Language/Literature paper by Farkas, Ákos István
More than Trendy: Huxley’s Reception in Interwar Hungary (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
Sizzling with the excitement of innovation while fraught with ideological controversy, the literary life of Hungary in the interwar period can teach us valuable lessons about cultural receptiveness. This is demonstrated by the speedy, varied and perceptive reception of Aldous Huxley’s works. From the conservative Magyar Szemle and its regional counterpart Erdélyi Helikon through the bourgeois-radical Nyugat to the left-leaning Új Szó, every quality magazine carried a fresh translation or an insightful review of this intriguing Englishman’s writings. Hungary’s publishing houses were equally busy issuing one Huxley-volume after another, beginning in 1933, with A végzet bábjátéka, a curiously titled translation of Point Counter Point. However, the accolade for discovering Huxley for the Hungarian reader goes to Pásztortűz, the Transylvanian magazine which published a short story of the writer as early as 1932. In Huxley's critical evaluation, speed was coupled with insight: Mihály Babits, Antal Szerb, László Cs. Szabó, László Németh, Fejtő Ferencz, or László Országh each revealed something important about the novelist’s achievement. The Englishman sympathised with those marginalized in the new world order, he clearly saw the dangers of the age’s two totalitarian systems and how individual selfhood itself could disintegrate, while he experimented with musical composition, narrative multi-perspectivism and metafictionality – these were some of his commentators’ keen observations. That Huxley’s Hungarian critics often embraced vastly different politics did not prevent them from uniting their efforts to understand and promote the best that was being thought and said in the world outside Hungary.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Ákos István Farkas teaches twentieth-century literature at the Department of English Studies of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where he coordinates the work of a modernism team and heads a doctoral programme in literature. His research includes a variety of interests from the modernist heritage of the contemporary novel (see his Will’s Son and Jake’s Peer: Anthony Burgess’ Joycean Negotiations) to the interaction between Hungarian and English-language cultures and literatures. His familiarity with Aldous Huxley’s oeuvre, on which he wrote his Habilitationsschrift, was broadened by his acting as series editor of Aldous Huxley’s works reissued in Hungarian translation.