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Anssi Halmesvirta
lected data and discussed with teachers in Budapest, Debrecen, and Eger. The first
friction in Jalavas adaptation to Hungarianness showed itself when he realized how
the Hungarians, in their fervor for their own language teaching, were prejudiced
against minority, in particular, Croatian and Slovak language education (Jalava
1876a: 186-188).
Jalava’s stay in Hungary (from January to August 1875) was nevertheless his
quite personal, intimate (ad)venture; at the outset he optimistically surmised that
he could find a kinship people (heimokansa)—imagining a common “cradle” of
Finns and Hungarians in the Altai Mountains (Jalava 1883: 6) and a linguistic
(Finno-Ugric) family resemblance thus erasing all Alterity between them.* How¬
ever, when getting better acquainted with Hungarian realities, this prefigured com¬
mon Identity was shaken and transformed by a reevaluation of Finnishness versus
Hungarianness. Hungary’s at times surprising dissimilarity from the Finns, created
much narrative tension and contrasts that could be seen also in the pictures contain¬
ing disjunctive and wild gestures of difference, foreign to Jalava’s Finnish readers
in general. Consequently, Finnish Identity became critically reassessed but finally
reaffirmed by experiences of peculiar difference in Alterity. In the end, Jalava had
been reinventing himself in Hungary and in doing so also reinforcing the Finnish
progressive, fennoman bourgeois national Identity and its civil values of tolerance
and moderation up against a Hungarian conservative, reactionary, semi-feudalist
Identity.
Jalava Among the Hungarians
Let us now follow the process of Jalava’s transformation in Hungary. On his arrival
(January 1875) in Budapest he sensed an immediate familiarity with “everything,”
in particular, with Hungarian language, which sounded to him very much like his
own “sweet” Finnish, although he could not say whether it was based on “imagina¬
tion” or on “reality.” Now, his childhood tongue, Swedish, sounded “gargling,” but
soon he also realized how difficult it was to really learn to speak Hungarian (Jalava
1876b: iii). Rosy impressions of Budapest soon evaporated as he saw how differ¬
ent from Finland Hungary really was. Hungarians lived in a “Southern” country
that was richer and had more fertile in soil than Finland, but the harvest was very
often ruined by drought. There were magnificent baths and hot fountains but a
serious lack of clean drinking water. What was even worse was that “poisonous”
fogs caused feverish diseases—the infant mortality rate was terribly high (33%, in
Finland approx. 15%)—so that Hungary was actually an unhealthier country than
Finland. This could not but affect the national character of Hungarians, which
4 Jalava knew that Finnish and Hungarian were not mutually intelligible, but he recognized that there
were similarities in the grammar, e.g., in the “word-roots,” showing common ancestry. The theory of
Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarians was challenged by the theory of Hunnic origin, the former win¬
ning ground in Hungarian scholarly circles in the 1880s (Jalava 1876b: 176, 184; 1883d).