Hungarian Literature Research Articles

Attempts at creating a new concept of literature •

AbstractUsing the term Hungarian literature in (Czecho-)Slovakia has been a problem for literary historiography specialised on reflecting on this corpus since the emergence of minority Hungarian literatures defined by geopolitics. Since the twenties onwards, the texts of the belletristic corpus have been asking, from time to time, about the relationships among space and identity, and providing answers from approaches heroic to ironic. The relationships of identity and space are reflected vigorously not only in belletristic representations but in the literary criticism that reflects on them and in literary historiography as well. In my study, I am going to follow the process having taken place in the literary-historical narrative between the two World Wars, which aimed to transform the geopolitical factors associated with identity into a constructed space through articulating the experience of intermediacy and reflecting on the “as-if” state of the intercultural existence of Hungarian literature in Slovakia.

The Myrmecofauna (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) of Hungary: Survey of Ant Species with an Annotated Synonymic Inventory.

Simple SummaryAbundance is a hallmark of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). They are exceedingly common in both natural and artificial environments and they constitute a conspicuous part of the terrestrial ecosystem; every 3 to 4 out of 10 kg of insects are given by ants. Due to their key role in natural habitats, they are at the basis of any nature conservation and pest management policy. Thus, the first step in developing adequate management strategies is to build a precise faunistic inventory. More than 16,000 valid ant species are registered worldwide, of which 126 are known to occur in Hungary. Thanks to the last decade’s efforts in the Hungarian myrmecological research, and because of the constantly changing taxonomy of several problematic ant genera, a new checklist of the Hungarian ants is presented here. A comparison of the Hungarian myrmecofauna to other European countries’ ant fauna is also provided in this paper. The current dataset is a result of ongoing work on inventorying the Hungarian ant fauna, therefore it is expected to change over time and will be updated once the ongoing taxonomic projects are completed.Ants (Hymenoptera: Forimicidae) are exceedingly common in nature. They constitute a conspicuous part of the terrestrial animal biomass and are also considered common ecosystem engineers. Due to their key role in natural habitats, they are at the basis of any nature conservation policy. Thus, the first step in developing adequate conservation and management policies is to build a precise faunistic inventory. More than 16,000 valid ant species are registered worldwide, of which 126 are known to occur in Hungary. Thanks to the last decade’s efforts in the Hungarian myrmecological research, and because of the constantly changing taxonomy of several problematic ant genera, a new checklist of the Hungarian ants is presented here. The state of the Hungarian myrmecofauna is also discussed in the context of other European countries’ ant fauna. Six species (Formica lemani, Lasius nitidigaster, Tetramorium immigrans, T. staerckei, T. indocile and Temnothorax turcicus) have been reported for the first time in the Hungarian literature, nine taxon names were changed after systematic replacements, nomenclatorial act, or as a result of splitting formerly considered continuous populations into more taxa. Two species formerly believed to occur in Hungary are now excluded from the updated list. All names are nomenclaturally assessed, and complete synonymies applied in the Hungarian literature for a certain taxon are provided. Wherever it is not self-evident, comments are added, especially to explain replacements of taxon names. Finally, we present a brief descriptive comparison of the Hungarian myrmecofauna with the ant fauna of the surrounding countries. The current dataset is a result of ongoing work on inventorying the Hungarian ant fauna, therefore it is expected to change over time and will be updated once the ongoing taxonomic projects are completed.

Transformations of a Ukrainian song in Hungarian territories during the first half of the 19th century

In my study I examine through what channels the Ukrainian song “Ïhav kozak za Dunaj” reached Czech and Hungarian territories through German mediation at the beginning of the 19th century. In the German-speaking territories, the Ukrainian song was spreading in German almost like a folk song. “Schöne Minka”, a Christophor Tiedge’s adaptation of the Ukrainian song, which differs significantly from the original, probably reached the territory of the Czech Crown and later the Kingdom of Hungary in the 1810s with the soldiers participating in the Napoleonic wars. A decade later, another version of the Ukrainian song much closer to the original appeared in the Czech and Hungarian territories. In Czech this version was published by František Čelakovský in 1822, and we owe the creation of the Hungarian version to Count Ferenc Teleki. Teleki did not work with Russian or Ukrainian sources, he translated the Ukrainian song into Hungarian with the help of a German translation. This text mediating between Ukrainian and Hungarian is Theodor Körner’s translation “Russisches Lied”. At the same time, Teleki’s translation is especially exciting for Russian and Hungarian literature since it shows surprising correspondences with Wilhelm Küchelbecker’s text “Der Kosak und das Mädchen” (1814), which is also a translation of the Ukrainian song.

Régi magyar Mária-siralmak

Among the most beautiful and ancient texts of the Christian liturgy and church literature are the Lamentations of Mary. The paperpresents their manifestations in old Hungarian literature from the 13th century to the 18th century.

Archetype as the communication tool of national cultures: on the question of the typological similarity of Russian and Hungarian literatures (based on the short story “Student” by A.P. Chekhov and the novel “Two Beggar-Students” by Mikszáth Kálmán)

The study aim is finding of interaction between national and universal features in works by the Russian and the Hungarian writers, shift from ethnocultural to common content as the specific communication tool of different national literatures. Methodology. Methodological study base is the system unity of cultural and anthropological, structural semiotic and typological, comparative and mythopoetic methods. Results. A.P. Chekhov and K. Mikszáth works include national specificity as well as universal motives and images. Revealed by comparative analysis writers common archetypical platform speaks to common great-roots of their work. Although this approach doesn’t exclude, even involves studies of individual artistic manner, biographic, historical and cultural impact. The common typological row is the fact of world literature phenomenon. Human inward life repeats in specific forms, particularly in archetypes. Comparison of the novel by K. Mikszáth “Two Beggar-Students” and the story “Student” by A.P. Chekhov shows the common typological row (characters status, images of home, road, way and transitivity motives) and simultaneously manifestation variety. Conclusion/recommendations. Convergence of motives and imaginary components in works by K. Mikszáth and A.P. Chekhov intensifies authentic features of the writers. The typological row allows seeing similarity and understanding better difference between the Russian and the Hungarian writers.

Языковая вариативность и контактные варианты в венгерской и международной литературе

Языковая вариативность и контактные варианты в венгерской и международной литературе

Бэнэдэк М. Двойник господина Голядкина

It is here presented the Russian translation of the introduction Dostoevsky’s short story The Double, firstly published in the fourth volume of the Hungarian translation of Dostoevsky’s Collected Works (1922) that was part of a large educational project by the publishing house Révai. The author of this short article about The Double, Marcell Benedek (1885–1969), writer, translator, and literary scholar, was an eminent representative of the Hungarian culture of the early and mid-20th Century. His works and media appearances were intended to familiarize readers with the works of Hungarian and European literature, to teach them to understand the language of fiction and the mechanisms of the aesthetic interpretation of reality. Benedek wrote one of the first articles about Dostoevsky’s early work in the European history of Dostoevsky studies and is at the origins of a tradition of deep reflection on the nature of the writer’s aesthetic principles.

Digital life stories in year four of primary school

"Abstract: In Romania, the curriculum for mother tongue education for grade three and four of primary school defines spoken and written text production in various communication situations as a general educational requirement and competence. (see the curriculum for competence-based teaching of the mother tongue approved by Ministerial Decree No. 5003 of 4 December 2014. Hungarian Language and Literature, grade three and four). This experimental study examines the impact of digital storytelling on children’s text production skills. Our aim was to design an interventionprogramme that develops primary school children’s selfexpression, text production skills, creativity but also their digital competencies. The goal is to use digital storytelling to develop children’s composition skills, including staying on the subject, creating the connection between title and content, spelling, text appearance, and reaching the desired length. In order to achieve our objective, we devised experiments involving two cohorts of children in year four of primary school who were given stories selected from Angi Máté’s book Volt egyszer egy… (Once upon a time there was a…). Using these stories as a starting point, the members of the both groups created their own stories, the experimental group applying digital storytelling, while the control group applied the technique of collage."

Beyond the Battlefields of Memory: Historical Traumas and Hungarian Literature

One can describe the contemporary Hungarian collective memory as an interpretational field of some traumatic historical events of the twentieth century. The essay aims to sketch some important tendencies of the literary representation of these events after the millennium. At first, it outlines the wider social and political contexts of these literary works. Secondly, it models the current Hungarian cultural field as an opposition between two strategies of memory labeling them in Michael Rothberg’s terminology as competitive and multidirectional ones. These approaches to the past are also associated with different ideological implications and literary canons. Finally, with a brief overview of some recent novels, the essay demonstrates some pathways of representing multidirectional attitudes to the past in the Hungarian literary fiction of the 2000s.

Contemporary Hungarian Women’s Writing and Cosmopolitanism

This article investigates contemporary Hungarian women’s writing in the context of cosmopolitan feminism. The literary works explored are Noémi Szécsi’s The Finno-Ugrian Vampire, Noémi Kiss’s Trans and Virág Erdős’s Luminous Bodies: 100 Little Budapest, which I read as examples of a cosmopolitan feminist engagement with urban space. As opposed to the Kantian concept of cosmopolitanism, which has been critiqued for failing to take the experiences of particular social groups and geographical regions into account, cosmopolitan feminism focuses on the local and the embodied. The discussed texts thematise border crossing both on the level of form and content, while they engage with the mundane, affective aspects of everyday life in an emphatically urban setting. This cosmopolitan feminism challenges parochial, heavy, national literary traditions and points towards a distinct feministaesthetics in contemporary Hungarian literature.

Hungarian Stories of the Regime Change: Voices and Perspectives

Regime change narratives in Hungarian literature gained a new type of consistency around 2010, after two decades of postcommunism. The article analyses narrative strategies of novels written about the regime change, showing their tendency towards a microhistorical approach. The discussed novels include works by such minority authors as Ádám Bodor, Andrea Tompa, Sándor Zsigmond Papp, Zsolt Láng, who represent in their novels the dramatic regime change that took place in Romania in 1989.

Az én poézisom

Mihály Fazekas’s poetry is often associated with the discourses of popular culture. His descriptive poems on nature, his songs and elegies describing the everyday life of the military, and his narrative poem, Lúdas Matyi, which is considered to be a classic in Hungarian literature, have all been interpreted as reaching back to the original culture of the Hungarian nation. This description was mainly based on Herder’s concept of nation and history. However, Fazekas was not interested at all in the problem of recovering a pure Volksgeist from folk culture. This essay argues that the fundamental aesthetic problem of his poetry is creating poetry of social life. For Fazekas, folk culture is not a cultural entity to be uplifted or an entity to be adapted, but an important register of cultural diversity. Poetry is nothing more than a means of making culture social. thus, poetry achieves its goal if the different poetical registers reach different social classes.

Az „izgalmas és titokzatos példa”

Lúdas Matyi (‘Matthew, the Goose Keeper, an original Hungarian tale’), an epic poem written by Mihály Fazekas in 1804 (published in 1815 and 1817 in Vienna), is the earliest known Hungarian variant of the tale type ATU 1538 (The Revenge of the Cheated Man). The poem has been interpreted as a pioneer work that introduced a peasant hero as well as the genre of the (despised) tale into Hungarian literature. Yet, hardly any variants of this tale type have been recorded from Hungarian oral tradition in the past two centuries. The author investigates this seeming contradiction, and analysing the eight oral variants as well as popular literacy argues that it was precisely the immense (written and theatrical) popularity of the plot that probably hindered the survival of an independent oral tradition of this tale.

Practices of Colonization in Regional Literary Histories

Abstract The discourses on 20th century Eastern European regional literatures are predominantly determined by the use of terminology and interrelationships of national and ethnic literatures, which originated in social and state organizational embeddedness. Besides, the majority–minority relation is significantly present in the discourse on these literatures, with this relation representing a – sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit – approach of colonization. If ethnic (or minority) literatures are not only examined as opposed to national (or majority) literatures, it might occur that ethnic literatures themselves often resorted to practices of colonization when describing the literary context. This paper aims at examining the processes of literary history writing of German and Hungarian literatures from Romania, and by looking at them from a transnational perspective, identifying the in-between space where the mutually oppressive spatial practices are eliminated.

KAPCSOLATTÖRTÉNET, KULTURÁLIS ÁTSZÖVŐDÉSEK, TRANSZNACIONÁLIS KUTATÁSOK

A vajdasági magyar irodalomkritikában, valamint a -kutatásban a kezdetek óta természetszerű volt a tágabb nyelvi és kulturális környezet iránti érdeklődés. A két világháború közötti korszak szerkesztői, műfordítói, írói a jugoszláviai irodalmak közvetítőiként működtek. E hagyomány folytatódott a titói Jugoszlávia évtizedeiben is. A szerb, horvát, szlovén irodalmak és a magyar közötti kapcsolat átjárhatóvá tételének Vajdaságban történeti hagyománya van. Talán csak a szlovákiai magyar irodalomban volt még a környező kultúrák iránti figyelem ilyen magától értetődő, Erdélyben kevésbé. Pozsonyban ugyancsak hang- súlyozták a cseh, a szlovák és a magyar kultúrák kölcsönös megismertetésének fontosságát. E missziót később a Kalligram Kiadó vállalta magára. Mifelénk a második világháború után a Híd, az Új Symposion, a Forum Könyvkiadó, szerkesztőik és a fordítók érdemei voltak kiemelkedőek. Bori Imre professzor a Magyar Tanszék hallgatói számára egyetemi tárgyként alapozta meg a magyar–délszláv irodalmi kapcsolatok ismeretét. Azonos című 1970-es, majd az Irodalmak – kölcsönhatások (1971), illetve 1987-ben megjelent kapcsolattörténeti tanulmánykötetein kívül Miroslav Krležáról (1976) és Ivo Andrićról (1992) is publikált kismonográfiákat. A vajdasági és a modern magyar irodalomtörténet kutatását tehát a szlavisztika és a kontaktológia komparatív kérdéskörével gazdagította. A littérature comparée a XX. században és az új évezred elején együtt változott a humán kutatások egyéb szakterületeivel. Konferencia-előadásom tárgyát a komparatív kutatások újabb irányai, feladatai és célkitűzései képezik.

A pszichológiai szerződés szakirodalmi összefoglalója

A szervezeti kutatások területén népszerű téma a munkaadó és a munkavállaló kapcsolatának vizsgálata. Ezt a kapcsolatot a pszichológiai szerződés konstruktum és fogalomrendszerével megalkotott elméletekkel is kutatják. A szerző a tanulmányban a pszichológiai szerződést és központi témáit mutatja be. Kísérletet tesz arra, hogy társadalmi szintű relevanciájára rámutasson, és egzaktabb mérési eljárásokat javasoljon. A tanulmány elméleti összefoglaló. Célja, hogy a magyar nyelvű szakirodalomban bemutassa a pszichológiai szerződést. A legtöbbet hivatkozott munkák bemutatását követően a fókusz a konstruktumra reflektáló módszertani észrevételek áttekintésén volt. A konstruktum és az elméletek a pszichológiai hangsúly mellett szociálpszichológiai és szociológiai aspketusból megközelíthetők.A paradoxont hordozó fogalom kontextuálisan feloldható. Az alkalmazhatósághoz javasolt elmélet a kötődéselmélet.A pszichológiai szerződés konstruktum és elméletek megértésével, felülvizsgálatával egzaktabb kutatási design-ok tervezhetők így javítva az eredmények validitását. Ha így születnek komparatív tanulmányok, a konstruktum standardizálhatóvá válhat.

Principles of dental care of transplanted patients

The number of organ transplants is being on the rise. State-of-the-art immunosuppressive therapies and modern peri- and postoperative care have significantly increased life expectancy of transplanted patients, therefore, dentists and oral surgeons may encounter these patients more frequently. Although the number of successful transplants in Hungary has recently exceeded ten thousand; there is still no dental treatment protocol for these patients. The authors aimed to review and analyse the international literature about the perioperative dental care of transplanted patients based on good practice and evidence-based care protocols. A review and comparative analysis of the English and Hungarian literature between 2010 and 2019 was conducted in relation to the objective pursued. The number of scientific papers in this topic is limited and their level of evidence is low. In our paper, the risk factors of transplantation and the cornerstones of perioperative, early and late postoperative dental management are described. Organ-specific considerations and possible oral manifestations of the applied medications are also presented. Lifelong administered immunosuppressive medications and the resulting artificially weakened immune system require increased attention from dentists and other healthcare professionals during patient aftercare. Close cooperation between the treating physician/surgeon and the dentist is essential to maintain patient safety. Moreover, inflammatory disorders may put the patients at increased risk, so maintaining good oral hygiene is essential. Regular dental check-ups, early detection and adequate therapy can be the cornerstones of long-term uncomplicated survival. Orv Hetil. 2020; 161(36): 1506-1513.

A Csontbrigád orosz fordításának tiszteletteljes kritikája

The paper introduces the criticism of the Russian translation of one of the popular novels of Rejtő, Skeletal Brigade. Demonstrating through numerous examples and by the “backwards translation” of the Russian text, the author sets out to understand through certain instances what might have caused the spectacular mistranslations in the Russian text. The article may also serve as an example for the lack of similar thorough translation criticism in Hungarian critical literature, which might contribute to the improvement of the Hungarian literature translation.

The History of the Poetic Mind of János Pilinszky

One of the most important poets of postwar Hungarian literature, János Pilinszky’s (1921-1981) poetry represents the problems of connecting with the Other, the imprints of Second World War trauma and the struggle with God’s distance and silence. Although, unlike the case of most of his contemporaries in Eastern bloc Hungary, his poetry has been translated into several languages, he is hardly known in English-speaking countries. The metaphysically accented lyrical worldview and creator-centered aesthetics—which shows parallels with the Christian poetry of Michael Edwards—of this Hungarian poet are difficult to link or to bring into discourse. On the occasion of the most recent publication (Pilinszky 2019) of Pilinszky’s non-literary publications which are practically unknown to non-Hungarian scholars, I attempt to outline the major attributes of Pilinszky’s poetry and aesthetics in order to highlight—with a mystical approach in mind—the intertwining presence of said lyre and aesthetics in his poem, In memoriam F. M. Dosztojevszkij [‘In Memoriam F. M. Dostoevsky’].

Writing of Contemporary National Literary History in Finland and Hungary – a Comparative Approach

The discourse on the writing of national literary histories is still in progress due to the postcolonial and transnational turn. In the frameworks of these literary theories, the meaning of national has been reshaped by focusing on the territorial, ethnic and language borders of contemporary literature. The theory of literary history writing had to face the issues of defining the phenomenon of migrant, emigrant and minority literature. A new Hungarian book titled Kik vagytok ti? Kötelező magyar irodalom – Újraélesztő könyv (Who Are You? Compulsory Hungarian Literature – A Revitalizing Book) (2019), also evoked a debate concerning the theoretical issues of Hungarian literary history writing. In this debate, not only the author and his critics confronted but also the critics with one another. By analysing the critiques and the author’s answers, the fundamental questions of the national literary history writing can be identified. With this metadiscursive approach, I aim to present the current state of Hungarian national literary history writing focusing on the minority and emigrant literature. I will compare the questions generated by the migrant literature in Finland to the issues emerging in the debate about Hungarian literature. This comparative and metadiscursive approach helps to understand the shaping process of the national literature in the dynamics of canonizations and marginalisation.