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NOBLE AND BOURGEOIS VALUES IN HUNGARIAN LITERATURE
revealed as a secret alliance of cheaters and freeloaders, whose sole purpose is
to ensure a fortune for the forger Feri Noszty through marriage to a wealthy
bourgeois girl.’
Krüdy continues this quixotic representation of the anachronism of the
nobility. In contrast to Mikszath, Krudy’s representation of the noble world
view has no specific social aspects, thus there is no confrontation with
the bourgeois lifestyle either. The gentleman, who has been tricked by the
passage of time, is no longer a representative of a certain social class, but
rather the symbol of human existence confronted with transience. Kruidy
thus approaches the question of anachronism from a more meditative point
of view than his predecessor. To someone contemplating the finite, virtually
all human values and ways of life are anachronistic, as they are all equally
obliged to submit to the universal and unquestioned power of transience. The
ironic depiction of the outmoded, old-fashioned gentleman no longer targets
a specific social group. Instead, it illustrates the inherently comic nature of all
human existence. Krudy’s characteristic relativism often calls into question
whether the chivalric mentality ever in fact existed.* Nostalgia for the age of
chivalry, and an ironic perspective that highlights the comedy of the knightly
era, are inextricably intertwined in his works.
For Zsigmond Moricz, the question has even more specifically social aspects
than in the novels of Mikszath. In the respective works of Möricz, the concern
is not so much with the content of noble values, as with the social role of the
rural gentry. His novels Until Daybreak (Kivilagos kivirradtig, 1926) and The
Gentleman’s Way of Having Fun (Uri muri, 1927) both explore the question
of whether the historical middle class would ever be fit for the role of social
leadership. The answer, in both cases, is negative, although the narrative
conveys the dissolution with a kind of pathos.’ Self-destruction, bacchanalian
delirium, emotional outbursts and susceptibility to the subsequent lethargy,
are all presented as a manifestation of the national character in Móricz.
While the narrator, who explores his own ideas in commentaries of varying
length, offers the industrious Jewish merchant and the German engineer as
examples worthy to be followed, a certain aversion can be sensed to the sober
and quotidian way they live. Moricz was following an old tradition when
representing the Hungarian national character as essentially emotional,
prone to outbursts and exaltation but incapable of sustained, monotonous
? Lóránt Czigány: The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature, Oxford, Clarendon, 1984,
237-241.
3 Anna Fabri: “Once upon a time I used to be a novel hero...”: The Cult of Literature in Gyula
Krüdy’s Works, in Tibor Gintli (ed.): The Hungarian Writer of the Lost Time: Memory and
Poetical Imitation in Gyula Krúdys Works, Jyaskyla, University of Jyaskyla, 2015, 11.
* Attila Tamas: Years of the Nyugat, in Tibor Klaniczay (ed.): A History of Hungarian
Literature, Budapest, Corvina, 1982, 353-354.
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