickness, alienness, and femininity. Personal memory broadens through cultural memory, the sadness of being separated from the village and the childhood garden, and the deep pain of losing the Garden of Eden. The village, the house and the garden become rhetorical forms, shapes of simplicity, sample sentences that can be expanded upon later. The memory of the abandoned village also brings with it a kind of transmigration of the ancestors. Through the identification of the garden with the female body, Eden as a female principium is also a symbolic image of lost girlhood, and it is at this point that some of Sappho’s fragments are linked to this poetic world.