Benkő Andrea: A Guide to Petőfi Literary Museum (Budapest, 2009)
Events
EVENTS What can a literary museum offer that visitors cannot find anywhere else? It can put on special events and programs that help to make literature more visible through presenting it with the help of all sister arts including dance, music, theatre and arts. Our aim is to offer programs that appeal to all kinds of audiences interested not only in literature but other arts as well. Thus, we hope to make our museum a meeting place for different reading cultures including all culturally minded and literary oriented people. Our Midsummer Night's programme in the palace court, as part of the international Long Night of Museums initiative, has become a tradition of linking pop/rock music and poetry. The event is attended by more than 1200 young people every year. The PIM Festival programme series includes classical, folk and jazz concerts as well as theatre performances throughout the summer. In autumn we traditionally organise Budapest Transfer, an international literature conference with changing themes and recurring elements of international poetry translation and roundtable discussions. We offer more than 200 events throughout the year including book launches, readings from contemporary literature, literary fashion shows, reading marathons and stage readings. The Reading Stage In the course of the museology work we were struck by the thought that the correspondence, diaries and biographic documents of Hungarian writers considered classic or significant should be adapted and performed in a dramatic form. This would mean that the priceless cultural treasures in our collections could reach the general public not only in the form of text editions and exhibitions but also transformed into literary work and presented in the magic of the theatre. Since 1990 our series Poets and Muses has been staging real life dramas. The performances also to some extent fulfil a cultural mission: through them, we are shown the complex relationship between the biographic reality and the fiction of the works. While the plays reveal minute, 28
