VARIANTS OF ESCAPE

Abstract

The paper attempts to interpret the literary representations of the refugee motif in the oeuvre of one of the most productive authors of contemporary Hungarian literature, Iván Sándor. The border, the sight of this geocultural boundary is the experience which, in Jurij Lotman’s idea of the border concept, presents literature with the experience of semioticization and meaning formation, which yields the experiences of cultural change, foreignness, and inaccessibility. Events located in the border regions cease to be phenomena that could only be interpreted by themselves, they become cultural factors that can be experienced in transitional situations. The transnational perspective’s approach to identity and subject formation, which can also be linked to the semiotics of border lines, starts from the fact that there are no singular, describable homogeneous identities, as these categories are originally built from intersecting relations. The other important yield of transnationality is the fact that it transforms the concept of space, thus providing it with a new meaning. This article examines these concepts through the analysis of some typical examples from Iván Sándor.