István Csicsery-Rónay, Jr. — The Classical Historical Novel and the Mythology of liberal Nationalism: Scott, Manzoni, Eötvös, Kemény, Tolstoy.

CHAPTER IV: HUNGARY IN 1514

The Engaged Historical Novel

Were it made available in translation, Eötvös’ monumental historical novel, Hungary in 1514, would strike most Western readers as a very peculiar work. Although he was the author of four novels, and numerous poems and novellas, Eötvös was not a professional literary man. He was an example of that characteristically Central European phenomenon, the public intellectual. His concerns were primarily those of public life: civil administration, political economy, and education.

Eötvös repudiated his Austrophile, baronial family while a young man, and associated with a number of exceptional Hungarian scholars and intellectuals with whom he was later to found the Centralist cir­cle, a group of Liberal modernizing reformers. He studied constitutional law and political philosophy, and in the 1830s acquired a reputation as a lyric poet, with affini­ties to Hugo and Heine. In the midst of the Reform Period, from 1830 to 1848, he and his circle took over the most popular Hungarian weekly from the imprisoned Kossuth, and published several scholarly and pole­mical articles arguing for the wholesale reform of Hungarian economic and political institutions on the French and English models. These works articulated all the basic ambitions of the Reform Era in Hungary.

Eötvös approached literature without embarrassment as a tool for social-political education. He was one of the most erudite men in Nineteenth Century Hungary, but he was not receptive to his Western Euro­pean contemporaries’ refinements of the novel, as was his confrere, Kemény. Eötvös appreciated few of the techniques of critical realism we have come to associate with the best Nineteenth Century novels, such as plasticity of detail, the diffusion of history in everyday life, and the representation of reality through various, highly differentiated social dialects. His inspirations came mainly from the political arena. Of the possible influences on his greatest novel, A falu jegyzője [The Village Notary] (1846), only the peasant novels of B. Auerbach and Disraeli’s Coningsby, both high “doctrinaire” Liberal works, are considered plausible (Sőtér 175).

Among his contemporaries, Hugo alone captured his imagination, and only Hugo at his most socialistic, in the 1830s. After a visit to Western Europe, during which he conversed with Hugo, Guizot, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine, Eötvös wrote two essays on Hugo to proclaim his adherence to the master’s promethean ars poetica. The poet’s task, he wrote, citing Hugo’s preface to the drama Angelo, is “to give philosophy to the masses, form to ideas, sinews, blood and life to poetry, unbiased ex­planations to the thinker, medicine for sick souls, balms for hidden wounds, one counsel for everyone, law for everyone” (Kultúra és nevelés 40).

A year later, in 1835, Eötvös again invoked Hugo as a banner to enlist his young contem­poraries for the cause of the reform.

There is no law in my opinion more sacred for every poet than to make himself understood; and as his language restricts his effects to one homeland, so there are also limits to our thoughts, and as soon as he surpasses them, he sings only for himself, or perhaps for the future. It is more beautiful and more certain to work for one’s own time; this is what the artist should strive toward. (Ibid. 47)

Eötvös set limits on himself that were decidedly unpopular in his day. Hugo’s vision of a politically redemptive poetry was well within the French Romantic tradition, and had a living popular base in the socialistic political activity of the 1820s and 30s. Hungary in the Reform Period had no such base. It had only the rudiments of a reading public with bourgeois sympathies. Hungarian Romanticism, moreover, had been addressed to a gentry audience whose constant concern was its own self­ preservation as a class against foreign absolutistic incursions.

After 1845, the Reform movement in Hungary moved with increasing speed toward a revolutionary confrontation with Austria. Kossuth was released from prison, and the Hungarian opposition parties agreed to suspend all specifically partisan agitation in the interest of a united front. But when the agreement was reached, Eötvös’ second novel, The Village Notary, was already in proofs. It appeared in 1846, and happened to be the most potent Centralist attack on conservative Hungarian gentry ideology and its county-based political government. Eötvös’ best known and most frequently read novel, it achieved an inter­national reputation and its translation was greeted with enthusiasm in England (Czigány 113-34). It elicited outrage in Hungary at the breach of contract among the opposition parties.

After 1846 Eötvös, too, agreed to publish only in the spirit of the united opposition. He perceived that Kossuth’s policy was leading to the polarization of the country he had long dreaded, a revolutionary mood that might lead either to socialistic anarchy on the part of the peasantry, especially the aggrieved and nationalistic Slav minorities, or a severe reaction from Austria. Political developments elsewhere seemed to support his fears. In 1846, when the Polish aristocracy re­volted against Austria, Vienna encouraged Galician peasants to rise up against their landlords and massacre them by the hundreds (Hobsbawm 169; 192).

Barred by his oath from publishing, and unwilling to support poli­cies not his own, Eötvös withdrew to his wife’s estate, where at incredible speed he completed his novel on the Dózsa rebellion of 1514. In the novel, Eötvös traced the origin of the oppression of the bonded-serf (jobbágy) class to the peasant revolt led by György Dózsa, and the inhuman laws promulgated to punish the rebels. He perceived that the conditions for a new peasant uprising against the nobles were again present, and unless the reform policy of the Centralists were quickly applied, the intended political revolution would backfire. Nobles and peasants would nullify each other; all hopes for independence and social progress would be swallowed by an Austrian reaction and perhaps the destruction of the Hungarian state.

The result was a novel unprecedented in Hungarian literature.

It follows … from Eötvös’ special situation, his sharp and deter­mined anti-feudalism, that he searched for the period of the Hun­garian past in which the attack on feudalism stands at the center, while the question of national independence emerges only from the background. The sharp foregrounding of the national past’s inter­nal class-conflicts is to some extent a new movement in literature, since the historical poetry of gentry liberalism strove primarily to enliven the historical line of the wars of independence, where the questions of internal transformation come up only within the limits set by the independence struggle. (Szigeti 33)

Historical Background of the Hungarian Historical Novel

To understand both the novel and the novel’s theme, they must be placed in the development of Hungarian society and culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. From the mid-Eighteenth Century to the Reform Era (1830-1848), Hapsburg absolutism isolated Hungarian so­ciety from developments in the West. Under the reign of Maria Theresa, the Hungarian nobility — the only class with access to education -­ was drawn to Vienna, where it served in the elite organizations of the court, and intermarried with the Austro-Bohemian aristocracy. As the aristocracy was assimilated into the Austrian imperial plan of the Gesamtstaat, those members of the gentry (the lower niveaux of the nobility) who were not serving in the Empress’ Hungarian Noble Bodyguard retreated to their estates. The languages of culture and administration were Latin and German; Hungarian was spoken among the gentry and at least half of the peasantry, but it had no public role.

Despite the fair success of Maria Theresa’s assimilationist policy among the aristocracy, the whole Hungarian nobility guarded jealously certain privileges granted to it by the ancient Hungarian constitution. Most important of these was the exemption of their lands from taxation. The Austrian nobility had long ago renounced the same privileges, and thus the Hungarians’ adamance on this point appeared to the court as a monstrous anachronism obstructing it from the collection of its pro­per revenues. The full burden of taxation fell on the peasantry, especially the jobbágys, the class of peasants bound by law to work the lands of the nobles. These were not serfs in the Russian sense. They had certain constitutional guarantees, and had even acquired over the preceding three hundred years the rights of contract and a limited social mobility. But the nobles’ privilege of exemption led to the defacto nullification of the bonded-serfs’ guarantees, as the demands of the stagnating economy and the insatiable state apparatus grew (Macartney 113-14).

Several times the court attempted to establish rules for the obli­gations and privileges of the peasantry. But the Hungarian nobles inter­preted every such move as an attempt to polarize the pureblooded Hunga­rian nobility and the bonded-serfs, almost fifty percent of whom were ethnically non-Magyar Slavs and Romanians. Austrian administrative re­forms were viewed as threats to the Hungarian nobles, who conceived themselves to be the Magyar nation.

After the death of Maria Theresa, her successor and son, Joseph II, introduced a radical change in Hapsburg administrative policy. Inspired by Voltaire and Frederick the Great, Joseph set out to incorporate and rationalize his realm by abolishing the feudal anachronisms within it. He despised the Hungarian nobles for their intransigence, and refused to have himself crowned King of Hungary, so as not to be bound to uphold the constitution. He ruled by edict. He demanded that the Hungarian nobles give up their class privileges — under the circumstances, a demand for class-suicide — and to distribute the burden of taxation equally among all classes. The demand was rejected, as his mother’s had been. Joseph’s response, so unlike the douce violence of Maria Theresa, bore the marks of his “revolutionary absolutism.” He applied economic pressures, dissolved the traditional county-based governments — the political backbone of the gentry –,  taxed Church lands, extended religious toleration to the sizeable Protestant population, and attempted an immediate and complete liberation of the bonded-serfs. The last of these policies incited several bloody uprisings and repressions.

Joseph met with greatest resistance, however, when he replaced Latin with German as the language of the bureaucracy in Hungary.

This audacious but hasty policy, which misunderstood completely the whole psychology of national evolution, became the beginning of a new epoch, not only in Hungary, but also in Bohemia and Croatia. Joseph II became, against his will, the real promoter of the na­tional renaissance. Feudal public opinion, until then almost en­tirely indifferent to national matters, under the sway of medieval Latinity, regarded the linguistic reforms as humiliating, and as whip cuts under which their dreamy national consciousness began to prance. This resistance could not be reduced to genuine national motives; it was rather a growing fear of the nobles that their jobs in public administration would be taken by the German imperial bureaucrats. (Jászi 68)

Although many Hungarian nobles, bureaucrats, and intellectuals already spoke German fluently and could easily function under Germaniza­tion, the outraged nobility reached its greatest solidarity on this point. Josephinism came to represent cool, alien, rationalist absolutism in the minds of most Hungarians. The politically active nobility strove to combat it with an ideology of organic traditions handed down from the Middle Ages. On a more popular level, Josephinism collided with the more recent and far more powerful trend of the Romantic movement, in particular Herder’s theories of national identity (Berlin 163).

Already in the mid-Eighteenth Century, a nationalistic Hungarian consciousness had begun to take form with the discovery of important chronicles from the thirteenth century describing the settlement of the Danube basin by the early Magyars. The theme excellently suited the no­bility’s purpose, fulfilling as it did the Herderian requirement that every true nation should have an idyllic Vorzeit, a golden age of natio­nal integrity and naturalness. It provided a mythohistorical foundation for the argument that the nobility, descendants of the early conquerors of the homeland and defenders of the race, were granted their privileges as rewards. For the politically isolated and self-isolating Hungarian community, the myth of the Magyar Golden Age became a form of cultural passive resistance to Austrian imperial acculturation, as well as a his­torical standard against which to measure its upstart oppressors. Writers under Joseph turned increasingly to essentially mythical idylls for their historical-nationalistic themes.

After Joseph’s death, the new Emperor, Leopold, was willing to grant legal reforms to safeguard the Hungarian nobility’s constitutional privileges. He agreed to the Diet’s demand to share the crown’s power to create, implement, and abolish laws, to levy taxes, and to recruit the army. At the same time, he continued Josephine reforms in less radical fashion in co-operation with the Hungarian Estates, by codifying religious freedom, insuring the free movement of the peasantry, and establi­shing representative commissions to work out proposals for future re­form. Leopold’s brief reign was followed by the accession of the openly reactionary Francis. At first resistant to Francis’ absolutism, the Hungarian nobles were persuaded after the discovery of a small Jacobin movement in 1795 to participate in the most extreme methods of authori­tarian repression by Austria. The political conservatism of the nobility now combined with the ostensibly conservative cultural nationalism of the preromantic movement — particularly among the small-landowning gentry — and literary activity in Hungary was narrowed to the immediate Goethian project of reforming the Hungarian language, and of making it capable of high poetic and intellectual expression. In the absence of an urban bourgeoisie, this became the rallying point of the “bourgeois gentry” culture.

As the nobility grew more isolated, the conditions of the jobbágys worsened. Hungary had been left virtually undisturbed by the Napoleonic Wars, and the gentry might have had in Europe a hungry market for its developing commercial farming. Its labor force and agrarian technology, however, were woefully inadequate. War taxes rose, and jobbágys by the thousands were pressed into the imperial army. At the same time, land­lords effected widespread evictions and enclosures. The familiar process of pauperization had begun.

Economic life in Hungary underwent a rapid change that directly affected the cherished lifestyle of the small- and middle-holding gentry, the class that had come to replace the Austrophile aristocracy as the national political power base after the reign of Joseph II. The nobility was bound by an ancient law prohibiting the alienation of their lands from their families (avicitas). The law had been disregarded for centuries, but the possibility of interminable lawsuits discouraged Austrian investors from advancing credit on lands the constitution would not per­mit them to acquire in the event of bankruptcy. Avicitas favored the aristocratic magnates, whose court-connections offset the financiers’ anxieties. All of the landowners’ agrarian labor was provided by jobbágys, bound to work a certain number of days each season. Under such conditions, the gentry could not compete against foreign and aristocra­tic monopolies. A split developed between the struggling gentry, which found in cultural nationalism the theoretical expression of its class and political opposition to the Hapsburgs, and the cosmopolitan aristo­cracy backed with Austrian capital and ideological sympathy.

The language reform was the first concerted effort to produce an embourgeoisifed (polgáriasodott) gentry ideology. In a land without a significant urban population, the ideas of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism were articulated on behalf of the landed gentry, the only class capable of supplanting the hegemony of the courtly aristocracy without undermining the country’s economy. During the period of the Language Reform, from 1805 to 1820, the process of literary organiza­tion, agitation for and the institution of a literary public life, took place in the depressed political climate of Francis’ and Metter­nich’s reaction. The long-standing acrimony on the subject of exemp­tions was soothed by Francis’ policy of divide et impera. As long as the Hungarian nobles insisted on their ancient national constitution, the Emperor believed they would resist republican internationalism (Jászi 81).

In literary life, historical themes became popular in lyric poetry, in which they were intended either as tragic lessons about the decline of Magyar mores, or colorful romantic adventures in the contemporary German mode. Most Hungarians received their historical information romantically stylized before they even set to work on it (by such Herderian historians as Ignaz Fessler). In the Romantic Period (1820-1830), poets turned to exemplary history with increasing frequency; their con­stant aim was to confront the degenerated Hungarian gentry audience of the present with the image of its glorious past. Alongside pathetic historical paradigms, hortatory ones emerged as well: the reign of the great Renaissance King, Matthias Corvinus; Ferenc Rákóczi’s campaigns against the Austrians in the seventeenth century; and even the peasant revolt in 1514 led by György Dózsa. The gentry’s unceasing confrontation with Metternich’s reactionary government on the matters of taxa­tion and economic reform served to encourage Hungarians to create an image of themselves as a proud warrior-nation always capable of supplying national heroes and heroic national resistance.

The social and political tension came to a head simultaneously in many different spheres of life in the years 1831-32. A cholera epidemic in 1830-31 led to a major peasant insurrection that spread throughout the country. Convinced that their landlords were responsible for the spread of the disease by poisoning their wells, the peasants attacked manors and their inhabitants with a fury reminiscent of the peasant wars of the Sixteenth Century (Pál 56-58). In the last year of the uprising, Count István Széchenyi published his work, Credit, the book that almost by itself laid the foundation for the economic and social reforms of the period known as the Reform Era.

Széchenyi was the scion of a Germanized magnate family. His mystically-tinged vision for modernizing Hungary into a European state built on Liberal industrial principles while remaining within the Austrian Monarchy as an equal partner, sparked the nationalist tinder that had been accumulating since the beginning of the century, and turned the na­tionalistic ideals into practical plans of development. Such plans had become pressing. The gentry was closed-out of large-scale agrarian ca­pitalism, and needed modernization of the organization of its labor force. When the Emperor Francis convened the so-called Reform Diet of 1832, the problem of the liberation of the jobbágys had becomes pres­sing. Debate was long and acrimonious, and a clear gap developed between Széchenyi’s party, reluctant to alienate the Hapsburg ruler and perhaps to incite anarchy among the masses, and the more radical reform elements advocating the liberation of the peasants and increased national autonomy. Széchenyi had from the beginning urged that the right of the pea­santry to free ownership of its land be considered a long-term goal, as well as the equal application of civil rights to noble and non-noble alike. Like all the Hungarian Liberals, he considered the nobility’s exemption from taxation and the bondage of the jobbágys (and their con­sequent inefficiency) to be the main obstacles to economic development — and it was Széchenyi who originated in Hungary the concept of the “union of interests” among classes and nationalities that was to func­tion as the most important Liberal invocation in Hungary. But he was very unwilling to precipitate confrontation with an Austria he had grown to deeply distrust, and he considered the premature emancipation of the peasantry an invitation to Austrian subversion.

In the course of the Diet, the “left-wing” reformers found a leader with the eloquence and energy to match Széchenyi, Lajos Kossuth, who was eventually to lead Hungary into the revolutionary war of independence against Austria in 1848. Kossuth surpassed Széchenyi primarily in the speed with, and extent to, which he proposed the emancipation of the jobbágys. Kossuth agitated for mandatory redemption of jobbágy labor by landowners, and in the years immediately preceding the Revolution, de­manded state-subsidies for the compulsory commutation along with the parallel demand for the institution of parliamentary representation for the peasantry.

The conditions were ripe then for the emergence of the historical novel in Hungary. Historical themes in lyric and epic verse had been all but exhausted. (During the early years of the Romantic and Reform periods, Hungarian history had been seen as quintessentially “poetic,” full of heroic fragments, but denied continuity by the Turkish and Haps­burg oppression. [Szerb 330].) The language was still heavily laden with the neolo­gisms and awkward constructions left over from the exuberance of the Language Reform; but it had also passed through the filtering imaginations of several excellent poets. A reading public was taking shape in the capital and some Transylvanian cities eager to absorb Western urbane culture. This new audience demanded more concrete and entertaining moral guidance from literature than the hortatory verse of Romanticism could offer them. And in the energized social climate of the Reform, with public life suddenly filled with ambitious and talented public figures debating in concrete terms what might constitute proper national action, the novelist could choose among a wide variety of models to represent the social life of the present.

In the 1830s, the historical novel became the most popular form of public literature in Hungary, primarily through the work of the Transylvanian Baron Miklós Jósika. Jósika presented a novelized version of Széchenyi’s vision of national public service, wrapped in the enter­tainments derived from the most Romantic aspects of Scott and Scott’s German epigones. Since Jósika’s main concern was to create models of conduct for his readers, he felt no need to examine the historical pro­cess as a field of changing conditions. His ideal precursor-heroes were to gain validity from their noble ideality, not from their concrete relevance to their historical settings. Jósika is consequently closer in spirit to the Vigny of Cinq Mars than to Scott.

While the ideas of social progress in Hungary were tied explicitly to the framework of the nobility’s defense of its class privilege, his­torical subject matter was constrained to be parabolic, legendary, and romantic — in other words, uncritical in its justification of an aristocratic concept of nationality. Until a contestatory and critical approach to both the present and the past broke this deadlock, the historical novel in Hungary could attain no higher than Jósika’s works. The ideological formula used to investigate the past could tolerate only a corresponding formula in the organization of fictional action. The necessary break came in 1847, with the publication of Eötvös’ Hungary in 1514.

The Introduction to Hungary in 1514

The radical difference was already evident in Eötvös’ theme, the peasant uprising led by György Dózsa in 1514. Dózsa, a petty-hero against the Turks during the period of anarchy following the death of the Hungarian “Sun King” Mátyás (Matthias Corvinus), was named leader of a large force of jobbágys mustered by the prelate of Hungary, Cardinal Bakács, to march as Crusaders against the Turks. The feuding mag­nate families, who could agree only in electing a puppet king, the Bo­hemian Ulászló, and to terrorize the peasantry, viewed Bakács’ papally­ endowed power to free all jobbágys who served in the cause as an attempt to build up a private army against the aristocracy.

In Eötvös’ telling, only a handful of the aristocrats — notably the royal treasurer, István Telegdi — were capable of perceiving that the peasant army was a revolution in the making, eager to revenge itself for the injustices suffered at the hands of the magnates. Dózsa himself was a ressentiment revolutionary, driven more by ambition than for ideological reasons. But behind him stood the mysterious friar, Brother Lőrinc, whose position changes in Eötvös’ novel from quasi-Ja­cobin republican to Liberal reformer.

After several victories against the aristocrats, Dózsa’s peasant army lost its discipline, and was defeated at the walls of the Transyl­vanian city of Temesvár (currently Timişoara), by the combined forces of two feuding mag­nates, Count István Báthory and János Zápolya, the Prince of Transylvania. In Hungary in 1514, Eötvös motivated the peasants’ defeat via a romantic subplot, in which a handsome and ambitious young nobleman, Pál Artándi, tricked a young bourgeoise who loved him and yet sympathized with the peasants, into betraying Dózsa’s army. After the aristocrats’ victory, Dózsa was executed in an infamously cruel manner. Pál was accepted into the aristocracy as the hero of the magnates’ victory, marrying the now dead Telegdi’s beautiful, but passive, daughter, Frusi­na. Pál’s bourgeoise lover, Klári, was forced to leave the country with her father, a pardoned but broken captain of the insurrection, and the peasants were subjected to martial tribunals and the codification of their punishment for future generations in the nation’s constitution. Left implied by Eötvös, who carried his action no further than 1514, is that the weakening of the peasantry by a vengeful nobility left Hungary open to defeat by the Turks twelve years later, following which the once-powerful Kingdom of Hungary ceased to be an independent nation.

Eötvös’ purpose in writing Hungary in 1514 was to trace to their historical origins the polarities of his society, tensions that threatened to break out as civil war. As with each of the historical nove­lists considered so far, he intended it to be a new kind of fictive approach to historical truth: “It is necessary, having taken my place on the field of the historical novel for the first time, to present the concept I have developed for myself with regard to the his­ orical novel, differing in some respects from the view usually held in this field.”¹

The tone of the introduction to the novel recalls the Hugo es­says of the 1830s, but we must keep in mind the altered conditions. Ten years earlier the optimism of the Reform invigorated Hungarian cul­tural life. In 1846, deadlock and armed conflict appeared imminent, ei­ther with Austria, or with a revolutionary, predominantly non-Magyar, peasantry.

In addition to those general artistic and ethical obligations which, when the author does not hold them in mind, cause every novel to degenerate into mere diversion, it is the lot of the historical novelist to have one additional obligation: to popularize history. From which it follows that, insofar as the novel intrudes on the sphere of history, whether it deals with the ge­neral conditions of past centuries, or portrays historical per­sons, the writer should not follow his imagination, but rather the information which he acquires for himself with careful inves­tigation, wherever possible from contemporary sources. — The knowledge of history is a torch all nations must follow if they are to progress securely; and it cannot be the poet’s duty to obscure the light he might shed on present conditions or, by intermixing foreign substances, to falsify the stream from which we may always draw wholesome, if sometimes bitter, lessons. The fame that historical persons have won for themselves is the most sacred form of property; the glory or ignominy that falls to us from past ages and surrounds certain names, is the reward or punishment of a nation; if a poet considers the judgement of later times to be false, let him strive to aid in correcting it; but to consciously distort the truth is an unforgiveable offense.

Eötvös’ Centralist political ideals were greatly influenced by the French “doctrinaire” Liberal historians, Mignet, Thierry, and Guizot. They viewed European history as a rational process of development through the clashing interests of classes and power groups, succeeding to the victory of the bourgeoisie over feudalism, and the institution of legal equality and economic progress in a free market. Eötvös countered Guizot’s support of finance capitalism with the ideal of an intel­ligentsia above class, working for the education of “the people,” a Goethian notion that has shaped the Central European concept of the intelligentsia to the present. Although he allowed leeway for the natural development of individual nations, Eötvös emphasized that the ul­timate goal was the establishment of the Liberal democratic state, and that the progress of historical events leading toward this goal was an intelligible process. Right understanding of the historical model was therefore a “torch.” Those nations that did not see it, or wish to see it, were condemned to historical darkness. As in the Hugo essays, the image is Promethean; the historian is to bring historical awareness to the people, to make it accessible and “popular.”

In the historical novel then, … beyond those limits that art has set on the imagination with every novel, there exist other limits, which also may not be transgressed by any writer. These limits are described by historical truth. — Similarly, it would never occur to a novelist who chooses a certain country and our present age for the scene of his story to distort the existing conditions; and however great the perfections of his work may be otherwise, an author who would speak of Russia as a constitutional country, or of O’Connell as a simple lawyer, would only invite derision; the distortion of general conditions is less obvious in the historical novel, but no less scandalous. One of the main elements of the no­vel is verisimilitude, which is unattainable when what the author says of the characters of his novel does not match what we know of those times and conditions in which these characters allegedly lived. This holds as true when the novel’s story takes place three hundred years ago as in the present.

I am well aware of the difficulties that follow from this con­ception of my task. It is in any case easier to paint stories in the so-called “romantic” manner, and sometimes more appreciated, since a part of the reading public likes to hear its own views from the lips of ancient heroes, and is more grateful for seeing the past painted according to a certain acquired model, which we call “chivalrous.” Had Dózsa appeared in this novel as the hero of con­stitutionalism, he might perhaps have counted on a livelier reception, while if others had been portrayed as the ideals of chivalry, my work might have become more interesting to some; but it is my conviction that precisely because of it, it would have lost all of’ its value.

Eötvös offers the familiar argument for historical realism, and his introduction to Hungary in 1514 is generally considered the first document of realism in Hungarian literature. He intends the new “realistic” historical novel to be absolutely true to fact, in opposition to the German “acquired model” of romances popular in Hungary from Dugonics to Jósika. Those works, popular in the pejorative sense, merely encou­raged the gentry’s stubbornness and stagnation by providing them with patriarchal daydreams unconnected to historical truth. Daydream replaced reality, and because it was so often invoked to buttress the “histori­cal” cause of class privilege, it had even come to replace true history.

In  Hungary in 1514 Eötvös remained technically true to his oath not to write in the spirit of Centralism. His agitation here against the conservative gentry is discreetly literary. The novel itself, how­ever, contradicts the tranquil tone of the introduction, in the furious emotions with which Eötvös fills his tirades. Hungary in 1514 is a political novel, a true roman à thèse, with an immediate and urgent social purpose.

The urgency of his project led Eötvös to difficulties, for he was not sufficiently self-conscious as a novelist to understand fully the limits a writer must work within to achieve narrative effects. Hungary in 1514 is overambitious in this regard. Jenő Péterffy, an important critic in the early Twentieth Century, criticizes Eötvös for his inability to realize his abstract goals in the concretes of narrative. In Eötvös, he writes, “the overwhelming presence of the ethical and philosophical element perceptibly injures the imagination’s creative strength. Eötvös as a poet always condescends to his subject through general ideas and emotions; and it is not their form that interests him primarily, but the effect the subject has on the life of the mind” (Péterffy 219).

We encounter in Hungary in 1514 a dense, politically engaged, and monumentally ambivalent work. Its author was so conscious of ideology — we might paraphrase Péterffy to say that he was more conscious of ideology than of aesthetic concreteness — that our approach must be the opposite of that of the preceding two chapters. Rather than coaxing the texts to speak about their ideological substructures, we must try to see this novel’s uproar of self-conscious ideological voices as a more intelligible aesthetic structure than as they first appear.

The Deadlock of Liberalism

Scott and Manzoni approached history as gifted amateurs. Both wrote “pure” historical works in addition to their novels, but their main literary interest was in transforming historical raw material into fiction. Scott’s historical understanding was drawn from the experience of oral traditions, which he made to serve as apologia for the particular course history had taken in the British Isles, and to which he was bound by interest and sympathy. Manzoni also adhered to a systematic historical view only to the extent that it furnished him with the pri­mary opposition in his novel: the progress of humanistic Christianity over feudal tyranny in the development of modern Italian bourgeois con­sciousness. The “filling in” of the historical paradigm was the purpose of novelistic invention.

Eötvös, by contrast, adhered to a complete theory of history drawn from Liberal historicism, as a part of his professional public activi­ty. The Centralist program was based on the assumption that the contemporary struggles elsewhere in Europe against feudalism and finance capitalism were part of a trans-European process, and that reforms of the Hungarian judicial code, administrative and penal structures, electoral laws, and the entire economic superstructure were required by the historical imperatives of progress transcending traditional Hungarian national concerns. During the period when he wrote his most agitational writings, in the late 1830s and early 40s, Eötvös constantly compared Hungarian conditions to those elsewhere: “Among all of Europe’s nattins we can barely show one that has lagged so far behind in its development as ourselves beside our so much lauded constitution” (qtd. in Sőtér 138). The Centralists were often attacked by the conservative organs for their “itch to imi­tate” — an account the Centralist circle accepted, and turned against their accusers: “Indeed, we imitate England and France; it is a sign that we do not wish to imitate Braunschweig or Schwartzberg-Rudolf-staat” (qtd. in Ibid. 128). Unless Hungary followed the Western models of bourgeois political development, it would have to accept its place as a backwater in the Austrian realm. Thus, the Centralists’ position was midway between that of the leading Hungarian public figures of the time: Széchenyi and Kossuth. The former was reluctant to endanger economic development with radical social reorganization, while the latter — although sympa­thetic to the oppressed peasantry — based his plan for national inde­pendence on the support of the gentry, many of whom had a clear interest in maintaining the social status quo within Hungary. The Centralists did not wish to break out of the Union with Austria completely, and Eötvös’ program for the relationship between the two states became the blueprint for the Compromise of 1867, which established the policy of dualism and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. On the other hand, the Centralists’ proposal to extend suffrage and establish a responsible central government was a direct attack on Austrian absolutism and assi­milationism.

Scott and Manzoni “discover” history in the unfolding of their novels. In Waverley and I Promessi Sposi, the nature of historical constraint, and the freedom available within it, is revealed primarily through the spontaneous action of the protagonists. “A total historical picture,” writes Lukács, “depends on a rich and graded interaction be­ tween different levels of response to any major disturbance of life. It must disclose artistically the connection between the spontaneous reaction of the masses and the historical consciousness of the leading personalities” (Lukács Historical Novel 44). Edward Waverley’s and Renzo’s freedom of action forces history to reveal its “true self” against them, by manifesting its limits and hobbles in everyday life. (By contrast, Lucia’s abduction and isolation do not permit this fiction of choice, and consequently her parts of I Promessi Sposi are the least historical.)

Waverley and I Promessi Sposi begin with intimations of utopia. The protagonists and reader set out together with a sense that an unalienated world exists and is attainable, free of historical contingency. They are expelled from country innocence by custom or infamy, and must wander through a labyrinthine, delusive historical world full of conflicting interests. Before they can climb out into a higher unity of personal and communal understanding, they must be enlightened to the principle of meaning behind the accidents that befall them. Thus, his­tory ultimately aids them to find the “proper” patriarchal or Christian humanistic principles. The course of events contains the principle of hope, and reveals it gradually to the protagonists.

Hungary in 1514 presents an ahistorical world that does not unfold or grow. Eötvös’ “doctrinaire” concept of history emphasized the causal necessity of historical development out of certain historical conditions at any given time, He possessed a theoretical framework before he posses­sed a theme, and his consciously agitative, didactic goal preceded his particular choice of subject matter. Unlike Scott and Manzoni, whose novels helped create their lives, Eötvös employed his novel for prede­termined goals.

He chose his theme, at least in part, because it was topical and urgent: if he could prove to and persuade his readers that the peasant uprising of 1514 was caused by class-oppression parallel to that in the present, and that the national weakness caused by the bloody suppression of the peasantry by the nobility was the cause of the Turks’ destruction of Hungarian independence, then he could show how urgent the need was for reforming class relations in the interest of a uni­fied Liberal state in the present age. But already in choosing a his­torical setting — especially one so far in the past that only Latin sources existed, to say nothing of oral sources — Eötvös was compelled to provide not only a story, but also an adequate abstract historical explanation of the story, and of why conditions had changed so little between 1514 and 1846. The task he set himself was not merely (or even mainly) to give life to a critical period of national history. Rather, he had to formulate standards by which the nation would have to judge its own history.

Eötvös’ goal limited how much spontaneity he could allow his characters. The Liberal concept connected the stages of past history with the progress or decay of the present in rationalistic, even mechanistic, terms.² To remain within his adopted pattern, Eötvös had to simultaneously give life to the drama of 1514 within the structure of world­ history, and the drama of his characters within the structure of 1514. Urgency, the desire to enlighten his readers, and his chosen setting’s great historical distance, determined that the emphasis would be on the broad world-historical drama. Thus, it is world-history that motivates the individual dramas of Hungary in 1514. A certain spontaneity is granted to the abstract forces of the historical period within the order of world-history — with the inevitable result that the protagonists’ ac­tion is inherently limited by the constellation of forces. The focus is reversed in comparison with Scott and Manzoni. On this level, Hungary in 1514 might be termed a novelized history.

Stories must begin somewhere, and the degree of abruptness with which they begin is one of the fine distinctions between a story and a history. A story enters the flow of action from somewhere outside the story itself. In Waverley and I Promessi Sposi we have seen that the narrator begins his work from the perspective of narratorial utopia, from an attainable unalienated social and natural world. In both novels the narrator’s tone is confident that the story can be told in its en­tirety, the pastness of history and the “dimension of permanence” alike have been revealed to the author and can be transferred to the reader (Guillen 347).

Like its predecessors, Hungary in 1514 also begins from an ahisto- rical vantage point. But it is not the storyteller’s serenity of completeness that creates this sense of distance from history. The sense of permanence of earlier historical novelists is turned on its ear; with Eötvös the nation’s confidence is a delusion produced by the false­ consciousness of Hungarian society in the present. His contemporaries live in a world without memories. The reminders of the past have been destroyed by centuries of warfare. The life of the community drags on in dimensionless, enervated, amnesiac sameness. The romance element that Frye detects in every historical fiction is explicitly dystopian in Hungary in 1514 (Frye, Secular 176).

The novel begins with the narrator gazing up from the flats of Pest at an invisible castle, apparent only to the historical mind’s eye.

Who has not heard of the former magnificence of the Castle of Buda? And when we see this relic of our ancient glory now, whose heart does not break in pain? Of that which this homeland’s greatest man built and which might have reminded the Magyar of a better age, not even the ruins remain as our legacy. If Mátyás’ palace were still standing dilapidated, in its old place, bearing the marks of hard battles and even harder centuries on its crumbling walls, but at least as the great man built it — if the silent walls, the ghosts of our former greatness, were still looking down at the lovely river which once reflected its glory, then, looking up from our prairie, we might at least weep. We do not possess even that much of the past. Instead of magnificent memories, a little town stands before us in its full commonness, and if we should walk about the houses, shabby, and yet not old, and on the badly cobbled streets and markets, we would require the full enthusiasm of our patrio­tism to believe everything we have heard of Matyas’ glorious city. The glorious rarely triumphs when it collides with the useful; and so it happened that what remained of Buda as ruins, after a centu­ry and a half of Turkish occupation and so many sieges successfully withstood, was used as material to build new houses, while only occasional pieces of castle wall or fragments of a Gothic carving under the house-portals remained, and we must turn to the drawings preserved by accident and the descriptions of a few ancient wri­ters to prove that our past was better than our present sad condition. (§ 1)

The Hungarian Romantic and Reform poets had made a convention of opposing the glorious past with the dreary present, and Eötvös signals at the outset that he is criticizing, at the same time that he is parti­cipating in, that hortatory and elegiac tradition. While the Romantics’ historical writing was infused with the patriarchal-pastoral nostalgia of the gentry, Eötvös’ nostalgia is urban. The great loss for him is the destruction of Mátyás’ (Matthias Corvinus) cosmopolitan culture, when the great Renais­sance king introduced the arts and ideals of Italian humanism, and transformed Buda into one of the most admired courts in late Fifteenth Century Europe. Eötvös attacks the gentry’s complacency indirectly, and yet radically, by demystifying the nobility’s myth that its privi­leges are the result of natural, organic historical development of Hun­garian institutions. On the contrary, the present Hungarian reality of the mid-Nineteenth Century is a world uprooted, split off from the true course of development.

If Mátyás had been the last Hungarian king with the power and imagination to strive for the centralization of the Hungarian state into an absolute monarchy, he undermined the aristocracy by patronizing the middle-holding gentry and raising non-nobles to power in the army and Church. Under his reign, the bourgeoisie flourished, and the peasantry, although heavily taxed, was protected by the strict enforcement of their legal guarantees. Mátyás possessed a strong army loyal directly to him, and capable of resisting the great Turkish army to the south of the country. With him the conditions for the evolution of an abso­lute monarchy were present for the last time in Hungary — a stage that in the Liberal conception necessarily precedes the consolidation of the bourgeoisie.

In the introduction, and throughout the novel, Eötvös implies that the reign of Mátyás, the history of which was familiar to most Hungarians (if in rather legendary form), was the point of Hungary’s greatest development. The great king died without leaving a legitimate heir, and the abrupt power-vacuum produced a period of violent anarchy. The many forces Ulászló had held in check, many of them of his own ma­king, rushed at one another. The brunt of the violence was felt by the peasantry. Along with rule of law, the whole polis decayed.

And yet, in the last years of Ulászló’s reign, at the beginning of our story, Buda was counted among the most beautiful cities in the world. The changes that occurred in every segment of the nation’s life after Mátyás’ death were not yet visible, and whosoever came here in 1514 imagined himself in the capital of a mighty nation. The vigor with which the Pope, the King of Venice, and even the French king, Louis XII, sought to ally with Hungary shows that foreign lands, accustomed to respecting the name of Magyar be­cause of Mátyás, saw in our nation even under his weak successor the fortress of the Christian world. A foreigner, standing before the still integral palace of Buda did not surmise the general de­cay which at best would have been noticed from the fact that since Mátyás there was no progress to be seen: like an nonvenomous oak that has reached its fullest growth, this nation had stopped in its development, which, in nations as in trees, is the beginning of decay; and that here, where every stone spoke of Mátyás, how miserable the present must have been to disappear so thoroughly under the memories of the past; — but the man interested only in the show of things would have thought, while in the castle of Buda, that he was standing before one of the most beautiful pala­ces in the world, which, even in its abandoned state and the first phases of destruction, reminded Ursinus Velius of the Vatican, then certainly under Ulászló, it inspired awe in everyone. (Ibid.)

The ironic reversal of earlier historical novels is complete. Rather than descending into history as contingency from a world of ahis­torical “purely human values,” in Eötvös’ world values are social and historical, they are generated by history. However mythic in retrospect, Mátyás’ polis had once been real and promised progress. The shabbiness of the present is almost free of contingency; it is a vacuum; the torpid nation has no national life, takes no historical action, sees nothing that might pull it from its complacency. Eötvös claimed that in 1514 there had been a chance to find the right course. Dózsa’s rebellion from below, and the work of those aristocrats working to strengthen the monarchy from above, might have led history to another outcome. The parallel with the present becomes imperative on this point: if the collision of the forces of 1514 might have been avoided with reforms, it certainly had to be done in 1846.

History as Class-Conflict: Bourgeois and Gentry

Scott and Manzoni both approached the class-conditions of their day via the Liberal ideology of history, although with different class sympathies. The Tory Scott accepted the property relations of his youth as historical givens, and thus as natural products. As a novelist, where his realistic bent prevailed over the romantic, he was content to mo­tivate these class-relations through uncritical representations of his protagonists’ everyday lives. Where conflicts of class values arise (as, for example, the relations between the Glasgow bourgeoisie and the Highland caterans in Rob Roy), they are smoothed over by a putatively universal human system of exchange (e.g., the kinship ties of Rob Roy and Bailie Jarvie). Manzoni shifted the focus of this Liberal perspective by giving the peasantry at the beginning of modem bour­geois development more natural access to the “purely human values” represented by Christian humanism. The class-conflicts typified by Renzo’s persecution and Lucia’s abduction were to be overcome by the feudal class’ conversion, i.e., acceptance of the nascent bourgeois humanist ethic. The implication was that when all classes identify with the rising class’ ethical consciousness, both ethical and material pro­gress could seriously begin. Both Scott and Manzoni believed that a realm of class-free values exists beyond historical class relations, values which are, in fact, the ethical ideals of the historically ascen­dant class, and proof of its progress.

Eötvös shared with the French Liberal historians a more explicit theory of class-conflict as the propellant of progress. The vagaries of Hungarian history had not favored the emergence of a bourgeoisie. The preceding one hundred and fifty years had been a record of the nobility’s defense of its class privileges and identification of its class with the concept of the Hungarian nation. The constitution and Corpus Juris distinguished among the classes in a way that was clearly inspired by the class-interests of the nobility. Eötvös argued that the virtual bondage of the peasant class prevented the country from having a modem wage­ earning agrarian labor force, and induced widespread misery among the pauperized jobbágys. The overwhelming force of the nobility blocked the dialectical development of classes in Hungary, thus insuring the nation’s historical stagnation.

Where class interests exclusively motivate social life, the representation of historical truth must reflect the limits that class relations set on individual action. Characters become increasingly typical, to use Lukács’ term, as their class relatedness becomes evident. Ideally, they are no less individual for being the expression of social forces. Lukács writes that Scott’s historical figures

are never mere representatives of historical movements, ideas, etc. Scott’s great art lies precisely in individualizing his historical heroes in such a way that certain, purely individual traits of character, quite peculiar to them, are brought into a very complex, very live relationship with the age in which they live, with the movements which they represent and endeavour to lead to victory. Scott represents simultaneously the historical necessity of this particular individual personality and the individual role he plays in history. What results from this peculiar relationship is not merely whether the struggle will end in victory or defeat, but also the special, historical character of the victory or defeat, its special historical valeur, its class timbre. (Lukács Historical Novel 47)

The precondition for this “peculiar relationship” that binds the individual with the social, at least in the historical novel, is that the historical conflict must be represented as diffuse enough in its effects on everyday life for the characters to preserve some personal latitude of action, a quality of spontaneity all their own. When an author chooses a historical conflict that directly controls all the lives within a society, he sharply circumscribes the spontaneity of his characters, Where their limits are consciously ideological, as in periods of great articulated social conflict, characters become increa­singly representative of their conditions, and their positions in the struggle. Their freedom of action, if they possess such a thing, is no longer a personal spontaneity, but a freedom or potential develop­ment inherent in their social classes.

Lukács writes that the great realists flourished when the social life around them became fluid, when class lines were not so sharply drawn as to prevent individuals from experiencing many stations. The typical characters and situations of critical realism were dialectically interrelated, defining one another by comparison. They were not frozen into the hermetic and fetishized world-view of a single class-bound experience of the world (Lukács, “Intellectual Physiognomy” 99). The time of the peasant revolt of 1514 was not such a time. When the tale begins, the nation’s classes are so fixed that each class is defined by its opposition to all the others.

In the novel, Eötvös presents the different class positions in almost choral-dramatic form. For each class, at least two representa­tives embodying all the typical traits of the class act as leaders to their choruses. One speaks for the false consciousness that pretends its narrow class interests represent the best interests of the whole nation. Posed against him is a sincere spokesman, whose clear under­standing of the historical forces articulates the ideal of national unity. With this almost ritualistically ceremonious pattern, Eötvös’ novel evolves into a form of political tragedy played out by aggregates emanating their representatives. Historical fidelity, the theory of history, and the extreme polarization of the historical forces in Hungary  in 1514 lead to a drastic curtailment of the characters’ spontaneity.

Klára’s father, the wealthy merchant Szaleresi — who, scorned by his debtors, the magnates, decides to join the peasant rebellion and becomes one of its officers — represents the bourgeoisie when it is historically too weak to assert its own interests, divided between the ideals of liberty and the economic interest and need for order that ties it to the ruling class. Szaleresi is constitutionally incapable of choosing a satisfying course of action. He hesitates — whether to remain with the rebels or leave them, whether to surrender his camp to the king or not — because he is a bourgeois.

His situation on the eve of the rebellion represents the double­ bind of his whole class. Neither of the main antagonists, the aristo­crats or the peasants, can serve his interests. Nor can passivity pro­tect him; he is seized by the historical forces without, and against, his will. In a passage frequently cited as Eötvös’ reflections on his own position in the event of a major social upheaval, he presents Szaleresi’s double-bind in world-historical terms:

Rocky is the road upon which the human race and individual nations journey toward their full development. The field, before it is sown with new seed, and ploughed, lies fallow for a while: we see this in nations, as well; on these fields, on which God casts his sub­lime ideals, whatever the past age has brought is uprooted and cleared away, so that new, more redemptive fruits might grow; and the thinker, looking back at such ages from the perspective of cen­turies, can watch without pity the momentary ruin and waste, for beneath them he sees the sprouts of a new crop. The forest grows the better when the strong arm of the storms fells the dying trunks, pulling up the dying roots, and takes the seeds from the branches to far-off places so that they should grow into trees: thus, nations cannot develop constantly in the sunshine, either. But woe to the individual tree, woe to the individual man, whom the storm seizes; the tree that is injured in its roots, the man whose small circle of happiness is disrupted, will never revive. (§14)

Whether these are Eötvös’ own views, or those of a narrator momen- tarily sympathetic to Szaleresi’s dilemma, it is an indication of bourgeois class consciousness of a later period. The passive, organic imagery, to which narrator and characters alike resort throughout the novel when events have gone beyond their control, is joined with the half-hearted faith that the revolutionary renewal will be, on the whole, salutary.

Ollósi, the court tailor, is Szaleresi’s “false” counterpart. Ollósi willingly abases himself before the nobles, and apes their manners. Since the nobles depend on him for their outward show, he, in turn, identifies the health of his trade in luxuries with the national good, just as the aristocrats claim that constitutionalism and their class prerogatives are in the best interest of all the people. “Ollósi viewed the whole world from the perspective of his own art; he did not doubt the progress of the land so long as he was making new cloaks every year, and sewing his filigrees on the mantles in ever new curlicues.” (§1)

The two Artándis, father and son, represent the positive and negative aspects of the gentry, respectively. Pál’s father, Tamás, an old warrior and former favorite of Mátyás, despises the excesses of the aristocracy, but he is content with grumbling and lamenting the loss of his great patron king. He, too, is satisfied with the perennial role of the gentry as the defender of the nation. “Not in you, great lords, but in us, the gentry, lies the nation’s strength,” he tells his friend, the far-seeing court-treasurer, Telegdi (§ 4). When Telegdi confronts him with the prospect of the peasant uprising, Artándi is incredulous, for he is unaware of the peasants’ plight. Telegdi finally persuades him to accept command of the jobbágy army. In this way, the wise aristocrat tries to arrange for the gentry to work together with the peasantry, and to represent their interests, lest they tear the body politic apart — a situation parallel to Eötvös’ own in writing his novel.

Pál, Tamás’ son, is, in externals, the ideal Hungarian noble: virile, handsome, skillful, and courageous. Yet he is Eötvös’ most cor­rupt character. Behind his virtues are the moral weaknesses of the Hungarian gentry: fierce ambition to be accepted among the aristocracy, and personal vanity posing as the desire for noble fame. Pál is a show- hero who never performs except when he is observed. Of the many charac­ters in the morally miraculous world of Hungary in 1514, Klára is the only deceiver. He encourages his lover, Klára, to believe that the class-lines between them can be crossed. When he finally casts her off, he uses his engagement to the magnate Frusina as a pretext. He deceives Klára again later to make use of her access to the besieged fortress of Temesvár, and garners all the praise for himself. When the life of Klára’s father depends on Pál’s intercession with Zápolya, he fears that his entry into the aristocracy, through his marriage with Frusina, will be endangered if his liaison with Klára is revealed. He refuses. Only when Klára swears to keep silent on the matter does he intervene to save the old man.

Eötvös’ Ambivalence toward Revolution

Eötvös sees both the bourgeoisie and the gentry as atomized, individualistic forces in 1514. Both had lost what power base they once had had with the death of Mátyás. In the new disorder, they accordingly have little responsibility for the central class antagonism, or for ini­tiating a solution. They can only choose solidarity with one of the cen­tral classes, as Pál opts for the aristocracy, and Szaleresi, at the out­set, for the peasantry. Their roles within the historical drama are peripheral; they come into the foreground only in the intimate subplot.

The central action of the novel follows the peasants’ uprising from its first stirrings of class-consciousness among the jobbágys, its choice of a leader, the acts and decisions that turn it against the nobility, to its defeat in battle and the reprisals that follow. Since the conflict is between classes, the aristocracy and the peasantry, it is by definition more abstract than a conflict between typical indivi­duals. The Hungarian audience was familiar with the outcome of the struggle, and with the class-terms in which it was fought, if not with its specific causes and military encounters. Dózsa’s execution had become the subject of legends, and like the myths of classical tragedy, the story of the rebellion held no suspense for the reader. Nor did it lend itself to the exotic distancing that “The ’45” and the Milan plague granted Scott’s and Manzoni’s fictions. Eötvös tried to exploit this classical quality of his subject-matter by giving the familiar outlines of the Dózsa “myth” a world-historical motivation.

The historical novels of Scott and Manzoni were implicit parables of the Liberal concept of progressive history. In this respect, Eötvös differed from them only in the degree of abstraction and explicitness with which he articulated the concept, and in the irony of his treat­ment of it. In Hungary in 1514, the past and present are juxtaposed not as two stages of a single process, but as potentially identical histori­cal complexes. In history, every relationship, including a repetition, can be critically significant. A repetition of catastrophic events means a reversal of the principle of progress. The emergence of Western demo­cratic states and the ruthless competition of industrial capitalism proved that those who do not progress must regress; and Hungary in 1514 “had stopped in its development, which, in nations as in trees, is the beginning of decay.” History could take a nation either forward or backward.

The Centralists were aware of the brutalizing effects of competi­tion in the West, and their agitation before 1845 was directed as often against the excesses of industrial capitalism as the anachronistic so­cial structure of Hungary. Eötvös was particularly concerned that the pauperization process of the Irish and other European nations might be repeated in Hungary. In several writings, most explicitly in the essay “Poverty in Ireland” (1840), and in a series of articles entitled “Misery and its Remedies,” which was written side by side with Hungary in 1514, Eötvös directly attacked Hungarian pauperization as the source of potential stagnation and revolution. If the events of 1514 should be repeated, he argued, the nation would be polarized beyond repair, and the Hungarian gentry might be physically annihilated. This is the under­side of progress, the threat of ironic reversal. Dózsa’s tragedy can be exemplary and inspiring only once.

Eötvös approached his chosen setting more directly than as a “pre-­ history of the present.” Hungary had progressed neither in culture nor awareness of social needs in three hundred years. 1514 was thus a precursor to 1846, not as a prehistory, but as a precedent. Eotvos chose his setting precisely for this reason, one with great polemical value. But the effect was also to make of the Sixteenth Century setting a “here and now” more abstract than the narrated pasts of earlier realistic historical novels. For Eötvös, the past and present were coeffcient: the past would not be completed until the nation acted — posi­tively or negatively — in the present, and the present needed to be conscious of the history of 1514 to see clearly the alternatives and the urgent need for action.

The historian’s and novelist’s work of warning is only as effective as his reader’s recognition of these ironies of repetition, and beyond them, the possible ways to break the ironic deadlock. For a revolutio­nary writer, like the republican Petőfi, who believed in the possibility of disciplined mass action, the fact that there had once been a peasant rebellion at all was sufficient inspiration. But Eötvös was not a revolutionary, and by 1847 he was proposing his reform plan as a way to avoid the mob terror of revolution. Although he took pains to justify the act of revolt, he was equally anxious to limit that act to the righting of the immediate wrongs motivating the uprising, This principle of revolutionary moderation was a cornerstone of the Centralist con­ception of political action. In “Poverty in Ireland,” Eötvös adumbrated the ideological stance of Hungary in 1514. The Irish revolt led by O’Connell was justified in Eötvös’ eyes by the misery of the pauperized Irish peasantry, the result of imperialistic English exploitation.

…there is a maximum for tyranny, a moment when oppressed human dignity breaks its chains and in the first moments of its liberty sets its mind on vengeance, not on noble impulses… there are moments in which nations, although foreseeing the consequences of their insurrections, indeed sometimes their political deaths, having reached the point of their greatest misfortune, await with cool desperation even that, as in his despair an individual be­ comes a suicide. (qtd. in Sőtér 96)

Ireland’s revolution could not have been prevented by the late reforms of 1782, for the causes were deep in the material misery of the peasants’ everyday lives.

The Irish people do not want laws. They have suffered materially, they want material succor; they have been deprived of their property, they demand property; they have become paupers after cen­turies of oppression, and everyone sees that when they have ceased to weep, they will begin to steal, and what centuries have sinned against them, one year cannot give them back… (qtd. in Ibid. 97)

Eötvös was obliquely drawing a parallel between Ireland and Hungary, where economic exploitation by a foreign oppressor directed mainly against the peasantry, was producing a similar misery. But, as revolution was justifiable in the name of justice, so it had to work toward the goal of law and order when the specific injustices were wiped away. A radical transformation of society and the terror that attends it go beyond the pale of justice. “A nation may be great in its revolutions; it can be glorious and mighty even in the midst of its anarchy, as the sick man who can do more in the full fury of his fever than might be ex­pected from his natural strength; but it can become happy only with the blessings of tranquillity” (qtd. in Ibid. 98). He added a rhetorical warning to O’Connell, that Ireland, “once it has won its rights, needs tranquillity; once jus­tice is granted, the revolution must cease; although it is great to rise with the nations, and to fire passionate enthusiasm with mighty words, the time will come when, to serve the country, you must be silent” (qtd. in Ibid.).

This distinction between justifiable resistance and its extension into lawlessness and mob terror forms the basic tension of Hungary in 1514. The problem for Eötvös as a historical novelist was how to narrate as a novel the historical shifts and power struggles that make up the spontaneous action of the historical forces within the world-historical context of national history. As noted earlier, Eötvös’ novel is much more abstract than Lukács definition of historical realism would seem to allow. Eötvös does not detail a dialectical interplay of spontaneous action on the everyday level and the historical consciousness of world­ historical individuals. In a world-historical crisis, seen from the standpoint of “the thinker, looking back at such periods from the per­spective of centuries,” all the spontaneity of individual characters is limited by the polarization of historical forces. Spontaneity can appear only in superficial form, as in the actions of the gypsy king, Polgár, who leaves his people’s safe island on the spur of the moment to guide Orbán  and Frusina through the chaotic land, like a fairy-tale’s donor. Or, alternatively, it is the abstract forces that possess a kind of spontaneity, represented in the novel by the variety of social, economic, and ethical directions at work within the classes themselves, strug­gling to gain ascendancy. Individuals are merely the concrete emanations of one or another of these contending forces.

The abstraction of character leads to an abstraction of the action. Eötvös does not portray the actual violent collision of the two main classes until the end of the novel, where the battle of Temesvár serves as the climax of the narrative. The reader is apprised indirectly of the skirmishes happening offstage, by the historian-narrator or the characters. The important battle of Cegléd, Dózsa’s major victory, we see only in its aftermath, as the refugees, Orbán, Frusina, and their companions pick their way through the litter of corpses by the light of the moon and the burning town. In this polemical world, the forces meet primarily as the principles of interest, in running verbal combat, the stycho­machia of orators. The most characteristic action of Eötvös’ public figures is the verbalizing of their ideologies.

History as Class-Conflict: The Aristocracy and the Peasantry

The distinction between clear foresight and false consciousness we discussed with reference to the gentry and bourgeois characters is pre­sent in the portrayal of the aristocracy, as well. With the subclasses, the distinction was one of ironic juxtaposition, since neither the bourgeoisie nor the gentry could affect the course of events. It was the aristocracy and the peasantry that were responsible for history in 1514, and thus the course of action of these two classes had to be fully articulated in the novel to be useful for the present.

István Telegdi, who represents the ideal aristocrat for the hun­dred or so pages of his brief life as a character, acts as Eötvös’ ide­ological spokesman. Telegdi alone, among all the magnates at court, recognizes the extent of the nobles’ tyranny over their peasants; consequently, only he foresees the revolt. It is from his speech to Tamás Artándi that the reader first learns the details of the aristocrats’ reign of terror over the peasantry.

In choosing Telegdi as his proxy in the text, Eötvös did not dis­tort the historical records he had set up as inviolable in the introduction to the novel. One of his main sources, Miklós Istvánffy’s Regni Hungarici Historica (1724), used the figure of Telegdi for the same purposes. The modern historians of the Dózsa rebellion write:

The greater part of the magnates supported the archbishop’s plan [to proclaim a Crusade against the Turks], but there were a few who opposed it. Among this latter group, according to Istvánffy, was the treasurer, István Telegdi, into whose mouth the author of the account — true to humanistic practice — places a long-winded speech, the essence of which is that the magnate foresees with visionary clarity, if the peasants who are mustered awaken to their power, they will turn their arms against their masters, and thus it would be more advisable, instead of attempting a Crusade, to col­lect funds for a conventional expedition. (Barta & Fekete 29)

Eötvös extended the license of his source, and gave as Telegdi’s motive sympathy with the jobbágys and outrage at the laws promulgated to oppress them.³ Telegdi makes it his duty to be apprised of every development in the whole country; he surmises the future; he understands the influence of religious peasant wars in other lands on the Hungarian political situation; he is familiar in detail with the atrocities commit­ted against the peasants; he analyzes the injustices of the economic system, in which the peasantry produces all the wealth and enjoys none of it, in prophetically socialistic terms; most important, he knows bet­ter than any other character that a unification of interests among all the classes must be achieved, if the nation is to survive. We have seen this in Scott and Manzoni in more optimistic and displaced form. For Telegdi-Eotvos, it is the last chance to pull back from the abyss,

…the homeland requires more than blood, more than enthusiasm from the nobility! The magnates do not make up the nation … but ask the burgher, and he will tell you that the whole nobility does not make it up entirely, either; ask the peasant and he probably won’t even answer you, but without a doubt he thinks differently to him­self; and where are the ties that bind these fragments, these rags of a nation together? … can we sacrifice our monetary interest, our factions, our petty hatreds, for our homeland? Can we unite? … You can find parties; but not a nation! Here they clamor for Bakács, there for Zápolya; here they court a foreign power, there the interests of a mighty family; we are forgetting the homeland; who can hold the whole together when the man on whom we placed the crown has become the object of contempt? (§4)

Thus, Telegdi speaks for 1514 and for 1846. As the Communist critic, József Szigeti, writes:

[Eötvös] judges the entire historical situation on the basis of Western European progress out of feudalism. According to this mo­del, parallel to the decay of feudalism and the strengthening of the bourgeoisie, is the development of royal power, reaching its summit in absolute monarchy, which for a while represents the inte­rests of bourgeois development, as well, and thus plays the role of a progressive historical force in its formative stages. Because of this, we can discern a certain vacillation in Eötvös; he is trying to discover whether the main line of Hungarian progress, under the historical conditions, was above or below, on the side of the central monarchy, or on the side of the peasants. Thus, everyone who strives for the fortification of the central monarchy is seen in a positive light. (Szigeti 64)

The aristocracy does not listen to Telegdi. When his warning is fulfilled on his own house, the nobles withdraw in fear behind the walls of Buda. After Telegdi’s alter-ego as enlightened magnate, the court tutor Bornemisza, promises Szaleresi the king’s protection, the magnates deny the king’s right to offer such a promise, and demand Szaleresi’s execution. In the end, it is the self-interest of the aristocracy that creates the whole chain of tragic events in the novel. Eötvös’ narrator is direct in his judgement.

Someday, perhaps, God will grant the Hungarian aristocracy, like the Roman imperators, their Tacitus; it will be his office, in speaking of the land’s public affairs, to paint with a worthy brush that age and those men, for whose sins the Magyar has been expunged from the community of independent nations. (§ 6)

It is Eötvös’ other spokesman, Brother Lőrinc, the mysterious village priest, who most clearly states the aristocrats’ position in his sarcastic summaries. When Báthory, who is known to have massacred many of Dózsa’s fellow-Székelys, arrives with the Prior of the Dominican Order as royal delegates to the Crusaders’ camp to demand its dispersal, Báthory gives his word to the jobbágys that they will have safe­ conduct, Lőrinc rebuts him by citing the law.

And why do we, miserable wretches, not believe the great, the famous Báthory, the nation’s Master of Horse, the High Sheriff of Somogy, the king’s Councillor, and the lord of so many for­tresses and villages? Why do we dare call him a liar, we mise­rable wretches, him, the powerful, the glorious, this Báthory, one of those who, it seems, elected a king for themselves only to have one more servant…. György Báthory, do not puzzle at our boldness, I will solve it for you. It is because we are poor and miserable, because we belong to that nation which you, power­ful lords, walk over like dust; because we know your code of ho­nor does not extend to us, the poor, that there is not one among us that you do not consider it a virtue to cheat….

This homeland is your home, which you won with your blood, of which every single piece of land is your property; through your graciousness you granted a small part to your jobbágys; this is the answer you give to our complaints; but just how far does your generosity extend? You gave us land worth 100 dinars, as much as one fertile fruit tree is worth, one tenth of the cost of one of your suits of clothes….

You were the lawmakers, and who could we turn to against your oppression, when your lawmaking thought only of the nobles’ protection? When a noble was injured by taxes, you made a law; you had no time left to think about the extortion of the people; in fact, when some amongst you, seeing the wretchedness of their jobbágys, wished to help them, you made a law to prevent anyone from suspending the tithe or the ninth [the proportion of yearly produce owed by each jobbágy family to the landlord], and if were to suspend it anyway, that the tithe was to be collected by the High Sheriff, instead of the rebel. (§15)

The law is the aristocracy’s instrument of class-oppression, and the magnates’ vengeance against the rebels is not complete until it has been codified, in the decretum of 1514. In the novel’s conclusion, Eötvös speaks for himself:

Whoever has not read this law, created by the lust for vengeance, and whose regulations have stood for centuries, defended by sel­fishness; whoever does not know the extremes to which an enraged aristocracy is capable of going in its demands, and whoever turns in disgust only from the rebellious peasants, let him take up our legal code, and read this decretum through to the end. We wish to write only probable things, and the things included in those articles lie outside the realm of probability, indeed, even of credibility,

…The law has one goal, and that is, that no criminal should escape punishment, and everything that might impede it is ignored,

…In certain cases, not only the malefactor himself, but his descendants are condemned, and it is decreed that the progeny of cer­tain malefactors are forbidden for time eternal from fulfilling sworn office, or from serving in the royal or other lordly houses.

…The lawmaker passes sentence on the whole class, among whom many did not participate in the revolt, and he condemns all the land’s jobbágys to eternal servitude, as if he can feel secure in this homeland only when he has destroyed everything else besides him­self. (§33)

Dózsa is named leader of the Crusade at Lőrinc’s suggestion, but he is not a true representative of the people. Dózsa’s ambitions are too personal, his scope too narrow, and his feelings too crude to serve the people as a mouthpiece. As we shall see, his special role as outsider saves him from the linguistic and dramatic leveling of Eötvös’ forensic approach to his historical plot. It is Lőrinc, Eötvös’ ideal orator, who speaks for the masses. Lőrinc’s words bring the peasants’ revolu-tionary class-consciousness to life — in his speech “the emotion that lived in thousands is expressed by one” (§15). When he is finished with his oration against Báthory, “the oppression of the lords not only became intolerable, but was also — which usually happens much later — considered to be so.” (Ibid.)

The peasantry’s first and strongest impulse is revenge. The majo­rity of the jobbágys are not ethnic Magyars, and they do not understand Hungarian, or even one another. Thus their common language is their suf­fering. Vengeance alone motivates the attack on Telegdi’s house — organized by Klára to frighten her rival for Pál into renouncing him, but which, taken over by the peasant mob, evolves into the first revolutionary act of the insurrection. Most of the crowd there, as well, are not Magyar, and their motives in the attack are pure, not even in­spired by the widespread, mistaken belief that Telegdi is hostile to the peasants. In a major choral scene, Szaleresi, outraged at the spontaneous violence of men supposedly under his command, demands of the mob’s leader, a Hussite named Gáspár, why they are attacking the house when its owner is absent, and only its womenfolk inside.

“You wouldn’t avenge yourselves on them for another’s sin, would you?”

“We will,” spoke Gáspár in a deep voice. “Telegdi is not a peasant who has nothing but his life, and from whom we can exact vengeance only by taking that away… Doesn’t he love his property? doesn’t he love his daughter and kinfolk? won’t he feel the blow that will de­prive him of them? ‘I will uproot your generations to the fourth generation,’ spoke the Lord, and his will be done.”… The mob roared out its agreement. (§13)

Gáspár represents the fanatical aspect of popular revolution. His theory, far from being rational and Liberal, derives from the millena­- rian Protestantism that was one of the genuine ideological vehicles for the peasant uprisings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For the Liberal Eötvös, Gáspár speaks the language of the demonic religious fanaticism that justifies its cruelty and the destruction of all classes but its own as a high eschatological necessity. Thus, the Hussites and Picards, the caste and castle levelers of 1514, are analogous to the revolutionary socialists of Eötvös’ own time — a historical analogy that will become one of the central tropes of Kemény’s The Fanatics.

The counterpart and antagonist within the peasantry is Lőrinc. He is prodigy, a Hugoesque Jacobin, born a peasant and nurtured into a revolutionary intellectual whose philanthropy has been aggravated into an ideology of violent struggle. He is equipped with the eloquence and political sophistication that can harness mass violence for constructive and theoretical ends, Like Telegdi’s, Lőrinc’s political sophistication makes him clairvoyant. Although he is only a village priest, he is aware of the law, statistics, and every factional intrigue at court. His goal is a nineteenth century socialist democracy, and he alone in the novel is aware of the necessity of choosing class allegiances in a time of revolutionary crisis: he sets Orbán’s tragic paralysis in context by demanding that he make a commitment to his class, or accept that he is a fratricide.

Lőrinc is the central orator in this novel of orations. He appears in every crisis, and either forces the characters to make their allegi­ances clear or he manipulates the situation for revolutionary ends (Sőtér 205). He is the reader’s main source for the history of the wrongs suffered by the peasantry. Dózsa is named leader of the peasants by Bakács at his suggestion. He saves the peasant army from dispersion under the threat of mass excommunication by humiliating the magnates’ delegation in debate. He is ever eloquent, ever rational. Typically, he is able to win over the peasants with Christian biblical language capable of counteracting the Hussite Gáspár’s Old Testament call to wrath.

Cut down the old tree that bears not fruit, and throw it on the fire — thus spake the Lord; and what, pray, were the fruits of the lords’ stewardship? They have occupied all the waters, forests, and mines for their own use, as if the Lord had created the world only for them; and what have they done with this land? … Nothing is poorer, more abandoned in this great world than the Magyar land; the day has arrived when we can no longer tolerate it. We were all born equal; God created this beautiful earth for the good of all; let God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. (§15)

Lőrinc is the antidote for the demagoguery that would drive the peasant army into a death-struggle with the nobles. He, too, argues for class war, but in the name of equality and definite national pur­pose: he proposes the republican utopia of a fully egalitarian nation.

Lőrinc’s rationalistic revolutionary line is always threatened by the masses’ pull toward anarchy. First the lust for vengeance overcomes the mob, a passion that, as we saw in the essay “Poverty in Ireland,” Eötvös accepts as the natural response of an infant revolutionary consciousness. But later, the rejection of one authority, that of the nobility, leads to a rejection of all authority; Lőrinc’s control over the peasant army slips further away with each success on the battlefield. While they remain encamped besieging Temesvár for weeks, the peasants’ overconfidence and boredom ultimately erupts into terror, when Telegdi’s fleeing daughter, Frusina, is brought into camp. The crowd demands death for the aristocrat. “Lőrinc did everything,”  writes Eötvös, “to calm the danger, but his usually so powerful voice resounded without impression on the multitude… In great uproars the word can have great effect, but only in the direction that the storm carries it, not against it” (§27). When Dózsa, abiding by a promise he has made to his brother to harm no more prisoners, refuses to give the crowd the blood it demands, control slips out of his hands, as well: “the mob could no longer be restrained, and if the commander would not withdraw his deci­sion, there would be no preventing a bloody collision” (Ibid.).

The situation is saved by the suggestion of a travesty wedding to Orbán, and Zápolya’s attack. We can see in this development from potential revolution to mob anarchy the ambivalence Eötvös manifests toward popular, violent revo­lution. The cause is just, wrongs must be righted, but the violence must be restricted to attaining strictly defined goals, i.e., revolution must remain within the law or the spirit of the law. Once it exceeds these orderly limits, it becomes anarchy, whether it be an organized Terror, or mindless mob violence. A paradox takes shape: where revolts are “not caused by ideals but exclusively by material suffering” (§20), as the Irish and the Dózsa rebellions, the violence must be directed toward the alleviation of that material suffering through a change in the law. Once the just law is effected, the revolution must be silent. But where there are no ideals, there are no conceptions of law or right, there is only need and resentment. Therefore, ultimately, revolution can never attain its desired goal. However just its cause, it can only lead to injustice. The people must first be taught to recognize their needs, the law that will satisfy them, and the political order necessary to effect the laws. In sum, the people must be educated to their liberty before they can attain it. This is Lőrinc’s final conclusion, after he has seen the ragtag anarchy of the peasants crushed by the magnates.

The road I took until now … is not the road that leads to the goal. The triumph of justice will not be achieved by blind force. The people cannot be free while they are surrounded by spiritual darkness. But do not believe that I have given up my hopes because of this. The great goal for which my heart beats is not unattainable merely because I have not attai­ned it. Because it was so great, it appeared to be so near; but I am convinced that the human race will reach it, even if only after centuries; and to work so that moment may come about as soon as possible is the goal of my life. God created man in his image … how could it be that divine truth can be barred forever from the world over which man rules? (§32)

This ambivalence is characteristic of the Liberal theorists when facing the problem of popular revolutions. István Sőtér writes: “In Eötvös’ portrayal, despite all his sympathy and understanding, the revolution grows by degrees into a conflict impossible to resolve… The Liberal Eötvös, thinking in the great perspectives, can recognize the objective necessity of revolution. But at the same time, he is horrified by its possibilities” (Sőtér 209). Szigeti, following a more doctrinaire line of argu­ment, notes the same:

Eötvös recognizes the positive role of revolutionary violence in human progress, at least for the past. But at the same time he validates the other tendency, his vision of peaceful transfor­mation in the present. Moreover, in a way that falsifies the perspective of the revolutionary past running into the present, and by drawing reformist, rather than revolutionary, conclusions. (Szigeti 45)

Our final citation, György Rónay’s commentary on Lőrinc’s speech quoted above, speaks directly to our thesis:

Eötvös rejected revolution as a historical and social solution in principle, he excluded it from his political vision, and through Lőrinc he asserted that it is a road that does not lead to the goal; the novelist, however, obedient to the power of the facts, and a priori distancing himself from the temptation of “the con­scious distortion of the truth” finally justifies, not Lőrinc’s thesis, but the opposite. (Rónay 177)

The Character of Dózsa

Eötvös’ ambivalence toward revolution has a peculiarly eccentric effect on the characterization of the peasant leader, Dózsa. The commander of the Crusaders was portrayed by historians as a power-mad, demonic usurper, while his memory lived in popular legend as a martyr of the peasantry. Perusing his sources for abstract, representative spokesmen of political-ideological positions, Eötvös found that his central historical figure seemed to have had no ideological position at all. Eötvös thus had to remove the unreflective aura of heroism and demonism surrounding Dózsa — the kind of revision he claims in the introduction as the historical novelist’s right — in order to bring the explicitly ideological problems of the peasant revolt into the foreground. Dózsa’s character in Hungary in 1514 is consequently more private than any of the other public figures’, and Eötvös’ psychologically critical representation of him stands in sharp relief to the oratorical characterization typical of the rest of the public plot.

The peasant commander is quite unsuitable for ideological drama. He is not a man of the people. He is a simple soldier raised by fate into a world-historical situation. Unlike other great “accidental” heroes, Dózsa identifies with the people he leads only in their resentment of the aristocracy. On the one occasion that he speaks for the people, it is to respond to the insult of being called a “base peasant” by the young lords at court (§2).

Dózsa gradually becomes a vehicle and representative of the pea­sants’ slide toward chaos. In place of ideals, he has only personal, “ulterior” motives. His vanity and ambition delight in the fact that he is the increasingly tyrannical leader of a counter-nation. He opposes Lőrinc’s common-sense on all the critical issues: he refuses to attack Buda when the time is ripe and moves to the south instead to gather support; he indulges the mob’s lust for brutal retribution against the lords; he is stubborn and unimaginative, tyrannical, brutal. At the height of his power and arrogance, immediately before Zápolya’s catas­trophic attack on the peasant camp, Dózsa becomes merely a petty reflection of the tyranny he ostensibly opposes, surrounding himself “with the external signs of power, for which he had longed his whole life” (§ 27).

Classless, self-involved, participating in world-history for his own private purposes, Dózsa alone in the novel approaches Lukács’ definition of the typical. He speaks for no one but himself, yet his his- torical position coincides with that of his followers. “After the battle of Cegléd, Dózsa held his enemies in such contempt, that he no longer fulfilled his duties as a commander” (§26). The revolutionaries and their leader fail together because none of them fights for ideologically positive goals.

As the revolt fails, Dózsa gradually takes on a more positive personality. His only altruistic attachment is to his brother, a concrete instance of the philanthropy that Lőrinc evinces only in the most ab­stract form. Dózsa is willing to forbid the mob from indulging in its bloodlust in order to keep his brother’s faith. His last thoughts, as he faces his horrible ordeal of execution (he was tied down to a see­thing hot metal “throne” and “crowned” with a seething hot metal band, punishment for aspiring to be “King of the Peasants”), are of his brother (§30).

Finally, (as it appears in the historical record) Dózsa’s death is unarguably heroic. Eötvös was faced with the problem of motivating this heroism in a character he had previously debunked for seven hundred pages. Suddenly, the character whose pettiness had served to sym­bolize the ideological emptiness of the peasants’ cause, rises to the stature of a tragic hero symbolizing the supra-ideological right of the suffering masses.

The sentence will be executed [says Dózsa in his prison cell] but its result will not be my shame, which [Zápolya] expects from my weakness, but my eternal glory. Heavy sins burden my soul; I have committed acts that I have regretted in my more tranquil hours, and for which men may perhaps curse me, but my torments will atone for everything…. Tell this to Zápolya. Tell him that I scorn his rage. I raised arms for the people, and I will sit on my seething throne as the living image of the people, and his feeble hands will never be able to remove the burning crown that will be placed on my brow. The future will find it there, and it will bow down to the man that was able to bear it without complaint. (§32)

While the revolt is still in its justified stage, in Eötvös’ eyes, Dózsa is the element of moral failure and corrupted ideals; Lőrinc alone represents its positive, progressive aspects. But Lőrinc escapes to the plane of cultural reformism, avoiding the reprisals and responsibility for having committed acts of violence in a just cause. With the failure of the uprising, Dózsa becomes the model of its proud suffering, its apotheosis. In him the uprising becomes a cathartic tragedy. We can speculate that Eötvös wished to effect an emotional release that Lőrinc’s character could not have provided, since he is all recognition and no pathos. But tragic catharsis combines both recognition and pathos; Dózsa recognizes that his suffering has value only because he was a leader of the people. In one page he rises to political and dramatic magnificence.

Beside his example, Dózsa’s wise reformism smacks of opportunism and irresponsibility. Thus, the lines are crossed. The private plane of Dózsa’s role in the rebellion transcends itself, and moves onto the plane of tragic affirmation of revolution, while the outraged, philanthropic revolutionary idealism represented by Dózsa evolves into a denial of itself.

The Intimate Subplot: The Pathos of “Purely Human Values”

If historical collisions were to naturally draw all of a nation’s citizens into clear class-bound roles, history would speak only to statesmen and historians of the present who are professionally interes­ted in such abstract aggregates. If Hungary in 1514 had been written entirely from the peasants’ or the intelligentsia’s points of view, it might have remained on such a level of abstraction. But Eötvös was stri­ving to “popularize history.” A purely forensic and scholarly presentation of the Dózsa rebellion would not have spoken to the great majority of the reading public thirsty for moral entertainment. Many, if not most, of his potential petit-bourgeois, monarchist audience considered the underlying Liberal assumptions of the novel highly arguable. The laborious political-historical reasoning from those Liberal premises prevented the reading public from identifying with the story, and considering it their prehistory.

Eötvös shared with his audience the sensibility of sentimentalism. While the historian-statesman in him would perhaps have been satisfied with the logic of the novel’s view of class-conflict, popular sensibi­lity, that which transforms history into novels, would not accept dryasdust theorizing as the basis of a novel. Consequently, Eötvös constructed a second and independent intimate plot parallel to the historical main plot, in which the characters’ actions are motivated by their personal ambitions and feelings, motives no less abstract for being personal.

Early in the action, while the peasants are still streaming into the Crusaders’ camp in Pest, Pál — already intended for Frusina by their parents — rescues Klara and her father from a band of robbers, and begins a secret liaison with her. To complete the figure, Frusina is loved secretly by Orbán, a young cleric of jobbágy origin, whom Telegdi had raised in his own home in gratitude to Orbán’s father, who had sacrificed his life to save Telegdi. On one of his trysts in Klara’s house, Pál overhears the peasant leaders (one of whom is the merchant Szaleresi, Klara’s father) debating their strategy of revolt. Pál rushes off to inform the king and to save Frusina. Klara quickly discovers she has a rival with a greater claim on her lover than her own, and in a jealous rage, organizes a crowd of Crusaders to threaten Telegdi’s house, and to intimidate his daughter into renouncing Pál. The threat escalates into an attack, and Telegdi’s house is burned. Orbán hastens Frusina away in the nick of time.

Orbán tries to lead Frusina and her company to safety in Transylva-nia, on a journey that takes them through the war zone, gypsy camps, over battlefields, and through deserted villages. When their journey is blocked near Temesvár by Dózsa’s troops, they hide out for weeks in a forest, and are then captured separately by the jobbágys, who take them to their camp. Lőrinc intercedes on Orbán’s behalf, since he had been born a jobbágy, but Frusina, the delicate daughter of the unjustly despised Telegdi, is nearly lynched. Orbán saves her life by agreeing to marry her. Frusina believes the young monk betrayed her to Dózsa precisely for this purpose. After grudgingly acceding to the ceremony, she repudiates him.

Pál, who waits nearby in Zápolya’s camp, undertakes to take a mes­sage to Báthory, who is surrounded by peasant troops, to the effect that Zápolya will not move to raise the siege unless Báthory agrees not to block Zápolya’s drive for the throne. Pál deceives Klara — who has free access to the town — into secreting Zápolya’s letter, and then Báthory’s reply, in her food basket. When the exchange is completed, Pál claims the credit for himself. Zápolya then attacks and destroys the disorganized peasant army; Orbán dies in despair in the armor of a Crusader; Klara and her father go into exile; and Pál is married to Frusina in a travesty of the wedding-feast traditionally concluding comedy.

The protagonists of the intimate plot, especially Orbán and Klara, are not class-representatives, but individuals striving to break out of the confinements of class. They are driven by their loves to cross class-lines: the jobbágy Orbán’s love for the aristocrat, Frusina, and Klara’s, the merchant’s daughter’s, love for the noble, Pál. Neither can consummate his or her love, despite their heroic efforts. Even though Orbán indefatigably risks his life to protect Frusina, the climate of class suspicion even infects her “angelic” nature, ultimately driving Orbán to suicide. Klara, who is continually deceived by Pál, believes only in her love and the classless society necessary to consummate it. She, too, must be sacrificed for Pál’s class-determined happiness.

In one sense, Eötvös uses his intimate, sentimental protagonists to match the historical tragedy with exemplary private ones. Szigeti writes

The tragedies of Klara and Orbán are briefs against feudalism, and support the peasantry’s anti-feudal struggle from an artistically new angle. They show that the struggle is not only for the material liberation of the oppressed classes, but also to create the condi­tions for the free and all-sided development of the personality. (Szigeti 73)

In this sense, Eötvös wished to construct a novel in two tiers: a novelized history and a historical novel, each with equal weight in the text, and representing the dialectic between the social and the individual that we associate with realism. If the synthesis had been success­ful, the emphasis would naturally have fallen on the personal dimension, with historical events as the limiting ground, as in all the other his­torical novels discussed in these essays.

The synthesis was not successful, however. Péterffy remarks: “Almost everywhere we can see the fine line where the data of history cease, and free construction begins. The greater part is properly historical, not imaginative” (Péterffy 122). Rónay writes that the love-interest is the most conventional aspect of the novel, that it did not even interest its author. Yet Rónay believes the novel loses nothing by it, since the private characters are “essentially independent of the progress of historical events” (Rónay 172-73).

The private plot intersects the public plot at certain points to motivate the abstract historical forces. For example, Klara is the vehicle of two of the most decisive events in the novel: it is she that organizes the attack on Telegdi’s house, and she who carries the message that leads to Zápolya’s attack on the peasant camp near Temesvár. Pál manipulates his lover so that the public leaders of the aristocracy might contact Báthory, and it is at her father’s house that he overhears the peasant leaders plotting the rebellion. Frusina, on the other hand, never achieves the level of motivation. She remains an ideal romantic love object for Orbán, and the ideal class love object for Pál.

But Orbán, the peasant child raised in the magnate’s household, has not even that much to do with the historical action. His value lies entirely in the realm of ideal example; he is the true soul foiled in each of his attempts to find a place in a totally ironic world. No doubt it is the terrible polarity of the classes that prevents the intimate characters from attaining any of their worthy goals. Orbán’s double-bind is the paralysis of a man unable, and unwilling, to choose between class-solidarity and personal loyalty. The revolutionary climate demands a choice from him, but each alternative is a betrayal. This condition in Orbán antedates the revolt: he has always loved Frusina, an ideal he cannot rise high enough to attain even if he were to become Cardinal, and he is no longer naive enough to rejoin his people. Torn between the ideal and his class, Orbán reproduces Szaleresi’s public double-bind. But with Orbán the split is secret, so internalized that only Lőrinc (who knows everything) can detect it. Orbán fears alienating Frusina with a declaration of love. In the end, as Lőrinc had pre- dicted, the “angelic being” rejects him anyway.

Orbán  is a pathetic hero. Eötvös leaves no room for doubt that he wishes the reader to accept this transcendental masochist as a figure of true nobility in a time when the nobles are villains. After his capture, Orbán begins a complicated process of self-annihilation that will eventually destroy not only his life, but also his memory. Frusina’s happiness remains the only meaning of his life, even after she rejects him, despite the fact that he has rescued her from a lynching by marry­ ing her. Eötvös believes he can free her only by dying before the mar­riage can even be suspected of being consummated. His death alone would not suffice for her happiness, since the moment she discovered his sacrifice she would be shamed for life. Orbán therefore designs his death in battle among the peasants — not because he sides with them, but so that even his memory will be cursed. We can have no doubt that Orbán is intended to be a genuine hero, he is described in shining terms: an Achilles, a mighty oak, Christlike in his sacrifice (§28). “What is noble on this earth, if not this man? What is glory, if only shame awaits such men?” cries Ollósi, as Orbán dies in his arms.

Counterposed to this hysterical pathos, the public plot appears almost optimistic in its luxury of positive assertions, tragic apo­theosis, and wise recognition. The turn inward from class-related values to purely human ones inspired Eötvös to create a character utterly un­fit for historical reality. The relationship between Orbán and history is entirely abstract; he has one choice: of adjusting either to history or pathetic oblivion. With Orbán and Frusina, Eötvös withdraws into abstract, sentimental language and feelings so totally, that he created historically unmotivated characters.

Moving inward from historical reality to characters’ sentiments always risks a romantic confusion about what exactly is happening in the public world. Scott knew this, and used it: Edward Waverley’s disorientation in the Highlands and the presence of the exotic Flora is his anti-sentimental version of it. Eötvös was not free from respect for the tender feelings, and in all his works there is a pull between a rationalistic interpretation of social life and a contrary valuation of essentially anti-social, Wertherian sentimentalism. In Eötvös he created a hero who performs no heroic act other than suicide.

With Klara he was more successful. She is the “earthy” counter­ part to Frusina’s “angel”; the dark heroine of the pair. She partakes of her father’s vices in feminine form: she wishes to rise in class through the leveling effects of love. Happiness, as Eötvös remarks in connection with Szaleresi, is a bourgeois value (§14). Only the “middle classes” can withdraw from social life to create an inti­mate sphere safe from the contingencies of historical reality. Thus, happiness is withdrawal from history, the highest of sentimental goals.

Like Orbán, Klara seeks happiness above all. But unlike Orbán and Frusina, Klara is constantly performing deeds in order to achieve it. She is passionate and impulsive, demanding purely human love as her right. She allies with the peasants to attain her goals: first, the mob attacks Telegdi’s villa on her orders, then she combs the country looking for Frusina to make her renounce her claim to Pál, in the company of one of her father’s former servants, now a Crusader himself. But Klara, too, is cursed by the double-bind of her class. Whatever she does backfires. Her attempt to scare Frusina results in the gene­ral revolt, and Frusina’s escape; her search for her rival almost leads to her rival’s murder; by helping Pál deliver his odious message she brings destruction on the cause dear to her. Klara’s double-bind is active: whatever she does increases the polarization between the classes. Where she tries to mediate, she upsets balance.

Like happiness, the double-bind is a bourgeois quality. In this lies the direct contradiction between the public plot and the private one. History creates the conflicts in 1514, and every figure is forced to make difficult historical choices. Dózsa is torn between loyalty to the king and personal ambition; Telegdi between his class and his love for the nation; Lőrinc between philanthropy and violence; Ulászló between kingship and personal weakness. Each of these characters is forced, in the end, to take sides dictated by events, i.e., by historical contingency: Telegdi dies an aristocrat, Ulászló must be king, Dózsa and Lőrinc lead the peasants. Szaleresi, the bourgeois, alone in the public plot has no historically necessary commitment. He is broken by his non-allegiance. The bourgeoisie as a class is caught in the his­torical double-bind between the aristocracy and the plebs.

By analogy, when the “purely human values” of the private plot manifest similar double-binds, we can discern the author’s sympathy with precisely those characters whose “happiness” is shaken by events out of their control, and whose ideals of love and inner contentment cannot be realized in a climate of historical strife. In the historical plot, Eötvös affirms Dózsa’s tragic death and the sympathetic struggle of the oppressed peasantry at the same time that he affirms the need for a unification of interests and harmony in an educated nation. In the private plot, he affirms as “purely human values” those qualities that make up the psychology of a single class, the bourgeoisie.

Hungary in 1514 As Novelized Historical Drama

We have considered several aspects of Hungary in 1514 that set it off sharply from Scott’s and Manzoni’s approaches to the historical novel: the world-historical perspective of the narrative, the represen­tation of class consciousness in its characterizations, the centrality to the novel of the historical collision between two classes, and the “presentness” of the historical problem. Also, it should be evident from the examples cited from the novel in this chapter, that Eötvös’ language is not the language of the Western realistic novel, geared to the descriptions and portrayals of a variety of social dialects and everyday situations. Eötvös’ diction is either declamatory and oratori­cal (when spoken by the characters) or objective and expository (in the historical narrative).

The plot construction is analogous: dramatic tableaux are interspersed with historical background exposition. By and large, the rele­vant material of the plot — that is, ideological statements relevant to Eötvös’ monitory project — appears in talk, in interior monologues or debates. Very little ideological information comes from the action. The pivotal scenes never rise above verbal action. For the most part, the massive novel is composed of tableaux in which dramatic and ideological problems within the text are aired and debated in Eötvös’ characteristic, highly-wrought language.

For Lukács, one of Scott’s most important innovations on the novel was the intensification and dramatic compression of events that led to a more authentic and vivid recreation of the past, by showing the reflec­tion of general historical conflicts in individual, personal dramas. Scott, and Manzoni following Scott’s lead, condensed the novel by intro­ducing the element of dramatic concentration into the narrative solution. Hungary in 1514 by contrast, acts in precisely the opposite way. As we noted earlier, Eötvös was more familiar with public literature than with the development of the novel. With this in mind, we can see that his historical novel bears all the marks of a monumental historical drama, expanded and diluted, as it were, by the introduction of historical­ narrative elements.

We noted the urgency of the novel, that it describes a history threatening to repeat itself. All the characters’ qualities are fixed by the limits of the social conflict, and the course of historical events brings only an intensification, rather than a development, of these qualities. Lukács speaks of this, with reference to the histori­cal drama, as “the explosion of qualities already present in the cha­racter” (Lukács, Historical Novel 143). In an early essay, Lukács identified the difference between the novel’s tendency toward development and the drama’s tendency to­ ward collision:

The still-developing man, the man who is moving toward something, or for whom development is life itself (Goethe), cannot be drama­tic; simply from the fact that for him every happening-event can only be a stage, only an episode. Naturally, not to speak of the technical impossibility of expressing development, its most impor­tant aspects, being internal, strictly psychological displacements, cannot even be expressed in the drama… (Lukács “A modern dráma,” qtd. in Fodor 695)

The moral developments that lead to Edward Waverley’s and Renzo’s historical recognitions are concentrated into dramatic events, for technical purposes — to make them vivid — and to be true to the historical experience of dramatic change. But their dramas are segments of a process of development that is not based on a single historical or per­sonal collision. Their historical environments (however dramatic “The ’45” may seem to Edward at the time) are only stages in the development of the modem bourgeois national state. 1514, however, represented for Eötvös a critical historical collision that produced a historical stale­mate. Its conflicts were still alive in 1846. Eötvös’ historical vision of Hungary had no space for development after the death of Mátyás, no space for the explicit or implied progression of phases that are a priori assumptions of the Liberal conception of history. As the stalemate threatened to erupt in violence, it became a matter of immediate import. Thus, Eötvös’ conception of both the historical present and his setting in the historical past was essentially dramatic rather than epic. As a result, his historical art was dramatic, as well, structured as a “totality of movement” toward the collision of the nobility and the peasantry. We can discern in the difference between Scott’s and Eötvös’ conceptions of the historical novel the distinction Goethe drew between epic and drama: “Their essential difference lies … in the recitation of an event as belonging entirely to the past and the dramatist’s representation of an event as belonging entirely to the present” (Lukács, Historical Novel 131). Even when Scott’s oral informants were still alive, their historical material had already been superseded. Even when Eötvös drew on medieval Latin chronicles, his conflict was in the present.

This character of “epic drama” informs all of Hungary in 1514. The distinction between typical and representative characters is touched on by Lukács’ description of dramatic character:

…the social collision, as the centre of drama round which every­ thing revolves and to which all the components of the “totality of movement” refer, requires the portrayal of individuals, who in their personal passions directly represent those forces whose clash forms the material content of the “collision.” (Ibid. 104)

Each of the public characters represents a specific set of contra­dictory forces in the collision of the classes. Eötvös evokes these contradictions explicitly, at first to evoke the double-bind of the nation caught in class conflict beyond mediation, then to try for a resolution after all. This pointed stylization of character is again characteristic of historical drama rather than historical fiction (Ibid. 136-37).

The dramatic nature of Eötvös’ conception goes far toward explaining his consistently elevated language in the novel. This is “popular” art, not in the sense that it was fashionable, but as drama is in its essence: public, ceremonious, directed immediately to the “people.” “The essence of dramatic effect is immediate, direct impact upon a multitude” (Ibid. 130). It is universally agreed in Eötvös criticism that his charac­ters are “carved from the same block” linguistically (Rónay 172). The intimate figures simply speak in more refined, lyrical periods than the public figures. The peasants speak the same lofty and passionate language as the most educated churchmen and privy councillors.

However clearly Eötvös sees the class differentiation of the so­ciety represented in the novel, and the impassability of class limits, there is no corresponding stylistic differentiation to reflect this; it is the commonplace of textbooks that his heroes all speak more or less the same way, and in his own forensically polished, intricate, prolix language…. Without a doubt, it is Eötvös himself speaking from his heroes’ mouths — especially when they speak of living matters that worthwhile to hear in 1846 as well. (Rónay 169-70)

The language of Hungarian prose was not to develop into a bour­geois medium of representation until later in the Nineteenth Century, primarily in the line of non-realistic writers, such as Jókai and Mikszáth. With Eötvös, it was just beginning to take form, but it was still encumbered by Eötvös’ legal and political language. The central element of his style is the tirade, an “infinitely expandable” sen­tence base (Harsányi 29), which developed naturally to meet the polemical needs of the Reform Era. It is difficult to translate it into English without transforming it into a pseudo-Baroque sentence, a more pliable and paradoxical style, or a pseudo-neoclassical sentence, a much more restrained one. At a time when most Hungarian writers were developing a rich, modern literary language from the German-influenced Language Reform, Eötvös turned rather to the example of Hugo and the contemporary constitutional debates. István Fenyő, an appreciative critic of Eötvös’ style, writes:

This style is rich and evocative, interpreting the expressions of the spirit in many colors; at the same time, its creator is careful that his readers should orient themselves clearly on the waves of expressiveness. The harmonic closure, and the well-planned archi­tecture, are as important as the energetic drive, the eruptive ten­sion, the emotional convulsions brought about by heaping sentences on each other; in other words, the Romantic period is not free of certain disciplining and proportioning impulses of classicism. True to Eötvös, to his Liberal Reform intentions, he wishes to stagger his gentry public, but not to disturb their cultural-emotional world-order totally. Indeed, this stylistic form creates in the reader the sense of balance, or proportion, of undisturbed conti­nuity. (Fenyő 63)

In contrast, and in opposition, to Hugo’s unbounded tirades, Eötvös strictly moderates the passion of his sentences.

Eötvös stays clear of his French fellow-poet’s extravagant flights, the structures reflecting the fragmented, extreme emotio­nality, the virtually explosive impulsiveness of his word-associ­ation. True to the main line of Hungarian Romanticism, which is heir to the Enlightenment, and in the name of Liberal doctrine, he strove to preserve in language also the marks of sobriety, com­promise, and moderation. (Ibid. 66)

Eötvös’ style is thus an image of the ideological tensions inherent in the project of Hungary in 1514. It is structurally geared toward consolidating two opposing tendencies: the balance inherent in rational judgement and the pliable force of passion. In the great public scenes of the novel, where the declamatory tone prevails, the style is that of public debate, balanced collision of forces. This is similar to what Lukács calls the “necessary anachronism” of the language of historical drama: “the intellectually heightened speech necessary to drama may further transcend the real history of the time, while preserving the neces­sary faithfulness to history — that is, if it does not harm the essen­tial historical content of the collision, but on the contrary, intensi­fies it (Lukács Historical Novel 151) .

Eötvös was in the paradoxical position of an aristocratic Liberal advocating the emancipation of the peasantry and inclusion in the his­tory and political life of the nation. He speaks on the peasants’ behalf, but to his fellow nobles. The historical revision his project entails involves articulating the interests of the peasantry in a language that is comprehensible to the gentry, a style that can “stagger” without “disrupting. “

Eötvös strove to give form to the concrete data of the 1514 events as a dramatic collision. Since his representative characters have no possible destinies independent of historical events, they become ab­stract embodiments of concrete historical facts. Historical drama re­quires the selection of those factors representing “all the driving forces of the political-historical collision,” in the process of moving toward the collision on the stage, or the mind’s stage. Historical drama emphasizes the initiative of world-historical individuals, while epic emphasizes the inexorable force of necessity over “maintaining” individuals (Lukács Historical Novel 147). With Hungary in 1514, Eötvös attempted to have the best of both forms. By constructing the novel as a historical tragedy, with a public-historical main plot and a romantic, intimate subplot, he belie­ved he could represent the historical problem as one of individuals whose actions are increasingly determined by the force of historical circumstance.

There is very little positive action in the novel. Where charac­ters actually perform deeds to change things, rather than debating their positions, they usually bring disaster. The force of historical circumstance, permitted to develop into such an irresistible quasi-“force of nature” by years of class interest and social unconsciousness, creates the dramatic double-binds from which there can be no positive issue in the terms of the drama itself. Telegdi is brutally killed, Szaleresi broken, Orbán sacrifices his life for a woman that will curse him, Fru­sina marries a sham-hero, Klara goes into exile, the peasants are de­feated and tyrannized even more, the nation will ultimately lose its independence for centuries to come. Only in Dózsa’s execution is there a glimmer of hope that the historical collision has produced a recoupable value, a symbol of human dignity in the midst of the most horrible suffering. But in Dózsa this tragic stature comes rather suddenly and late, drawn from resources the author had not revealed earlier in his ressentiment revolutionary. Lőrinc’s recognition of the futility of violence and merely materialistic revolution, coming on the last page of the massive work, takes Eötvös out of tragedy altogether. Lőrinc’s final, suddenly achieved anagnorisis, which affirms Eötvös’ own belief in nonviolent reform, seems, in fact, to deny the value of Dózsa’s tragic stance.

Yet the facts argue for a different conclusion, As Rónay writes, the ideologist Eötvös rejects the revolt, while the novelist justifies it.

They burned Eötvös, Orbán fell in battle, they smashed the Crusaders, the revolution failed; and yet the reader’s ultimate impres­sion is that even if it had to fail, the revolution was still right. The whole work does not in the least justify Lőrinc’s recantation, but rather those, if you will, historical-philosophical, assertions that Eötvös ties to Szaleresi’s unfortunate fate: “Woe to the indi­vidual tree — woe to the individual man, who is seized by such a storm” — he says; but in the end it is not the fate of the single tree, but of the forest that is essential. Indeed, the forest “grows more beautifully when the storm’s strong arms uproot the dying trunks and take the seeds from its branches to distant places to grow up there as trees.” (Rónay 177-78)

Eötvös uses historical details, the “totality of objects” of 1514’s political and class relations, to motivate the collision. Lukács notes of the Scott-type novel that “the novel counters the general historicism of the essence of a collision with the concrete historicism of all the details” (Lukács Historical Novel 151). For Hungary in 1514 the details are selected to show how they coalesce into great corporate trends. Individual everyday lives among the masses are no longer distinct from one another: the oppression, migration, and resistance are shared by everyone, Thus, the con­crete element of the novel appears in the narrator’s and characters’ historical disquisitions, often giving the impression of undigested historical description.

Clearly, this is not the distinction between the ideology of the concrete and the idealized class-structure we saw in Scott. Rather, we have the opposite. Where Scott concentrated on the empirical ex­perience of his characters, Eötvös ignores it, and idealizes his pro­tagonists’ feelings; where Scott idealizes the class-structure of Tory England, Eötvös demystifies Hungarian society by describing its historical experience as a society, and demonstrating the facts of history. Simply by concentrating on a point of such intense social collision, Eötvös circumscribed the degree of consciousness possible in his novel, while his popularizing goal required a heightening of declamation at the expense of concrete details and episodes. Where he strove to embody the fates of individuals, he created characters so utterly passive in the hands of the historical forces, that they rarely interact with them.

Conclusion

Hungary in 1514 was written on the eve of the last and longest-lasting of the national uprisings of 1848/9. From the perspective of an educated, Liberal, aristocratic intellectual, the threats to national unity came from two sides: the blind greed of archaic feudal class-in­terest, and the blind lust for vengeance of the revolutionary ethnic peasantry and industrial proletariat. Eötvös’ goal was national unity, the same informing ideological goal of Waverley and I Promessi Sposi. Failed bourgeois revolutions in 1830, bloody riots in cities and up­risings in the country, and general disillusionment with bourgeois capi­talist development among great sectors of the European population, had placed the goal further from reach in the perspective of evolutionary Liberalism,. Scott’s and Manzoni’s confidence was, in Eötvös, replaced by the growing sense of peril, particularly in a country vulnerable to violence equally from within as without. The inherent social optimism of the earlier realistic historical novelists is turned upside­ down in Eötvös, and as a result history becomes stalemate, the histo­ricity of institutions and objects becomes a source of dark irony. The affirmation of collective unity becomes the only alternative to anarchy and ruin. Thus, the peculiarities of Hungarian conditions in 1846 gave rise to Eötvös’ restructuring of the basic elements of the classical historical novel.

The Liberal view conceived of national unity as a classless value embodied in bourgeois ascendancy. In Scott, this meant the preservation of gentlemanly property values, in Manzoni those of the Christian crafts­ men-peasantry in the process of enbourgeoisement. Eötvös did not choose a single group to represent the values of progress. His novel has no single hero, for his goal was a unity of class-interests. His language and the ideology of sentimentalism’s “purely human values” embodied in the pathetic innocents of the intimate subplot clearly carry the ideals of the European bourgeoisie. Thus, when faced with historical conflicts out of their control, the lives of these innocents are seen as wasteful, ironic, pathetic tragedies. In the doubly-bound bourgeois world, historical forces increasingly come to be seen as natural forces, storms and avalanches, rather than as human ones, while human life also is seen in passive, organic terms, as trees and forests, rather than in terms of human volition.

We find in Hungary in 1514 the same contradictory tendencies of the earlier realistic historical novel raised to a higher pitch of urgency, and in explicitly ideological form. With the exception of Dózsa, Eötvös’ protagonists each represent different points along the scale of bourgeois values. Their ironic and pathetic fates are the result of their seeming “classlessness,” the ideal values with which they strive to transcend the limits of class-interest. Thus, Frusina represents the sensitive-passive sentimental ideal; Klara the passionate sentimental female ideal; Telegdi the wise statesman beyond class inte­rest; Orbán the bourgeoisified peasant yearning for the ideal; Lőrinc the socially conscious intellectual, and so on — images of personality all drawn from bourgeois characterology, The general destruction of the nation is thus represented by the destruction of its proto-bourgeois characters, i.e., its bourgeois values.

Hungary in 1514 is a product of a revolutionary moment, a time in which the gradual development of social life accelerates into overt, all-encompassing social-political conflict. This is the gist of Lukács’ Hegelian identification of historical drama — with its essential movement toward collision — as a mode adequate to revolutionary times, while the epic’s emphasis on the mediation of institutions — its tota­lity of objects — emerges naturally from post-revolutionary life when the process of institutional development is still visible to most peo­ple (Lukács Historical Novel 98). The period — or historical moment — of revolution is felt existentially to be a dramatic collision, when the unconscious drift of life intensifies into conscious form, “through the new relationship which comes into being between the individual and the collective, and the transformation of individual time that comes as a consequence (Jameson Marxism and Form 259-60). As Fredrick Jameson writes, apropos a discussion of Sartre, revolution does in reality what drama does in the imagination, for in it “all gestures and thoughts, routines, decisions, private life as well as public life is … drawn into relationship with the revolutionary process, reorganized around it and reevaluated automatically by its juxtaposition with the central revolutionary fact itself” (Ibid.)

In Eötvös, the classical historical novel is “reorganized and re-evaluated” by the desire to prevent the almost inevitable revolutio­nary collision between the Hungarian nobility and the Hapsburg Empire and its allies, the non-Magyar peasantry. The serenity of pastness necessary for the epic was unattainable, the process of historical-poli­ tical development became trivial in comparison with the critical his­torical moment in which, Eötvös believed, lay the fate of the nation. Consequently, Eötvös’ realism takes little account of the “rich and graded interactions” of the classical form as practiced by Scott and Manzoni, and strives instead to depict a dramatic collision on a national scale. Further, published in 1847 and because of the outbreak of the Revolution in March of 1848 never reviewed, Hungary in 1514 was not intended by its author to be a display of the mediations leading to the bourgeois nation-state, but rather to act as a mediation itself, as a direct, immediate device for political enlightenment. It is doubt­less a failed work, at cross-purposes with itself — how could a book of more than seven hundred pages be immediate in its effect? how could a novel of speeches about the need for national unity directed to the educated Hungarian elite be direct and popular in the sense that the times required? Yet the failure of Hungary in 1514 as a realistic his­torical novel — despite the personal eccentricities of its author –­ comes as a natural development in the history of the mode. In an at­tempt to express the Liberal Reformist ideals of the classical histo­rical novel in a revolutionary time, it brings out in sharp relief the relationship of historical realism in literature to the historical conditions under which it was pursued, and the reasons for its dissolution as a literary mode.

Notes to Chapter IV

1. All quotations from the text of Hungary in 1514 are my translations of the 1972 Magyar Helikon (Budapest) edition of Magyarország 1514-ben.

2. “Guizot’s writings form a chain from which you cannot remove a link. His aim is to rule and organize the past as well as the present. I doubt if it is given to man to embrace the causes of his history with this completeness and certitude: he finds it almost beyond his strength to understand the present. History seen from a distance undergoes a singular metamorphosis; it produces the illusion — the most dangerous of all — that it is rational. The follies, ambitions, the thousand strange accidents which compose it all, disappear. Every accident becomes a necessity. Guizot’s history is far too logical to be true.” Sainte-Beuve quoted in G.P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, 182.

3. Eötvös gives no indication whether he believes Istvánffy’s version is true to the historical Telegdi or not. He merely refers to the speech in a note — Chap. 4, n. 4; elsewhere, regarding Dózsa’s and Zápolya’s characters, he is more critical of his sources.