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Encountering the Hungarian Alterity: An Analysis of a Narrative by a Finnish Traveller encounter helped them to jettison old prejudices and stereotypes and realize that, in everyday matters such as foreign trade and tourism, they had been engaged in only useless and mutually harmful skirmishes and animosities. What came to Hungarians, geographically far away but mentally close in the sense of kinship relations, was that the Finns could quite easily get across the boundary, since their expectations for meeting friendly and receptive relatives were exceptionally high. In this article, the dichotomy of Identity and Alterity is applied in examining one instance of imaginary/real travel into the space and mind of the Other. The texts to be analyzed here are Antti Jalava’s (1846-1909) compendious travel book, Unkarin maa ja kansa (Hungary, The Country and Its People, 1876), and his shorter but lavishly illustrated Maantieteellisia kuvaelmia X-XI (Geographical Descriptions, Hungary, 2 vols. 1882-1883), which are narratives in the dualistic meaning of the genre of travel literature. The textual analysis is complemented by explanations of the three pictures that show the so called national characteristics of people living in Hungary." Antti Jalava was a Finnish-minded, fennoman intellectual dedicating his scholarly work to Hungarian affairs since the early 1870s.” He wanted so eagerly to associate himself with “Hungarianness” that he even used the Hungarian first name Antal when in Hungary in order to ease the encounter, thus crossing the Identity boundary in order to immerse himself in Alterity. As he put it, ever since the Finns had acquired enough knowledge and experience of the Germans (Swedes) and Slavs (Russians), it was high time to get familiar with kinship (in Finnish: heimolainen) peoples, the Finno-Ugrians. Jalava’s texts can be read both as weapons in the fennomen’s struggle for rule in Finland and as media to ease anxiety for survival between imperialist Germans and Slavic cultures and to awaken the combative spirit in the name of “originality” of the Finno-Ugric culture in Finland and in Hungary. Difficulties and obstacles as well as successes faced by the Finns and the Hungarians in their history were being projected onto each other and analogies and parallels were being used to, politically speaking, teach them both. Jalava’s own mission was to get closely acquainted with the Hungarians whom he thought to be the most civilized of Finno-Ugrians (Jalava 1882: 3). His Hungarian project was closely connected to the building of the national Identity’ of the Finns vis-a-vis the Swedish identity in Finland, and he belonged to the culturally and, since the 1860s, also politically influential fennoman movement, the leaders of which sent him to investigate higher education institutions in Germany and AustroHungary. In Hungary, he attended lessons, seminars, and examinations and col ! They have been identified as copies of Mihaly Munkacsy’s (1844-1900) works. Most likely, they were sent to Jalava by his Hungarian colleague, Jézsef Szinnyei in the early 1880s. 2 The list of Jalava’s works can be found in Suomalais-unkarilaisten kulttuurisuhteitten bibliografia vuoteen 1981 (Bibliography of Finnish-Hungarian Relations), 1982, 40-42. 3 Namely, giving answers to the questions of who the Finns were and where they originated. 101
