OUR STORY

A legacy cared for across generations

The Memorial Room has survived because the poet’s family continued to care for it after his death.

Lőrinc Szabó’s wife, Klára Mikes, and their daughter, Klára Gáborjáni-Szabó, preserved the study and its contents. Later, the poet’s son, G. Szabó Lőrinc, continued this work and in 1994 established the Lőrinc Szabó Foundation in part to provide an institutional framework for preserving the Memorial Room and his father’s legacy.

Following his death in 1997, the work was continued by his widow, Éva B. Szabó, and his daughter, Réka Gáborjáni-Szabó.

Literary historian Lóránt Kabdebó played an exceptional role in the scholarly preservation and study of Szabó’s oeuvre. Through the Lőrinc Szabó Research Centre at the University of Miskolc, he and his colleagues spent decades editing, researching and making important parts of the poet’s written legacy accessible.

Today, the Foundation continues this work with a new generation of the family beginning to take part in preserving and communicating the legacy.

WHAT WE PRESERVE

More than a collection

THE MEMORIAL ROOM TODAY

Why urgent work is needed

The Memorial Room has survived for almost seventy years through the care of the family. But a historic apartment and the collection it contains cannot survive on care alone.

Urgent technical repairs and essential preservation work are now needed to keep the Memorial Room and its contents safe. These include work on the apartment and its essential systems, as well as measures required to provide secure conditions for the books, furniture, papers and personal objects that have remained there.

These works have to come first.

We are therefore raising HUF 10 million (approximately €28,000 / $32,000) for the urgent repair and preservation of the Memorial Room.

Once these immediate needs have been addressed, the Foundation can continue the longer-term work of documenting the collection, making selected materials digitally accessible and preparing for the possibility of welcoming visitors again.

SUPPORT THE MEMORIAL ROOM

Help preserve a real place

The Memorial Room is not a reconstructed museum interior. It is the apartment in which Lőrinc Szabó lived and worked for twenty-two years – a place where an important part of twentieth-century Hungarian literary history was actually lived, read, translated and written.

Its survival now requires wider support.

Every donation brings us closer to the HUF 10 million needed for the current urgent work, and helps secure the future of the Memorial Room beyond it.

Donations are used for the Foundation’s most urgent charitable purposes, with the preservation of the Memorial Room at the centre of its work.

LOOKING FURTHER AHEAD

A small literary place with a wider reach

The Volkmann Street apartment will never be a large museum – nor should it become one.

Its value lies precisely in its intimacy and authenticity.

We envisage a Memorial Room that can welcome visitors in small numbers; provide meaningful encounters for students, readers and researchers; make more of its collection available digitally; and host carefully conceived literary and educational programmes connected with Szabó’s work, literary translation and twentieth-century Hungarian culture.

The aim is not simply to preserve a room unchanged.

It is to keep the literature around it alive.

PUBLICLY ACCOUNTABLE

Transparency

The Lőrinc Szabó Foundation is a registered Hungarian foundation.

Its annual reports and official documents, including information on the use of its resources, are publicly available on the Hungarian section of this website.

Annual reports and official documents →