With the Little Help from Janis Joplin

Shortly before his death Hungarian writer and essayist Péter Esterházy (1950 – 2016) wrote the dramatic text of Mercedes Benz – Historical Revue in two parts for the Slovak National Theatre. In particular, it focuses on the famous noble family Esterházy’s influence in Slovakia. The author of the play had a very strong association with this matter. In his writing Péter Esterházy used a wide range of intertextualities: his literary texts are like the fabric spun from fibres of the autobiography of his own family history, but also fragments of Hungarian and Slovak history, legends, tales, as well as hearsay and myths. The interpreted dramatic text is remarkable because Esterházy, in addition to intertextual recycling of his own texts, also exploits the texts of the Hungarian classic author Imre Madách The Tragedy of Man. The author of the study has focused on clarifying the function, specification and effects of Esterházy’s intertextual writing.