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NATIONAL IDENTITY AS A LITERARY QUESTION historicity and oral tradition. Henceforth I will call this version the factual anecdote. It is a shorter narrative with characters living in historical memory, using the form of a dialogue, ending with amusing conclusions and having no author, rather just a collector. The other variety is a fictional component of novels with a considerably more blurred connection to history, which came to exist in Hungarian prosaic and poetic literature as “an episode of comic modality”. For the sake of convenience, it will be called the fictional anecdote. This interpretation is relatively unknown to Western scholars, so it is easier for them to understand the type of Hungarian novel composed of fictional anecdotes and classified as an “anecdotal novel” by comparing it with the “composite novel”.® In Hungarian culture the anecdote developed into a fundamental means of expression approaching the status of a specific genre that had a major impact on Hungarian fin de siécle literature. The dominant fictional prose of the period can be characterised by the anecdote, a phenomenon giving rise to the anecdotal novel. Such a novel mostly organises itself through episodes formed anecdotally in an unaffected and playful tone, the plot being adventurous and amusing, and related, one way or another, to history. Furthermore, it often has some connection with national issues. The composite novel differs from the anecdotal novel in that the story is less organic, whereas the latter includes a mainline narrative to which minor stories are linked, although not in a logical order with precedents or consequences. The anecdotal novel is not necessarily related to national identity, although anecdotes may have a factual character and strong historical references, in which this connection is strong. However, the factual and fictional anecdote frequently change position, so cultivating and affecting the national identity as a function appears in the fictional variation, as will be illustrated in our example. It would appear Polish culture has created a similar formation, the gaweda. The Poles, however, usually mention the Russian szkaz for comparison in order to highlight the perceptional circle of this national literary genre* 3 The composite novel was accepted as a genre in the 20" century forming a conceptual framework that can be applied tosimilar texts written before that time. The term comes from Maggie Dunn - Ann Morris: The Composite Novel. The Short Story Cycle in Transition, New York,Twayne Publishers, 1995, 2, who wanted to define the term short story cycle, relatively popular in the 1970s, more precisely: “The composite novel is a literary work composed of short texts that — thought individually complete and autonomous - are interrelated in a coherent whole according to one or more organizing principles.” Czeslaw Milosz (The History of Polish Literature, Berkely, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 1983, 255.) wrote: [The] Gaweda may be roughly defined as a loose, chatty form of fiction (not unlike what the Russians call skaz) in which a narrator recounts episodes in highly stylized, personal language. Both the language and the character of the storyteller are usually those of an average, old-fashioned squire [...]. Episodic anecdotes taken from the life + 409 +
