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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). + 426 +
