Relevance. The war that began in 1914 met the growing needs of the bourgeoisie class, as it was a source of enormous profits. In the event of a victory, Russia would gain exclusive dominance over the Black Sea, Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula. The war was also supposed to serve as a lightning rod against the growing revolutionary movement and the impending revolution. On the eve of the war, the labor movement in Russia reached exceptional tension, in its scope it was comparable to the revolutionary year 1905. In such circumstances, the war was supposed to "extinguish" the growing discontent of the people. The study of the attitude of political parties in the Russian Empire to the war is of not only theoretical but also practical interest, since the possibilities of preventing a new world war are largely related to the position of various social forces, political parties, the state of civil society, and the ability to negotiate controversial issues.Purpose. To investigate the attitude of the political parties of the Russian Empire to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.Objectives: to analyze the political situation in the country by 1914 and characterize the positions of Russian political parties in their attitude to the war.Methodology. The author's methodology is based on the principles of historicism and objectivity. The methods of information synthesis and analysis, the method of generalization of the obtained data, and the ideographic method are also used.Results. In the study, the author shows the process of unification of Russian political parties in relation to the war with Austria-Hungary and Germany that began in 1914. At that moment, all party barriers fell, and representatives of political parties recognized the need for a war to a victorious end. But the Mensheviks and Trudoviks opposed war loans, and the Bolsheviks protested against the war.Conclusion. An analysis of the sources showed that the war consolidated Russian society. Representatives of all parties, except the Social Democrats, supported Russia's participation in the war, considering it defensive.
In the Carpathian Basin, German-speaking peoples have lived alongside Hungarians for hundreds of years, resulting in many, shared points of cultural intermingling. (Although commonly referred to as svábok [‘Swabians’], this is not the correct term for Hungary’s German minorities since their origins differ from those of Swabians living in Germany today). After World War II, thousands of Hungarian Germans were deported to Germany. Those who remained could not use their native language and dialect in public. Today, young generations reconnect with their German roots in state-funded, national minority schools where, through the medium of Hochdeutsch, students are familiarized with their Hungarian German dialect, history and traditions in a subject called népismeret [‘folk education’]. This paper provides a brief overview of the current legal documents and rulings that determine the curriculum in Hungary’s national minority schools before detailing the topics studied in a Hungarian German folk education class. We contend that the overwhelming losses in cultural heritage that resulted from assimilation must be reversed in a process that simultaneously respects their unique, dual identity. To this end, we recommend adapting the curriculum of folk education to include an alternative, more inclusive perspective of famous, “Hungarian” individuals.
This paper asks why so few works of Hungarian children’s literature have made it to publication in English-speaking countries. It finds that few translated children’s books make it onto the English-language market and those translations that are successful mainly appear in major European languages. Representation at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair has been dogged by a lack of financial resources and polish while Hungarian State funding has lacked continuity. Nearly all the English translations of Hungarian children’s books available today have been published in Hungary, although a book will occasionally find its way to foreign publishers by informal means. This paper also follows the development of Hungarian children’s literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day, noting changes in terms of character, subject matter and attitudes to diversity and use of the fairy-tale tradition. It outlines one recent controversy surrounding the publication of Meseország mindenkié [’Storyland for Everybody’], a book which aims, in contrast to the current regime’s ideology, to represent the marginalized in Hungarian society. It also details recent clashes sparked by the new Hungarian National School Curriculum and one writer’s feminist critique of a classic text.
Musicologists would consider Gustav Mahler’s symphonies heterophonic, while literary scholars might read them as modern narratives that invite a myriad of interpretations. This road into the open is reflected in Arthur Schnitzler’s 1908 novel Der Weg ins Freie. The protagonist Georg von Wergenthin is a Mahlerian figure, enamored of Vienna but also in search of a way out. This paper is a comparative study of Mahler’s music in its dialogue with literature – from Dante and Goethe to D’Annunzio and Hofmannsthal – as well as their shared characteristics that come to shape fin-de-siècle Viennese modernity.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
As a couple, Miklós Mészöly (1921-2001) and Alaine Polcz (1922-2007) have a special status in Hungarian literature. Mészöly is one of the most important figures of postwar Hungarian fiction. His wife, Polcz, became an author at the age of sixty-nine when her first book, a wartime memoir entitled Asszony a fronton [1991, ‘One Woman in the War’] (Polcz 2005, 2002b), gained attention. Although she has been generally regarded only as an írófeleség [‘a writer’s wife’] (see Borgos 2007), by the turn of the century she eventually became more popular than her husband. This paper focuses on a novel by Mészöly, Pontos történetek, útközben [1970, ‘Accurate Stories on the Road’], that was based on Polcz’s tape recorded narration of her journeys mostly to Transylvania. My analysis poses two questions; the first regards the issues of style and narration, while the second examines the topic of gender. In other words, this approach to Mészöly’s novel aims to grasp the characteristics of the narrative style of Mészöly by comparing his transcription to the text recorded on the tape made by Polcz. How was it possible for the husband to publish a novel exclusively under his own name from his wife’s “raw material”?
Vörösmarty, Mihály. Csongor és Tünde, Csongor and Tünde - a Fairy Tale Play in Verse. Trans. Peter Zollman [parallel Hungarian-English edition]. Winnetka: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017. 80 pp.
Kékesi, Zoltán. 2015. Agents of Liberation – Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Art and Documentary Film. Trans. Reuben Fowlkes. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press; Saint Helena, CA: Helena History Press. 221 pages.
Taylor, Jeff. 2014. In Search of the Budapest Secession: The Artist Proletariat and Modernism’s Rise in the Hungarian Art Market, 1800–1914. Saint Helena, CA: Helena History Press; distributed by Central European University Press, Budapest. 260 pp.; Szívós, Erika. 2011. Social History of Fine Arts in Hungary, 1867–1918. Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs. 349 pp.
Moving from the thesis that the question of happiness centers on ethics, this paper contributes to the clarification of the concept and then discusses happiness as it is represented in the works of Peter Handke. The peculiarity of these representations of happiness is that they thematize happiness anachronistically with regard to the relevant “Zeitgeist”. By tracing down the ways in which happiness is processed in Handke’s works and by comparing the social implications of these strategies, this paper satisfies the desideratum that arises from the fact that the ethics of happiness in the works of Peter Handke have hardly received any scholarly attention.
History of Austria. Liechtenstein. Hungary. Czechoslovakia
How did the rich and the super-rich Hungarian Jews in Budapest fare during the 1930s, World War II and the Holocaust, and beyond? Two new books deal with their stories: Marianne Szegedy-Maszák's "I Kiss Your Hands Many Times" and Katherine Griesz's "From the Danube to the Hudson". Szegedy-Maszák was able to use her journalist's profession and skills to explore and vividly present her family's story in a work that can likewise satisfy the historians, the romantics and all those who like a “good read.” Griesz’s epic family memoir encompasses the same time period and topic as Szegedy-Maszák's book in its portrayal of a multi-generational Hungarian Jewish family's fate in the crisis -full mid-twentieth century, as seen and interpreted by its female descendant decades later.
The name of Theodor Herzl (Herzl Tivadar) evokes his Hungarian ties and the major stages of his life and work with relative ease, but doctor, writer and journalist Max Nordau (1849, Pest – 1923, Paris), requires a more delicate approach, having essentially sunk into oblivion despite his prolificacy in literature and his wide-ranging Zionist activities. In the case of Max Nordau, the second personality discussed in this paper, the aim of this paper is not to remedy the lack of information on Nordau, but to draw a comparison and a parallel between the years Nordau and Herzl spent in Pest in terms of assimilation and issues of language and identity. We first highlight events that are relevant to Nordau and Herzl‟s family background, schooling, school transfers and university education, and then discuss in greater detail the linguistic and cultural paradigm shift that began in 1861 and forced Nordau first into a defensive position and then into isolation both socio-culturally and occupationally, but led to well-balanced bilingualism in Herzl‟s case.