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Letters From Budapest
| Article
# : |
19748 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
2,955 Words |
| Author
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Tamas Aczel
Tamas Aczel is professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. His latest novel, Illuminations, was
published by Pantheon. His new novel, The Hunt, will be
published by Little, Brown in spring 1991. |
For centuries, Hungarian literature, especially fiction, remained terra incognita for Western readers, and only during the past few decades has this former white spot on the map begun to be included in the intellectual geography of the world. The reasons for this malfunction of literary sensibilities are manifold. It wasn't due to any lack of distinguished writers--there have been many fine Hungarian authors. Though it wasn't always easy to find translators who could adequately render their language--a strange remnant of Finno-Ugric mixed with Turkic, Slavic, Latin and Germanic influences--in a Western idiom, good translations could be found.
Nor was Western ignorance of Hungarian literature and history the result of some ancient culture shock. Christianity had become both the spiritual source and intellectual mode of Hungary long before. The conflict between the elegant antiquity, urbane optimism, and refined traditionalism of Catholicism and the rebellious spirit, stern solemnity, and artless gravity of Protestantism created the foundation of modern nations, cultures, and literatures and also shaped Hungarian's moral and intellectual climate.
But Hungarian's development was interrupted and for centuries delayed by foreign wars and occupations that threatened the very existence of its people. The English had their bloody disagreements with the French and the Spanish, and popes and emperors were not reticent in sending vassals to battle for their rights of investiture. Yet other European peoples, for all their suffering, never faced an immediate prospect of total annihilation or extinction; the Hungarians did, and more than once.
The waves of Tartars, Turks, Germans, Austrians, and Russians played havoc with the Hungarian's villages, vineyards, and virgins--indeed, with the very fabric of their existence. The result of this virtual arrest of natural economic and political growth was that the industrial and political revolutions that elsewhere took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were aborted or defeated. In Hungary, the feudal organization of land, society, and wealth survived until almost the end of the nineteenth century and, in its vestiges, long afterward.
It was mainly for these reasons that the idea of nationhood assumed, in the course of the past two centuries, quasi-mythical dimensions in Hungarian politics and literature, despite the ever-widening rift between ruler and ruled, folk nation and political state. Nationhood became identified with the myth-creating peasantry and came to imply moral
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