The verse novel is a particularly important phenomenon of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature. Even though there are considerable differences among the individual texts, we can speak of the verse novel as a stabilized genre; works belonging to it are characterized by features such as high self-reflexivity, the foregrounding of narration, the ironic treatment of established popular literary genres and of literary conventions, or the figure of the hero who is characterised by spleen, who does not find his place in society and ruins his personal life.1 Such features may well be familiar from verse narratives in other languages, especially from those of Lord George Gordon Byron or Alexander Pushkin; the Hungarian verse novel, however, is unique in its relatively firm generic self-identification, something we do not find in their English or Russian counterparts. But while we may speak of the Hungarian verse novel as a genre specific to nineteenth-century Hungarian literary culture, it is also one that was formed in an intercultural context: it is an important example of how works so emphatically belonging to a national tradition are to be understood as transcultural products. I want to suggest, in this chapter, that their very “Hungarianness” could only come about through intercultural encounters.
Prototypical examples of the Hungarian verse novel include László Arany’s A délibábok hőse [The Hero of Mirages] from 1872, János Arany’s Bolond Istók [Stephen the Fool] from 1850/1873, or János Vajda’s Találkozások [Encounters] from 1877; in the margins of the genre we find such texts as János Vajda’s Alfréd regénye [Alfred’s Romance] from 1875 or even Endre Ady’s Margita élni akar [Margita Wants to Live] from 1910. Although we may even find some contemporary examples, it is a genre that was formed and flourished in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is best examined in cross-cultural terms for two chief reasons. First, it is a unique byproduct of self-conscious generic experiments related to the nineteenth-century epic that can be observed in various national literatures across Europe; at the same time, the normalization of these experiments into a single genre is an idiosyncratic property of Hungarian literature. Second, even though the Hungarian verse novel is a literary response to the Hungarian experiments related to the nineteenth-century epic, its immediate incentives were the verse narratives of Byron and Pushkin (Don Juan and Eugene Onegin in particular). I will discuss how Hungarian verse novels interacted with their models; but in order to grasp how such influences were stabilized into a genre that we may regard far less amorphous than its sources, we must also map the particular circumstances in which this kind of writing was formed.
Generic Contexts for the Verse Novel in Hungary
The nineteenth-century verse novel may be seen as a genre produced in response to issues central to the Hungarian literature of the time, such as the debates concerning the epic. One central aspiration of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature was the creation of the national epic. On the one hand, the national epic was to fill an apparent gap created by the lack of an original archaic epic or epic-like verse narrative (the kind that for instance the Niebelungenlied was for German literature).2 On the other hand, there was a conscious aim of differentiating the nineteenth-century national epic from examples of the classical epic, such as Miklós Zrínyi’s Szigeti veszedelem [The Siege of Sziget], published in 1651. The national epic was to represent early Hungarian history, serving also as an embodiment of national identity. Many Hungarian Romantic epics can be considered embodiments of this aspiration and some of the most important poets of the time were involved, including Mihály Vörösmarty with his Zalán futása [The Flight of Zalán, 1825] and János Arany with his numerous unfinished attempts, such as the plan of the Csaba-trilógia [Csaba Trilogy, 1853–1881] or Buda halála [The Death of Buda, 1863], all of which related to early Hungarian history and mythology.
Similar attempts can be observed in other Central-European literatures as well, though the degree to which such texts participated in the construction of national identity greatly varies.3 For instance, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1834) in Polish literature clearly belongs to this trend,4 as does Ján Botto’s Smrť Jánošíkova [The Death of Jánošík, 1862] in Slovak literature,5 the 1888 Latvian national romantic epic Lāčplēsis [Bearslayer] by Andrejs Pumpurs,6 or the epics (e.g., Gorski vijenac [The Mountain Wreath], 1847) of the Montenegran poet Petar II Petrović Njegoš that appeared in the context of a fundamentally oral literary tradition.7 But as it will be detailed below, this is not the situation in England, from where the primary incentive of the Hungarian verse novel derives—in English literature between 1790 and 1830, a central aim was to replace the epic by a modern kind of verse narrative,8 not a national epic.
In Hungarian literature, there was, in fact, a desire for such a single text to fill the role of the national epic.9 The seriousness of this ambition is well marked by the fact that attempts at questioning the status of the epic were initially marginalized. For example, Sándor Petőfi’s mock epic A helység kalapácsa [The Hammer of the Village] was not particularly well-received at the time of its appearance (1844) despite the author’s stature as a defining poet of the time; the same impulse also explains the fact that when nineteenth-century critics and authors discussed the epic poetry of Mihály Csokonai Vitéz (1773–1805), they were not primarily concerned with his mock epic Dorottya (1803), but rather with the classic epic he planned to write.10 Given the central role of the epic in the nineteenth century, we may suppose that the status of any verse narrative written in the period—including that of the verse novel—has to be considered primarily in relation to the epic.
Indeed, verse novels typically contain explicit references to the epic, markedly positioning themselves with respect to—and typically against—the conventions thereof. In this sense, the verse novel can be considered an explicit literary response to the epic. Unlike earlier mock-epics (the most notable Hungarian example is Csokonai’s Dorottya), verse novels do not directly imitate and parody the formal properties of the epic but merely refer to them.11 For instance, a mock-epic such as Dorottya places the invocation at the beginning of the entire text, that is, it adheres to the epic convention at least in formal terms; by contrast, a verse novel such as László Arany’s A délibábok hőse will also use an invocation, but will resituate it in the text, and while the epic convention remains recognizable, it is employed in a nonconventional form. (Byron may of course be thought of as a precedent here, as his famous mock-invocation in Don Juan—“Hail, Muse! et cetera”—is placed at the beginning of Canto III.12) But, perhaps, the verse novel’s critical stance toward the epic is even more striking when, instead of evoking epic conventions out of context, the work contains explicit discussions of certain epic conventions. János Arany in Canto II of Bolond Istók includes a description of the failure of the national epic (the task of which was to a large extent assigned to János Arany himself13), as well as reference to the critical responses of the audience to Arany’s own parody of the epic venture in A nagyidai cigányok [The Gypsies of Nagyida]. Yet another way in which the verse novel positions itself in relation to the epic can be detected in the work of Pál Gyulai, who was not only a prominent critic but also a novelist and a poet himself, and the author of the verse novel Romhányi. One of his primary concerns was the modern novel, and, besides reviewing contemporary Hungarian prose novels, he also published a shorter one himself in 1857, Egy régi udvarház utolsó gazdája [The Last Master of an Old Manor-House]. Gyulai perceived the verse novel as a middle way between the epic and the prose novel: while he deemed the epic more suitable for expressing certain national traits, he also thought that the classical epic was no longer satisfactory for modern literature.14 In other words, he was aiming at a kind of verse narrative that could replace the epic, and the verse novel was, in his view, an ideal candidate.
As Gyulai’s example shows, the epic was not the only point of reference in the crystallization of the genre: Hungarian verse novels were very frequently contrasted to other genres as well, primarily toward contemporary novels.15 Gyulai had serious reservations concerning the prose novel, most examples of which he considered to be sensationalistic. Such reservations and explicit claims were also made in many verse novels, not only in Pál Gyulai’s Romhányi (expressing direct criticism of Mór Jókai, one of the most prominent novelists in the period), but also in László Arany’s A délibábok hőse. In Gyulai’s Romhányi, there is a point in the story when the protagonist, who is on the run because he had fought in the revolutionary war of 1848 to 1849, is brought to the house of a woman he previously courted but abandoned. He is exhausted and unconscious, as described in Canto II stanza 36:
De rá nem ismer, oly nagy láza,
S ismét behunyja a szemét . . .
Hát ily sovány regényem váza,
S mily prózai, szokott beszéd.
Jó olvasóm, tán így fogsz szólni,
Ki vártál nagy jelenetet,
Romhányi hogy’ fog szónokolni . . .
Nem kínozom a beteget.
Ha nagy, csodás és szörnyű szép kell,
A Jókai regényét nyisd fel;
Én ezt meg nem tanulhatám,
Nincs hozzá sok phantasiám.16
(But he does not recognize her, so high is his fever, / And he closes his eyes again . . . / So meagre is the skeleton of my novel, / And what prosaic, common speech / My dear reader, so will you perhaps speak, / Having expected a great scene, / How Romhányi would orate . . . / I will not torture the patient. / If you need something great, miraculous and terribly beautiful, / Open Jókai’s novels; / I could not learn this, / I have not much fantasy for it.)
The narrator anticipates his readers’ response to the scene described in the beginning of the passage. The clash represented here is between the kind of literature the narrator wishes to (and does) produce and the kind that is represented here by Mór Jókai’s Romantic novels, characterized by highly improbable scenes and Romantic extremities, at least according to Gyulai’s narrator. As this instance reveals, verse novels can display an ironic stance not only toward the epic, but also towards the contemporary novel.
The epic aspiration and its eventual rejection, as well as the critical debates surrounding the prose novel, are among the primary features of the Hungarian literary culture of the time, which helped the emergence of the verse novel as a genre that can be defined through its critical relation to other genres preoccupying Hungarian writers. In this critical self-positioning, the verse novel stands as an alternative to forms aspiring to the status of grand, national narratives. But it could hardly have taken the shape that it did without intercultural literary encounters, which must now be also observed.
Intercultural Contexts of the Genre of the Verse Novel
Beyond the immediate context of Hungarian literature and criticism, the formation of the Hungarian verse novel was enabled by two major European precedents, Byron’s Don Juan and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Significantly, these works were in their own original cultural contexts regarded as generically unstable or ill-defined, while in Hungarian critical literature they were perceived as belonging to the generically unambiguous form of verse novels. Although in the case of Eugene Onegin, the designator “verse novel” or “novel in verse” (Pоман в Cтихах) comes from Pushkin himself, what seems to have been an idiosyncratic subtitle for Pushkin came to be interpreted as a genre designator in Hungarian literature (and in Hungarian interpretations of Don Juan and, especially, of Eugene Onegin). Genres are, of course, never essential or ahistorical, abstract entities to which particular works conform; they come about and shift shapes in a complex process of literary negotiation, via imitation and innovation; generic denominations can thus often be contentious issues. Byron’s and Pushkin’s works, in spite (or perhaps because) of the numerous generic indicators they employ were seen as generically idiosyncratic. That in a Hungarian context they were unanimously seen as verse novels was not due to what they “really” were in generic terms, but was the byproduct of the emergence of the Hungarian verse novel.
Indeed, the English and the Russian literary contexts were rather different from the Hungarian one (and also from each other), and literary responses to the epic were not normalized into a single genre in either of them. As mentioned above, in England there was a desire to devise a new kind of verse narrative that could supplant the epic, but this did not go along either with an aspiration for, or with a criticism of an aspiration for, producing a national epic. The experiments in this field are covered by the umbrella term “romantic verse narrative” by Hermann Fischer, and they include examples quite close to the epic (such as Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama, Joan of Arc, Thalaba, or Madoc) as well as ones that were closer to the ballad and the romance (such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or Sir Walter Scott’s ballads, most remarkably The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, or The Lady of the Lake). Several texts of Byron also belong here (e.g., The Giaour, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, or Don Juan).17 English narrative poetry was fairly divergent in the period, there being several sporadic experiments only loosely connected to one another. This is also to say that in the English context, no genre identifiable as “verse novel” crystallized.
Byron’s Don Juan, which in Hungary was seen as a prime example of the form, was in the English context seen as but one possible version of the Romantic verse narrative, and while Byron was generally perceived to be a follower of Scott, especially with his earlier works,18 Don Juan was seen as taking verse narratives into a self-destructive direction.19 This destructive character attributed to the work is to a large extent due to the reflexive nature of the text, which involves the ironic treatment of established works and genres. In this respect, Byron was influenced by mock-epics, but also by novelists such as Henry Fielding and, most importantly, Laurence Sterne.20 Such a mixture of precedents, however, did not point toward any notion of a verse novel, a genre that never came about at the time of the boom of verse narratives in Britain—as opposed to the Hungarian context.21 Don Juan did not even find any imitators in the period in England,22 and far from being seen as establishing the genre of the verse novel, it was rather regarded as the endpoint of the tradition of the English Romantic verse narrative.23
But despite Don Juan’s lack of direct influence in English literature at the time, it had considerable impact on the Continent. The best-known instance of this impact is probably Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. But not even in the course of this transcultural exchange did Byron’s work become a defining specimen of the genre of the verse novel: in the Russian context, Eugene Onegin was considered to be related to the (prose) novel, primarily because the genre of the verse novel was as alien to Russian literature as it was to English literature. The sense of the generic proximity of this kind of writing to the novel can be discerned in the network of influences surrounding it. On the one hand, Pushkin’s work was strongly influenced by Russian prose novels, for example, the works of Nikolay Karamzin;24 in turn, it came to be influential in terms of later Russian novels, for example, the works of Ivan Turgenev or Leo Tolstoy. On the other hand, the impact of Don Juan on Russian literature was—apart from Pushkin—manifest primarily in prose novels, for example, in Mikhail Lermontov’s Герой нашего времени (A Hero of Our Time).25 Although Eugene Onegin explicitly makes ironic references to the epic tradition in the way Don Juan does (for instance, the invocation is placed at the very end of chapter VII, which is the penultimate chapter), it also contains features that stress, more strongly than in Byron’s case, the form’s proximity to the novel: unlike Don Juan, it consists of chapters and not of cantos. It is also more succinct and centered on the story, for even though narration is foregrounded, the storyline does not become subsidiary to the narrator’s personal concerns. Thus, we may say that similarly to the case of Don Juan, Pushkin’s work—its generic contextualization and its influence—also failed to produce the stable form of the verse novel in Russian literature that Hungarian writers could adopt as a ready-made genre.
Although in the English and the Russian contexts these seminal works were not seen as initiating the genre of the verse novel, they did have such an influence in Hungary. Indeed, both Byron and Pushkin were highly influential in nineteenth-century Hungary. Many Hungarian verse novels testify the impact of Don Juan. Many (including János Arany’s Bolond Istók or László Arany’s A délibábok hőse) were written in the stanzas of Byron’s Don Juan, and we also find in them numerous explicit references to Byron’s texts. For instance, in János Arany’s Bolond Istók the narrator refers to his tendency to digress from the storyline as an inheritance of Byron (canto I, stanza 71):
Hosszas valék, de Byront követém:
“My way is, to begin with the beginning”—
Azazhogy kezdem a legkezdetén;
(Ő mondja ezt, pedig különb legin’ mint
A többi dúdoló e sár-tekén;
Vagy ha nem is, különb bizonnyal mint mink.)
Méltán! hisz’ a kis búszerző elég
Sokat tön már, noha picinyke még.26
(I have been lengthy, but I have been following Byron: / “My way is, to begin with the beginning”— / That is, I begin at the very beginning; / (He says so, and he is a better lad than / The other hummers on this globe of mud; / Or even if he is not, he is definitely better than us.) / Justifiably! since the little troublemaker has / Done a lot already, though he is still tiny.)
The reference to Byron is also a reference to a certain standard to which the narrator adheres: a given quality of the text (that is, lengthiness) is justifiable because it stems from Byron, which Arany also underlines with a direct quotation from Don Juan (canto I, stanza 7). In other words, a Hungarian verse novel may refer back to Don Juan as a point of orientation, as an example that should be followed, and hence the basis of a genre. Note also that Arany here is referring to a property of Don Juan that concerns the poetics of Byron’s text: digression is not merely a feature that can be detected in Don Juan but rather a fundamental narrative trait that is essential in the composition.27 In turn, the reference is not accidental in Arany’s text either, in that the composition of his Bolond Istók is fundamentally characterized by digression as well. This may indicate that beyond the adaptation of a stanzaic form or explicit references to Byron or his text, Don Juan also offered a model in poetic structure that helped shape the Hungarian verse novel.
And we may observe a wider context as well in which Byron was instrumental for the formation of the genre in Hungary. It must be noted that the Hungarian verse novel appeared relatively late in the course of Byron’s spreading popularity. He was already well-known in Hungary in the 1820s and 1830s, at that time primarily through the huge impact of Childe Harold on lyric poetry.28 János Arany was already familiar with Byron’s lyric poetry in the 1830s, but he had only read Don Juan (as far as we can tell) by 1845.29 Arany published canto I of Bolond Istók in 1850 but he continued with canto II only in 1873. Similarly, Pál Gyulai started working on Romhányi as early as 1858 but this work was again resumed only in the 1870s. This chronological difference between Byron’s general impact and his influence on the verse novel is significant because it coincides with a general shift in Hungarian literature in the period: the gradually decreasing interest in creating the national epic and the increasing appeal of a highly ironic mode. The two processes are presumably not unrelated and their connection suggests how the formation of a genre in peculiarly Hungarian contexts is by no means independent of intercultural negotiations.
A similar scenario presents itself when we look at the influence of Pushkin. This influence was boosted by Károly Bérczy’s 1866 translation of Eugene Onegin, initially based on the existing German translations, and relying only later on the Russian original.30 This translation made fully available in Hungarian another model for a highly ironic verse narrative. Pushkin’s influence is even more visible than Byron’s partly because Hungarian verse novels are often paraphrases of the Onegin-story.31 Pál Gyulai’s Romhányi can be mentioned as one example, and László Arany’s A délibábok hőse as another, the latter being a rather ironic paraphrase of Pushkin’s original. In both cases, the basic scheme is that the hero leaves a young woman who is in love with him, and when he returns to her, she is already married to someone else. In the case of A délibábok hőse, the protagonist (Balázs) is actually in love with this woman, but he leaves to join the army without asking her hand in marriage. When, years after, they meet again, Balázs goes out drinking with her husband, and when they return home and the husband falls asleep, Balázs ends up trying to rape her. This is in line with the general characteristic of László Arany’s work that represents the clash between ideals and reality in a way that suggests a deepening of Pushkin’s cynicism.32
As mentioned above, Pushkin’s work in a Russian context is more readily relatable to the prose novel than to the verse narrative (the generic frame of Don Juan in an English context). Hungarian verse novels are similar to Eugene Onegin in that they (typically) retain a novel-like storyline; but as discussed in the previous section, they are also markedly positioned against the contemporary trends in prose novels, which complicates the generic matrix of Pushkin’s influence. In the Hungarian context, the ironic mode of the verse novel also extended to alienating narrative gestures pertaining not only to the epic, but also to the novel. This typically takes the form of genre parody, with the result of an explicit distancing of the verse novel from the prose novel, as is the case in László Arany’s A délibábok hőse when the narrator tells us that the hero has escaped from the army, and continues as follows (canto III, stanzas 9–10):
Majd észrevették, s a tenger fokáig
Egész csapat zsandár üldözte őt;
Itt víz alá bukott, úszott sokáig,
Utána ötven cső hiába lőtt;
És úszik egyhuzamban Anconáig,
Hol egy halásztanyán nyer új erőt . . .
—Így mondaná talán el sok regény,
De kérlek, olvasóm, ne hidd, hogy én.
Tőlem ne várj kaland-okozta lázat;
Ha borzadályt kívánsz, vérbódítót,
Ha véred petyhüdt, hogy forgásba rázzad
Keress kötéltáncost, cirkuszt, bitót;
Vagy nézz el egy Pesten építte házat,
S lesd meg, mikor potyog le róla tót,
S borzadj, ha tetszik ott; de e poéma
Nem izgató szer, és tintám se pézsma.33
(Then they saw him, and a whole group of gendarmes / Chased him up to the seashore; / Here he dived into the water, swam for a while, / In vain did fifty guns shoot after him; / And he swims at a stretch to Ancona, / Where he regains his power in a fisherman’s cottage . . . / —This is how many novels would perhaps recite this, / But please, my reader, do not think that I would do so. // Do not expect adventure-incensed fever of me; / If you wish horror that is narcotic, / If your blood is droopy, look for acrobats, the circus / Or the gallows to stimulate it; / Or observe a house being built in Pest, / And watch out for the Slovaks to fall down, / And shudder there, if you wish; but this poem / Is not a stimulant, and my ink is no musk either.)
The first stanza of the quotation above is an imitation of certain Romantic (prose) novels, up until the last two lines, which explicitly show that the narrator rejects this kind of literature. In the next stanza the narrator argues at length that it is primarily the reader’s expectation that a novel should include such unlikely adventures, making the point about novels not a question of the author’s personal taste, but an issue of a more general literary debate about reader expectations. The narrator’s gesture actually calls on the reader to abandon the novel’s sensationalism, and to opt for a form of literature that is alien to the dominant trends in prose novels. It must, however, be noted that while the verse novel is defined here through a critical contrast with the prose novel, the very fact that the comparison arises also suggests that verse novels, for all their difference, are not wholly unrelated to the prose novel—as, indeed, was the case for Pushkin’s work in a Russian context.
The generic negotiations that are going on here are in fact characteristic of verse novels: they contain ample discussion of how the given text relates to others, either to particular ones or to certain genres. In Hungarian verse novels, there is an additional layer of literary reflection: namely on the genre of the verse novel itself. This is something that was not available for Byron or Pushkin, given that in the English or Russian contexts the verse novel was not an identified genre in its own right. Of course, Pushkin was able to reflect on Don Juan or other works of Byron. For instance, the narrator of Eugene Onegin refers to Byron’s way of writing in canto I, stanza 56:
O flowers, and love, and rustic leisure,
o fields—to you I’m vowed at heart.
I regularly take much pleasure
in showing how to tell apart
myself and Eugene, lest a reader
of mocking turn, or else a breeder
of calculated slander should,
spying my features, as he could,
put back the libel on the table
that, like proud Byron, I can draw
self-portraits only—furthermore
the charge that poets are unable
to sing of others must imply
the poet’s only theme is “I.”34
This is an explicit reference to a well-known quality of Byron’s texts, that is, the tendency to keep the author-narrator’s figure close to that of the hero, occasionally also merging the two. Pushkin’s cross-cultural gesture both relates his text to, and distinguishes it from, those of Byron. This link is actually recognizable for the reader who sees the similarity between Byron and Pushkin. And indeed, Hungarian verse novels very much saw this similarity and could adopt Pushkin’s strategy of relating his work to Byron, by relating themselves to both Byron and Pushkin. And it is in doing so that they could reflect on a genre that was produced in Hungarian literature partly through just these intercultural encounters.
The references to Byron and Pushkin are deployed to define the text as being different from Byron and Pushkin precisely, and emphasize the fact that it is Hungarian. To provide one example, in Pál Gyulai’s Romhányi the narrator at the very end of canto III states that his hero (Romhányi) will be neither Don Juan nor Onegin because “he is only poor Romhányi,” “Hungarian by birth”:
Annyit megmondok most előre,
Hogy hősöm nem lesz Don Juan,
Anyégin sem válik belőle,
Szegény Romhányi ő csupán.
Magyar szülött, birálóim bár
Tagadják s becsmérlik nagyon,
Hanem gúny rajtam ki nem fog már,
Munkámat félbe nem hagyom.
Nem csüggeszt balga vád, itélet,
Nem ösztönöz hiú dicséret . . .
Ne kiméld gyönge oldalát,
De várd el végét legalább.35
(I can say as much in advance / That my hero will be no Don Juan, / Nor will he become Onegin, / He is only poor Romhányi. / Hungarian by birth, though my critics / Deny and deprecate him/it36 a lot, / But jest does not beat me anymore, / I do not leave my work unfinished. / Foolish accusations, judgements do not depress me, / Vain praises do not motivate me . . . / Do not spare its weaknesses, / But await its ending at least.)
Again, the text here establishes cross-cultural links both by differentiating itself from either Don Juan or Eugene Onegin and by suggesting that the three texts are comparable and hence belonging together in a certain way: apart from relating his text to those of Byron and Pushkin, the author-narrator implies here that there is a fundamental link that holds between Don Juan and Eugene Onegin, and that this link is already given. Moreover, it seems that the similarity between these two texts is such that they form a distinctive set. To slightly exaggerate, at the moment that the poem’s narrator is reflecting on the work’s genre by distancing it from Byron and Pushkin, he is creating this distinctive set (not defined in the original contexts as verse novels), which serves to define the Hungarian verse novel. Even though the Hungarian verse novel was to a large extent a specific literary reaction to the epic, its anchoring point lies in the set consisting of Don Juan and Eugene Onegin, which is a set that was partially created by the Hungarian verse novel itself, in that Hungarian literary tradition retrospectively interpreted these two works as instances of the verse novel, thereby also assigning the (Hungarian) genre an intercultural expansion.
What I think we may witness in this network of interactions is how the encounter with works of foreign cultures was instrumental in stabilizing into a particularly Hungarian genre a kind of writing that was defined in different and unstable generic terms in their original contexts. Eugene Onegin contains a vast number of references to Byron’s texts and Hungarian verse novels adopt this feature in their references to both Byron and Pushkin. This is indicative of the Hungarian verse novel’s relation to both Don Juan and Eugene Onegin, not only as individual models but, more importantly, also as texts of essentially the same genre, in which Hungarian verse novels can recognize themselves. The interpretation of Don Juan and Eugene Onegin as verse novels arises as a result of a particular intercultural contact, which has a huge role in producing a genre formed in a context differing from those of the model texts and peculiar to a national tradition.
Notes
1. The term “verse novel” or “novel in verse” goes back to Pushkin, who labeled his Eugene Onegin as “A Novel in Verse” (Pоман в Cтихах) in the subtitle. Many Hungarian verse novels use the same or similar designations, and the Hungarian term “verses regény” (verse novel) has become an established term to refer to this particular genre. The English terms “verse novel” and “novel in verse” are in most cases used interchangeably; the reason why I prefer to use “verse novel” is that it conveys the idea of a separate genre better, rather than creating the impression that the particular texts were novels that just happened to be written in verse.
2. Note that several of the archaic epic-like verse narratives believed to be original texts were actually fakes: the best-known example is probably James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems from the 1760s. The most direct incentive for János Arany was also a fake: the Czech Rukopis královédvorský [Manuscript of the Queen’s Court, 1817] by Václav Hanka. Arany read a translation of the text in 1857, and it prompted him to carry out considerable philological work on the Hungarian literature of the Middle Ages; the result of this was his famous study entitled Naiv eposzunk [Our Naive Epic, 1860], in which he essentially claimed that a Hungarian national epic did exist once, but was lost in the early Middle Ages. See Neubauer, “The Idea of Europe,” 362. The existence of a complete Hungarian translation (by Szende Riedl, published in 1856) also indicates that Hanka’s text was an important example for Hungarian literature, not the least due to the influential literary critic Ferenc Toldy; see Dávidházi, “Saját forrásvizsgálaton alapszanak,” 215–19.
3. For a discussion of a broader context of epic verse narratives in Central Europe, see Neubauer, “Introduction.”
4. See Koropeckyj, “Adam Mickiewicz as a Polish National Icon.”
5. Raßloff, “Juraj Jánošík,” 447–48.
6. Meškova, “Constructing a Woman Author,” 241.
7. See Slapšak, “Petar II Petrović Njegoš.”
8. See Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative.
9. Gere, “Nemzettörténet és mitológia határpontjain,” 138–41.
10. Dávidházi, “Csokonai és az irodalomtörténet feltételessége,” 12–30.
11. See Bacskai-Atkari, “Furcsa vitézi versezetek.”
12. Byron, Don Juan.
13. See Borbély, “Arany eposza.”
14. Gyulai, “Szépirodalmi szemle II,” 88–105.
15. Imre, A magyar verses regény, 137–84.
16. I am quoting the text from the relevant volume of the collected works, see Gyulai, Munkái II., 90.
17. See Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative.
18. Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative, 146–50.
19. Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative, 156–62; Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, 33–40.
20. Rawson, “Byron Augustan.”
21. Bacskai-Atkari, “Byron hiánya.”
22. See Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative.
23. Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative.
24. Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin.
25. Diakonova and Vatsuro, “‘No Great Mind and Generous Heart . . .’”
26. János Arany, Összes költeményei I, 871.
27. See Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, who relies on McGann, Fiery Dust.
28. Imre, A magyar verses regény, 16–17.
29. Imre, A magyar verses regény, 17. See also László, Arany János angol irodalmi kapcsolatai, and Szinnyei, “Arany humora,” 58–67.
30. Imre, A magyar verses regény, 40–41.
31. See Imre, A magyar verses regény, 40–55; see also Illyés, “Puskin.”
32. Interestingly, while the existence of paraphrases has received considerable attention in the literature in connection with several verse novels (see Imre, A magyar verses regény, 40–55), the ironic nature of the paraphrase, to my knowledge, has not been explored in detail. The question, however, has recently come into the foreground of attention: in 2001, János Térey published his verse novel Paulus (and more verse novels have appeared since then, hence the genre has a postmodern revival in Hungarian literature), which also includes a very ironic paraphrase of the Onegin-story, in which the even more degraded characters are constantly linked to those of Pushkin.
33. László Arany, A délibábok hőse, 55.
34. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 32.
35. Gyulai, Munkái II, 117.
36. Note that the Hungarian text does not include an overt 3rd Sg object here (not even in the form of the pronoun), and hence the referent of the zero object pronoun must be inferred from the context: this can either be the hero Romhányi (him) or the verse novel Romhányi (it), as the former is discussed in lines 1–4 in the stanza and the latter in lines 7–12: thus, the lines in 5–6 in between the two are ambiguous in this respect. The way in which hero and work collapse in Gyulai’s text at this point may be familiar from Byron (especially from Childe Harold) and from Pushkin; for instance the way in which the narrator bids farewell to “Onegin” makes it unclear if he is parting from his hero Eugene Onegin or his text Eugene Onegin. For a detailed analysis on the final scene of Eugene Onegin, see Bojtár, “Az irodalom gépezete,” 83–85.
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