The Hungarian Quarterly, 1994 (35. évfolyam, 136. szám)
Fábri Anna: Where Time Stood Still. Images of Upper Hungary in the Work of Jókai, Mikszáth and Krúdy
searching for their own voice in the footsteps of the French Romantics and Sir Walter Scott. Poets were perhaps even more attracted to this region, for in the retelling of lays and legends in verse the Up-Country, the land of medieval magnates, had a distinguished place. The young Sándor Petőfi, barely sixteen years old, compiled a list of sixty castle ruins in Hungary; two thirds of them were up north. As he repeatedly pointed out, his heart was in the lowlands and he admired only from the distance the savage, romantic Up-Country. Later he spent many weeks travelling in its eastern regions, publishing his travel notes in five instalments. Hungarians, at the time, were absorbed in a Great Plains idolatiy; these travel notes created a sensation, further strengthened by a poetic competition in which Petőfi engaged with two young fellow poets, the subject being an idyllic Carpathian landscape. There was more to it than poetry: a number of prominent Hungarian politicians stemmed from Upper Hungary, especially its eastern and north-eastern regions. Those who gathered for meetings of the Hungarian Diet in Pozsony (Pressburg, later to be rechristened Bratislava) included Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the opposition, as well as the short-lived leading conservative, Count Aurél Dessewffy, who also came from eastern Upper Hungary. A surprisingly large number of the young opposition intellectuals gathering in Pest in the 1840s were of burgher origin from the towns up in the north, or had been educated in the famous schools there. Theirs were the key positions in the nascent press. One of the most prominent of them was Mór Jókai, whose cradle had stood in the south-western marches of the region; he was a journalist and editor, who published his first novel in 1846, at the age of twenty-one, and became one of the heroes of the 1848 Revolution. Jókai, in a huge oeuvre which defined the nature of Hungarian fiction, was the first to make systematic use of Mednyánszky's Picturesque Journey—not only of its data and set pieces but of journey by water as a narrative topos. Such are frequent in Jókai's works, achieving a key role in one of his major fictions, Az arany ember (Timár's Two Worlds). J ókai was born in Komárom (Komarno), the destination of Picturesque Journey, where the Vág joins the Danube, and he spent the years of his childhood there. The romantic isles, used as recreation areas by a town built on both banks of the Danube, and the fortress of Komárom, one of the most powerful in the whole Habsburg Empire and which played so important a role in the dying days of the Hungarian Revolution (1848-49), all figured in a dozen Jókai works. Childhood impressions, and figures that the writer's memory faithfully preserved, the merchants of Komárom, river boatmen, artisans, soldiers, noblemen, and burghers, Hungarians and non-Hungarians were Jókai's companions in a working life that spanned almost six decades. 12 The Hungarian Quarterly