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Encountering the Hungarian Alterity: An Analysis of a Narrative by a Finnish Traveller reinventing himself, Jalava painstakingly wrestled with the refusal of change, which implied a political message for the Finns, too: Hungarianness was not the kind of Alterity from which one could learn the politics of moderation and tolerance. This he concretely experienced when joining the electoral campaign of Jokai Mör— his favorite Hungarian writer, the works of whom he translated for the Finnish theatre—in 1875. To Jalava, Hungarian canvassing was a corrupt political circus. What was valuable in the Hungarian Alterity was what was lacking in the fennomen’s fighting-spirit—the “fierce patriotism and national feeling” (Jalava 1883a: 12) with which the Hungarians defended their country against Others. And the Finnish-Hungarian identification worked still on a higher, metahistorical level: both Hungarians and Finns performed their missions in the service of civilization: the Hungarians protecting the West against “barbarians” in the South and the Finns in the North against the Russian, Slavic menace (Jalava 1876b: 366-367). Epilogue The preconditions for cooperation between Finnish and Hungarian scholars in the field of Finno-Ugric studies improved considerably at the beginning of the 1880s. Jalava was nominated a supernumerary lecturer at the University of Helsinki in 1880, and he published the first Unkarin kielen oppikirja (Hungarian Grammar, 1880) with his friend Jézsef Szinnyei (1857-1943), who visited Finland 1879-1881 and published his own travel book, Az ezer 16 orszdga (A Land of a Thousand Lakes, 1885). An opportunity to boost scholarly relations and Finno-Ugric cultural revival ensued in 1881, when the Finnish Literary Society and Hungarian Academy of Sciences celebrated their fiftieth anniversary. Jalava hurried to remind them that “the kinship of Finns and Hungarians had been for a long time a well-established fact,” and for his part, Szinnyei bluntly stated that when they had lived together in their cradle in the East, they had spoken a common, “original language” (Jalava 1882: 6-7; Szinnyei 1881: 192-193). It was a great moment of mutual Identitybuilding at the expense of Alterity, and it is no wonder why some Finnish liberals in Finland suspected that “magyaromaniac” (i.e., overflown enthusiasm toward things Hungarian) fennomen neglected the cultivation of English and German literature and forgot that they had more receptive relatives, the Estonians, living quite nearby (Tervonen 1987: 340). In the 1890s, the fears of the policy of imperial (St. Petersburg, Vienna) integration started to surface, and the so-called Eastern Question of how to deal with the Ottoman Empire remained acute. Jalava urged the Hungarians, still “inflamed by pernicious passion for discord,” to concentrate on internal conciliation, alleviating social grievances and securing rights for the national minorities. In 1909, he ominously remarked on the possible fate of small nations in eastern Europe to Szinnyei, “Cold spell in Spring, in nature and in state” (Jalava in Szinnyei 1881: 147-148; Tervonen 1996: 397). It was only after World War I, long after Jalava’s death and when both Finland and Hungary had become independent, that Finnish-Hungar107
