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TIBOR GINTLI
labor, which is considered boring and uneventful. A kind of myth of Romantic
doom sometimes looms in the background of national self-analysis. The topos
of Eastern laziness meets the decadent cliché of lethargic impotence.
Some of the attempts to define national identity in the Hungarian literature
of the era are ostentatiously exclusive. Szabö Dezsö’s novel The Village That
Was Swept Away (Az elsodort falu, 1919) depicts Hungarians as dispossessed
and destitute in their own country. According to his anti-Semitic and
xenophobic approach, free capitalist competition was the means of conquering
the Hungarians. Bourgeois culture could therefore only be subject to biting
satire, while the world of the village is an idyllic context for the manifestation
of the power of nature. The city is painted in demonic colors: whoever leaves
the village will inevitably be destroyed by the city. The tendentious message
of the novel is that the future of the Hungarians depends on their return to
the village. This is symbolized by the marriage of the young landowner, who,
having travelled in Europe, consciously chooses the archaic life of the rural
farmer, to a healthy peasant girl. Dezs6 Szabo’s novel embodies an authorial
attitude that is extremely damaging for society. He mobilizes worn-out
romantic myths in such a way that he presents them as genuine solutions,
removing them from their original, abstract-mythical context. He attempts to
respond to real social issues using an eclectic myth construction, irreparably
confusing fiction with referentiality. Instead of mythical opponents existing
in the fictitious context of literature, this solution seeks and finds enemies
who exist in reality, in order to channel the frustration aroused by national
failure into hatred against them.
A significant part of modernist Hungarian narrative fiction does not directly
thematize the issue of relations between the nobility and the bourgeoisie.
There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, the interests of modern
prose often lay in a different direction. In the Hungarian literature of the era,
psychological narratives were at least as popular as social novels. Psychological
narratives, however, had no deep-seated interest in the question of national
identity, for obvious reasons. Some of the writers who gathered around the
most important forum of modern Hungarian literature, the periodical Nyugat
(West), followed the aestheticizing trends of Western European modernity, and
thus had no interest in presenting social issues. These writers associated a focus
on public issues with the pre-modern period before Flaubert, and turning away
from realist-naturalist tradition and its concentration on social context, they
did not expect literary texts to raise specific social issues, but rather to explore
the more general, existential questions of the human condition.
5 Gintli Tibor: False Wishing Dreams. Szabé Dezsé, Ihe Eroded Village, Ot Kontinens, 2012,
45-51, http://tortenelemszak.elte.hu/images/toriszak/ot_kontinens/2012/2/07-GintliTibor.
pdf, (accessed 7 July 2017).
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