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TIBOR GINTLI Revolution had come to a successful conclusion between the 1870s and the turn of the century in Hungary, creating a social class of industrial workers, in literature the confrontation between the working class and bourgeois values emerges relatively late, its first aesthetically significant manifestation being Tibor Déry’s novel The Unfinished Sentence (A befejezetlen mondat) finished in 1938 and published only in 1947. One widely recognized characteristic of social development in Hungary is the fact that, from the Middle Ages, the vast majority of the urban population were not ethnic Hungarians. The stratum of entrepreneurs that emerged during the Industrial Revolution that began in the last third of the 19" century did not comprise primarily Hungarian social groups, but craftsmen from outside the country. As a result, the significant economic gains achieved during the Industrial Revolution were largely owing to immigrants from Germany (and to a lesser extent from Italy, France etc.), and to Jews who had settled in Hungary both during and after the great 18'"-century wave of immigration from Galicia. In literature, this fact is often illustrated in the form of bourgeois characters who are not only representatives of innovation, but also of alien values that are contrasted with the values of the old nobility, identified as belonging to the Hungarian character. Based on the Romantic cult of the past and the natural world, at the beginning of the era national identity was generally personified in literary works by both the nobility and the population, which was identified with nature itself and with origin — two social groups whose emergence dates back long before the era of modernization, to the Middle Ages. However, this approach did not necessarily mean the rejection of bourgeois values and the cultural exclusion of the bourgeoisie. Especially since a significant part of the Hungarian nobility supported the bourgeois transformation — as clearly illustrated by the fact that, in Hungary, the bourgeois revolution took place within a constitutional framework, under the jurisdiction of the feudal Parliament in 1848. In modern Hungarian literature, the bourgeois intellectual of gentry origin emerges as a distinctive character, liberal in terms of political beliefs, and consciously embracing a bourgeois lifestyle.’ However, according to the typical political approach of the era, in Hungary there was only one political nation — the Hungarian. Although this approach was not categorically exclusive, assimilation was seen as the only possible means of integration into the national community. The nation would only accommodate members of different ethnic and religious communities on condition that they accept the doctrine of a single political nation, and identify with the values that defined the so-called Hungarian national 1 Gábor Gyáni — György Kövér — Andrea T. Kulcsár: Social History of Hungary from the Reform Era to the End ofthe Twentieth Century, New Yotk, Atlantic Research and Publications, Inc., 2004, 233-234. ° 422 +
