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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 nonjudgmental 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 valuebased 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. * 427 +
