Oldal 428 [428]
NOBLE AND BOURGEOIS VALUES IN HUNGARIAN LITERATURE
One of these writers was Dezső Kosztolányi, whose works were mostly
concerned with the irrationality manifested in the finite nature of human
life, and the unfathomable inner secrets of personality. Social guestions, such
as the contrasts between the noble and bourgeois lifestyles, are apparent
only in the background." His novel Skylark (Pacsirta, 1924) explores the
unredeemable loneliness of the human condition through the story of an
unattractive old maid, and examines the complex system of emotional and
psychological relations among family members, all of whom are aware of
the hopeless situation of the title character. Ihe real hero of the novel is the
father, who, out of all the characters in the book, relates to the unresolvable
situation with the greatest complexity, and perceives with the greatest clarity
the hopelessness of their lives. The character of the retired archivist Ákos
Vajkay amalgamates noble tradition and bourgeois lifestyle. His noble origins
are suggested not only by the spelling of his family name, but also by his
favorite hobby of researching the family trees of the nobility. His former
work as a bureaucrat, and his sober lifestyle that is entirely free of gentry
allure, connect him to the bourgeoisie, while his reserved manners and non¬
judgmental attitude are suggestive of liberal thinking. In terms of character
he represents a noble attitude, which, while wholeheartedly adopting the
principles of the bourgeois transformation, is identified egually by noble
origins and bourgeois liberalism. This identity is perfectly symbolized by the
portrait of Count Istvan Széchényi, the initiator and most significant figure
of the Hungarian bourgeois transition, which hangs on the wall of the town
casino.
For the next generation of writers, the relationship between noble and
bourgeois values was already a thing of the past. For the generation of modern
writers born around 1900, the noble lifestyle was no longer a living tradition,
as it had been for Kosztolanyi, for example, whose own grandfather had
taken part in the 1848-49 war of independence. The work of Sandor Märai
can be interpreted as a symbol of passing beyond the issue. While Mikszath
and Krüdy, the latter being revered by Marai as one of his masters, recorded
the decay of noble values, in his most significant works Marai presented the
bourgeois mentality as sentenced to extinction. In his view, the rational order
of the bourgeois lifestyle had created a culture that made possible the value¬
based autonomy of the individual. In his interpretation, the age in which he
lived — due, to some extent, to contemporary ideas of crisiology — was defined
as a time of the mass man coming to power. According to his projections, the
appearance of the mass man, stripped of his autonomy, means not only the
end of bourgeois culture, but the end of European culture, too.
6° Szegedy—Maszak, Mihaly: The Age of Bourgeois Society, 1920-1948, in László Kósa (ed.): A
Cultural History of Hungary in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Budapest, Corvina
— Osiris, 220.
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