Zsigmond Zalabai

* Ipolypásztó, January 29, 1948 – † Somorja, December 26, 2003 / critic, literary historian, literary scholar, local historian ; ; He completed his primary school education in his native village in 1963, and graduated from the Ipolyság high school in 1966. He obtained a teaching certificate in English-Hungarian from the Comenius University in Bratislava in 1972. In 1988, he defended his candidate's thesis, and in 1995, in Budapest, he became a doctor of literary studies based on his work entitled Verstörténés. In 1972–1975, he was the editor of Irodalmi Szemle, and between 1975–1988, he was the head of the literary editorial office of the Madách Könyv- és Lapkiadó in Bratislava. From 1988, he was an assistant professor, then associate professor, at the Department of Hungarian Language and Literature at the Comenius University in Bratislava, and from 1990 to 1992, he was the head of the department. In December 1989, he organized an aid convoy to Romania. In the last years of his life, he struggled with illness and ended his life by suicide at the age of 56. The Somorja city library bears his name. He was the initiator and initiator of the Somorja Bibliotheca Hungarica public collection, which is now a department of the Forum Institute for Minority Studies. He was the leading critic of his generation, but at the beginning of his career he also tried his hand at poetry and prose. ; His real field was literary theory and literary history. His volume on poetry theory, Longing in the Tropics (1981), was published several times. His two-volume sociological study of his native village (Mindenekről szémű adok, 1984, Hazahív a harangszó, 1985) was a great success. As a publisher's editor, he compiled several anthologies of contemporary Hungarian poems from the Uplands, children's poems, and prose writings. Among the representatives of old Hungarian literature, he also dealt in more depth with Albert Szenczi Molnár and Dávid Baróti Szabó, and made some selections from their writings (A. Szenczi Molnár: Szorgos adósa vagyok hazámnak, Életemnek lepésa – 1993, D. Baróti Szabó: Jer, magyar lantom – 1994). His most important volumes of study: A vers túlódalán, 1974, Tűnődes a trópusokon, 1981, Verstörténés, 1994, Irodalom és irodalom, 1997.