HUNGARIAN STUDIES 11. No. 2. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1996]

Richard Aczel: In the Wake of Enlightenment: The Birth of Modern Hungarian Literature

IN THE WAKE OF ENLIGHTENMENT: THE BIRTH OF MODERN HUNGARIAN LITERATURE RICHARD ACZEL University of Köln, Köln Germany Modern Hungarian literature was born of, and continues to embody, a fascinating fusion of broadly European and distinctively national characteris­tics and aspirations. To appreciate the ambivalent identity of Hungarian literature in perhaps the most formative period of its historical development (1772-1848), it is essential to examine the complex cultural historical context in which the national literature came to consciousness. In the last century Ferenc Toldy traced the origins of Hungarian literary modernity back to the year 1772 -which saw the publication of four important works by György Bessenyei - and this date has been broadly accepted ever since by literary historians as a working point of departure. Linked to this periodization is a conventional perception of modern Hungarian literature as a child of the Enlightenment. Thus, according to the multi-volume A magyar irodalom története put out by the Hungarian Academy: "Művelődés- és irodalomtörténetünk első, tudatosan világi eszmei mozgalma a felvilágosodás volt [...] Bessenyei György felléptével 1772-ben indul meg a magyar fel­világosodás." (Vol. Ill, pp. 11-12, Budapest, 1965) The value of all such epoch-making dates is inevitably questionable, and resides above all in the type of historical understanding they render possible. If 1772 is, on this basis, as good a starting point as any, its equation with the concept of a Hungarian "Enlightenment" is considerably more problematic. There are two key reasons for treating the conventional characterization of the period 1772-1795 in Hungarian literature as a "belated" age of Enlightenment with caution. The first concerns the content of the concept itself. While one cannot, in Edmund Burke's phrase, with a single term draw up an indictment against a whole century, there are certain social and intellectual constituents without which any working concept of the Enlightenment is meaningless. These would have to include a commitment to empiricism in scientific method, rationalism in the characterization of nature, universalism in the description of human nature, cosmopolitanism in intellectual formation and matters of taste, and a fundamental rejection Hungarian Studies 11/2 (1996) 0236-6568/96/$ 5.00 © 96 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

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