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Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
and acted as the books illustrations depicted. Aimed to instruct a general, popular,
and especially young, audience, these images have conveyed unifying, uniformiz¬
ing, and at the same time simplified ideas of the native peoples of North America.
Let us see some of the most common variations.
A Heroic, Pathetic Representation (Snapshots)
A heroic, pathetic representation of the American Indian is to be seen in Figure 6,
the front cover illustration of the Hungarian translation of Cooper’s novel The
Prairie, published in 1973, and also in Figure 7, the front cover picture of the same
authors The Last of the Mohicans, published in Hungarian in the same year. Both
images were drawn by the already mentioned Wiirz, an artist frequently employed
for the illustration of children’s books in the period.'? Figure 8 shows one of the
numerous inner illustrations of Welskopf-Henrich’s novel The Return of Tokei-ihto,
which were conceived in the same spirit, and the Hungarian translation of which
also released in 1973. Such a visual heroization of the North American natives is
well known from the Indian movies of the age, both in their Western as well as
Eastern “Red” versions (Commies and Indians ... 2013). It is important to recog¬
nize however to what an extent our graphical representations suggest the idea of
snapshots. They seem to have originated as much in the still images of movie culture
as its precedents—and perhaps also afterlife—in visual technology, namely photog¬
raphy. The pathetic late romanticism conveyed in the photos that the American
photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) had made of a number of Native
Americans during the early 1900s could have exerted a direct influence in this re¬
spect; it reached in an indirect way the illustrations of our children’s books as well
(Curtis 2005; see also Sz. Kristóf 2004).
The Representation of Movement (Filmic Images)
Movie culture as such seems to have had an enormous impact on the imagery of
our Indian books in another respect. Figures 9, 10, and 11 could give an idea of
how movement appears in the graphical illustrations of those books—itself originat¬
ing in the visual world of the Indian films of the period. Figure 9, the front cover
picture of Az Ezüst-tó kincse, the Hungarian translation of May’s Der Schatz im Sil¬
bersee (‘The Treasure of Silver Lake’), published in 1973 in Budapest, depicts a wild
racing in the prairie, as does Figure 10, the front cover picture of the same author’s
A medveöl6 fıa, Der Sohn des Bährenjägers ("Ihe Son ofa Bear Hunter’) published
in 1975 in Budapest.'? Figure 11, the last inner illustration of the former novel of
May goes, however, even further. This drawing from Der Schatz im Silbersee shows
2 "The Afterword of this edition of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales were written by Adam Rez (1926¬
1978), a well-known Hungarian literary critic of the age. It was he who executed the translation of both
Vadélé (“The Deerslayer’) in 1956 and Az utolsó mobikán ("The Last of the Mohicans’) in 1973.
5 The latter was made by another well-known painter and graphic artist of the age, Gyula Szönyi (1919¬
2014).