First Published:
13 Jan 2025, 9:00 am
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First Published:
13 Jan 2025, 9:00 am
Tags:
Ágnes Györke and Tamás Juhász (eds), Urban Culture and the Modern City: Hungarian Case Studies, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2024; 330 pp.: ISBN: 9789462703940, £49.02/€59.50 (pbk)
Translocality, as a research perspective to explore socio-spatial connectedness, has gained traction in recent years, resulting in analysis of cities as sites where one encounters ‘the role of the local within the global flow of ideas’ (p. 10). This orientation is particularly productive in the context of literary urban studies, with scholarship increasingly discussing postcolonial and European cities from the same perspective. There has been some academic interest in the translocalities of the ‘Second World’ as well, exemplified by Uilleam Blacker’s Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe with its focus on Poland, Ukraine and Russia (p. 10). However, scholarship discussing the conceptualisation of the modern city in Hungary from the perspective of art and material culture remains for the most part unexplored (p. 10). Edited by Ágnes Györke and Tamás Juhász, Urban Culture and the Modern City: Hungarian Case Studies provides fresh and substantial insights.
According to the editors, the volume aims to illuminate the ‘marginalized lesser-known side of European modernity’ (p. 9). The volume’s contributions deliver cultural representations of Budapest and Hungarian towns within a translocal analytical framework, thereby highlighting local-to-local connections (p. 10). This approach is incredibly valuable for a global audience of the book who are likely to be unfamiliar with local Hungarian culture. By exploring different historical periods and analysing the cultural connections between urban locations in Hungary and those beyond its border, the collection offers a deeper understanding of Central and Eastern European modernity before and after the cataclysmic world wars.
This approach addresses a significant gap in research – the disconnect between Hungarian and English-speaking art and literature – largely a legacy of the Iron Curtain. However, this divide was not always so pronounced. In fact, as part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Hungary was deeply embedded in the cultural and intellectual landscape of Mitteleuropa before two world wars devastated Europe, and the country entered a 50-year-long state socialist era as part of the Eastern Bloc. By focusing on Hungarian works of art through a translocal analytical framework, the volume not only explores this phenomenon but also directly contributes to it. The introductory chapter, co-authored by the editors, helps to orientate a reader unfamiliar with the history and culture of the region, providing valuable contexts to the chapters that follow.
The volume is divided into three sections, focusing on the early 20th century, the mid-20th century and the contemporary period following 1989. The first section, titled ‘The Early Twentieth Century: Literature, Painting and the City’, consists of four chapters. The first chapter by Márta Pellérdi, titled ‘“You’ll Never Walk Alone”: Ferenc Molnár’s Budapest in Liliom and The Guardsman’, explores theatrical representations of early 20th-century Budapest through the work of the internationally most successful Hungarian novelist and playwright of the period. The chapter further explores the concepts of mirroring and spectacle in modernism, along with a biographical survey of the playwright’s life and career.
Tamás Juhász, one of the co-editors of the volume, authored the next chapter, ‘City in the Land: Nationalism, Technology and Celebrity Culture in Gyula Krúdy’s Primadonna’, which focuses on the beginnings of stardom and imagined communities via a close reading of a biographical novel based on the life of Ilka Pálmay. The chapter offers a fascinating exploration of the complex cultural geography of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and its global situatedness alongside the emergence of nationalism together with the consequences of the Great War.
Ágnes Klára Papp’s chapter, titled ‘Small-town Poetics: The Provincial Small Town as the Counterpoint of Metropolis in Dezső Kosztolányi’s Skylark’, explores complex cultural relationships of the 19th-century big city/small town binary. Focusing on the provincial small town, the author uses Bakhtin’s chronotope to illustrate the complexity of metropolitan relations. Papp continues to explore similar dynamics in canonical French and Russian literature, building her argument informed by a translocal perspective.
The final chapter in this section, ‘“Métèques” and the Central Powers of “Montparnasse”: Emil Szittya and the École de Paris’ by Magdolna Gucsa, explores the Hungarian-Jewish painter, poet and theorist Emil Szittya’s involvement in the contemporary debates on foreign artists’ roles in Parisian art life. The author provides an overview of the main trends in art history and the issues of modern art in the context of rising xenophobia in the postwar years, and then continues with a close reading of Szittya’s extensive commentaries on his ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
The second section, titled ‘Perspectives on the Mid-Century: Public Art and the Novel’, explores issues of gender, collective memory and civility through locations in and outside of Budapest. The first chapter, ‘Place, Space, Gender and Narrative Agency in Margit Kaffka’s Colours and Years (1911, 1912) and Magda Szabó’s The Fawn (1959)’ by Éva Federmayer, explores the significance of the setting in two 20th-century novels by two acclaimed Hungarian female literary figures. Federmayer connects several major themes including mourning, careers, gender and class through the interconnectedness to space as narrative points, using the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia.
‘Told and Untold Histories of Oppression: Hungarian Romani Composer János Bihari’s Memory Sites in Budapest under State Socialism’ by Árpád Bak, examines the political and ideological dimensions of the artistic representations of Romani people under the state socialism era. Using the historical memory of composer and musician János Bihari as a complex case study, Bak contextualises the persistent practices of bias and prejudice from 1947 to 1988, making this chapter a significant and valuable contribution.
The next chapter, ‘Small-town Civility and the Concept of Liberty in Géza Ottlik’s Opus Magnum’ by Ferenc Hörcher, focuses on how the politics of civility perpetuates a strong anti-totalitarian stance even without taking an explicit stand. Ottlik’s novel, School at the Frontier, is read as a Bildungsroman, focusing on the crossing from childhood to young adulthood taking place in the small frontier town of Kőszeg.
The four contributions of the final section of the volume titled ‘Reflections on the Contemporary City: Material, Literary and Visual Cultures’ investigate affairs of post-1989 culture and questions of cultural memory. ‘Surface Matters: An Archaeology of the Arrow Cross in Budapest’s Façades’ by László Munteán focuses on largely unnoticed remnants of arrow cross inscriptions on brick walls. Using the 2019 book Scars of Budapest, as a focal point, Munteán explores topics such as the history of the Arrow Cross far-right party and military movement, propaganda, nostalgia and resistance.
‘Budapest in Noémi Szécsi’s The Finno-Ugrian Vampire: The Grand and the Peripheral’ by Ágnes Györke, a co-editor of the volume, offers a close reading of the highly acclaimed novel The Finno-Ugrian Vampire, focusing on the transition of post-socialist Budapest of 1989 with a focus on the translocal allusions of the narrator. The chapter further explores strategies of metropolitan identity construction, problematised by the dichotomy of 19th-century urban grandness and post-socialist periphery (p. 264).
Following that, ‘Three Postcards of Budapest: Paradigms of the Urban Imaginary in Post-communist Hungarian Cinema’ by György Kalmár introduces representations of Budapest and the identity formation facilitated by urban environments, focusing on three contemporary films: Moszkva tér (Moscow Square, 2001), Kontroll (Control, 2003) and Jupiter holdja (Jupiter’s Moon, 2017). Following a post-Foucauldian approach to space and human subjectivity, the article explores spatial coded reflection and Derridean philosophy at core historical turning points of 20th-century Hungarian history.
The final chapter, titled ‘Old City: Ageist Crime and Transgenerational Care in Kristóf Deák’s The Grandson (2022)’, contributed by Eszter Ureczky, focuses on urban crimes targeting senior citizens, as global trends of ‘greying societies’ direct our attention towards their particular vulnerability and possibilities to offer support in the forms of transgenerational and collective care. This is achieved through a close reading of a contemporary Hungarian film by adopting the perspectives of age studies, care ethics and socio-spatial studies (p. 302).
The Iron Curtain may have been removed by 1989, yet the effects of framing Eastern Europe as the political Other for the West stay with us to this day. It is my hope in line with editors’ intentions that situating Hungarian literary studies as ‘translocal interventions’ will offer new perspectives to those wishing to explore the rich socio-cultural fabric along with its history and contemporary realities of Central and Eastern Europe.