Jones, Gwen. Chicago of the Balkans: Budapest in Hungarian Literature, 1900–1939 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 352 single self-respectful fish could be caught’ (p. 59). Clumsy phrases stand out: ‘We usually did not know what they were being performed on any given night’ (p. 15); ‘please give me a few of characteristic Latin proverbs and sayings’ (p. 40); ‘The love and enthusiasm we felt for the play and the author was simply powerflown into the theatre public’ (p. 120), as does the novel use of English lexemes: ‘He treated his patients with great care and softness’ (p. 31); ‘I remember him as a young man full of life and blossom’ (p. 37); ‘his eyes had a refined and clear analysis’ (p. 50). Individually these errors are minor, but collectively they diminish the value of an otherwise worthy endeavour and a higher standard is to be expected. Despite its infelicities, Sekirin’s compilation presents a pleasurable and edifying trove for English-reading fans of Chekhov. School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics Mark S. Swift University of Auckland Jones, Gwen. Chicago of the Balkans: Budapest in Hungarian Literature, 1900–1939. Legenda, Oxford, 2013. xi + 155 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£45.00: $89.50. While during the interwar period urban boosters and tourism professionals have marketed Budapest either as a ‘Queen’ or ‘Pearl of the Danube’, Gwen Jones chose to call her book, on the basis of a 1910 quote taken from Hungarian writer, Lajos Hatvany, a ‘Chicago of the Balkans’. The contrast between these epithets is significant. While the former illustrate a desire to portray the city under a favourable light, the latter — with its emphasis on a geographic and cultural ‘in-between’-ness — points at the tension born from Budapest’s transformation into a dynamic and cosmopolitan Western metropolis in a region of Europe seen as politically, socially and economically backward. The growing difference between the capital and the rest of the country fuelled many misunderstandings. In the book’s five chapters, the author provides a detailed discussion of how the literature of the period reflected issues perceived as arising from Budapest’s ‘big city’ status, such as moral corruption and psychological alienation, the fragmentation of identity, the conflict between urban and rural values, including the role of the capital city in nation-building and its impact as a domestic promoter of internationalism and European values. Discussion of these issues, as Jones makes it clear in her introduction to the book, was shaped both by the personal experiences and political orientation of the different writers, essayists and scholars who contributed to the Budapest debate. Also key was the unravelling of the post1867 assimilationist process supported by the pre-war Hungarian liberal state, REVIEWS 353 which led to the transformation of Jews and Germans into Hungarians, the sincerity and effectiveness of which was questioned by Hungarian nationalists, antisemites and a broad coalition of supporters of the Christian-national course promoted by the Horthy regime during the interwar period. Following the introduction (labelled somewhat misleadingly as chapter one), chapter two features writings by Tamás Kóbor, Sándor Bródy, Ferenc Molnár, Ferenc Herczeg, Géza Gárdonyi and Aladár Schöpflin (authors from a variety of social and ethnic backgrounds, from poor to lower and upper middle class, to Jewish and German (Schwab) origins, and born, with the exception of Molnár, outside Budapest) to discuss the meaning — as the chapter title highlights — of ‘Becoming pesti at the Turn of the Century’. Used as a shortened form for Budapester, pesti (Pester) refers in Hungarian to a dweller of the Pest-side of Budapest where the economic, social and cultural effervescence of Budapest’s turn-of-the-century metropolitan becoming was concentrated. Instead of celebrating this transformation, however, these novels and short stories mirrored a sense of disillusionment and frustration with the city, caused on the one hand by the ‘snobbery, loneliness and greed’ they found in it, and by Budapest’s rigid social hierarchy and stratification, on the other (p. 35). While this undermines the image of pre-war Budapest as the generator of an unproblematic and happy belle époque, the texts meanwhile ‘identify Budapest as process or metaphor rather than place, and contain little detail of the city...