HUNGARIAN STUDIES 2. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1986]

REVIEWS - Czigány, Lóránt: The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature (Mihály Szegedy-Maszák)

11* REVIEWS Lorant Czigány The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature From the Earliest Times to the Present Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984. 582 pp. Historiography has at least two clearly distinguishable facets: it organizes a certain amount of data into a narrative structure, establishing some connection between explanandum and explanans. Accordingly it is possible to criticize any work of historical writing on the basis of factual knowledge and on that of the theoretical concepts underlying the explanation of "data". As it must be taken for granted that a single author who sets himself the enormous task of writing the history of a national literature from the earliest times to the present, cannot achieve this end without lapses of inaccuracy. I shall focus primarily on the metahistorical aspects of this present work. Lóránt Czigány is a critic who left Hungary in 1956. Living in the West, he pays regular visits to his native country. Because of his double allegiance, he is ideally suited to the writing of a history of Hungarian literature combining an international horizon and the familiarity with cultural changes in present-day Hungary. What the reader living in Hungary might expect is no less than a timely corrective to his parochialism and national complacency. What kind of vision of Hungarian literature does a critic unbiased by local interests have? Looking at the table of contents, it is somewhat surprising to see that Petőfi (1823-1849) and Jókai (1825-1904) are the writers whose works are discussed in separate chapters. Petőfi is certainly one of the three most important Hungarian poets of the 19th century, and Jókai is no minor novelist, but few readers today would maintain that they are the most representative verbal artists of the Hungarian language. It is possible that Czigány has remained insensitive to the somewhat equivocal popularity of Jókai? Critics have always emphasized the latter's artistic inferiority to Zsigmond Kemény (1814-1875). Besides, statistical studies indicate that Jókai has lost much of his popularity in recent years, even among children, who used to represent the bulk of his reading public. In any case one cannot help observing that Czigány gives too much emphasis to Jókai's historical romances, which in the title of chapter XIII. he himself characterizes as a form of "national escapism" (p. 217.); whereas he pays much less attention to works written for a more serious public. In general the book tends to make Hungarian literature seem much less "adult" and civilized than it actually is. We may justly draw examples from the 19th century, because this is the period with which Czigány seems most familiar. While the uneven, and sometimes rather superficially sensationalist fiction of Jókai is analyzed over 12 pages, the activity of Kemény, a major representative of psychological realism, is summed up over 4 1/2 pages. It is no wonder, then, that this sketchy outline is full of blind spots. Some of Kemény's major works are not even mentioned: the highly influential imaginative portraits of leading statesmen, István Széchenyi arid The Two Wesselènyis (both published in 1851), are ignored along with the long theoretical essay Drama and the Novel (1853), the nouvelle Alhikmet the Old Dwarf (1853), in which the hero dreams his second life, and the "romance" Nightmares on the Mind's Horizon (1853), a highly original experiment with narrative time and point of view. These facts are important, because they could have helped the reader understand the international aspect of 19th century Hungarian prose. Kemény's use of the genre of the historical portrait makes him a contemporary of Macaulay, his speculations concerning dramatic fiction foreshadow the theoretical essays of Henry James, his cult of the fantastic and the Doppelgänger, the

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