„A bright and distant future”: Are Hungarians Nationalists or Not? Insights from Hungarian Literature of the Past 50 Years

Lecture by Dr. habil. Csaba Horváth, PhD (Károli Gáspár University, Budapest):
The concept of the Hungarian nation is predicated on a notion of nationhood that has been fortified by Romanticism. The result is multifaceted: while the Hungarian selfimage is defined by the pathos of Central European Romanticism (i.e. courage, acceptance of fate, self-sacrifice, etc.), the socio-political conditions of the 19th and
20th centuries compelled readers to confront the fact that these values were, in fact, abandoned.
Contemporary Hungarian literature has recognised this contradiction and utilised irony as a medium to address it. Concurrently, the Hungarian self-image has been predominantly shaped by the romantic tropes instilled during school education. The lecture will examine this paradox in relation to some representative authors of Hungarian literature from the past 50 years (István Örkény, György Konrád, György Petri, Péter Esterházy, Attila Bartis, Krisztina Tóth etc.).
As a teaser, you can read a short story by István Örkény (reading time: 2–3 minutes): https://orkenyistvan.hu/a_bright_and_distant_future