Suchergebnisse

As a couple, Miklós Mészöly (1921-2001) and Alaine Polcz (1922-2007) have a special status in Hungarian literature. Mészöly is one of the most important figures of postwar Hungarian fiction. His wife, Polcz, became an author at the age of sixty-nine when her first book, a wartime memoir entitled Asszony a fronton [1991, 'One Woman in the War'] (Polcz 2005, 2002b), gained attention. Although she has been generally regarded only as an írófeleség ['a writer's wife'] (see Borgos 2007), by the turn of the century she eventually became more popular than her husband. This paper focuses on a novel by Mészöly, Pontos történetek, útközben [1970, 'Accurate Stories on the Road'], that was based on Polcz's tape recorded narration of her journeys mostly to Transylvania. My analysis poses two questions; the first regards the issues of style and narration, while the second examines the topic of gender. In other words, this approach to Mészöly's novel aims to grasp the characteristics of the narrative style of Mészöly by comparing his transcription to the text recorded on the tape made by Polcz. How was it possible for the husband to publish a novel exclusively under his own name from his wife's "raw material"?

In this paper I will provide a brief overview of early twentieth-century, Hungarian history in order to examine how anti-Semitism and anti-modernism influenced modernism's reception in fin- de- siècle Hungary. In 1908 the most significant Hungarian literary review of the twentieth century was founded by Hugo Ignotus, Miksa Fenyő and Ernő Osvát, all of whom were assimilated Jews. The journal's title, Nyugat, ['West'] unambiguously marked the editors' orientation and program of accelerating cultural modernization by reviewing and translating Western European works. For conservatives this aim of transferring aestheticism, late Symbolism and decadence was regarded as an attack against the nation's patriotic traditions. Anxiety surrounding the Jewry's purported "failed assimilation" was compounded by the fear that a foreign culture would have an undue impact on Hungarian literature. It is my aim to analyze both the first and second wave of modernism in Hungary so as to reveal the analogous relationship between the argument that Western European modernism is alien to the Hungarian literary style and language and the anti-Semitic argument stating that assimilation of the Jews is superficial.