The Comeback of the Historical Novel—The Stuffed Barbarian and Chikago: Interviews with Gergely Peterfy and Theodora Bauer

Works of art—classical music, literary texts, cinema, paintings—never “speak” on behalf of any political party. Culture is not left-wing, right-wing, or any wing, because as soon as it becomes a forum for dispensing partisan views, it becomes propaganda and loses its validity. Sir Philip Sidney’s words in his “The Defense of Poesy”—“the poet never lies”— imply the requirement for art to craft a condensed reproduction of shapeless, unfathomable reality that the poem’s readers, or more broadly speaking, the artefact’s “consumers,” recognize as true.¹ Unless this is the case, the product is outside art. This, however, does not mean that the arts do not deal in ideas whose load by their very nature is ideological. As Piotr Kuhiwczak puts it: “It is irony and an ability to look at things from a distance which distinguishes culture from barbarism and real writers from pretend ones.”² In the two interviews that follow, we can trace the return to the historical novel in present-day Austria and Hungary, a hundred years after the end of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy. Not accidentally, the multiethnic Monarchy, whose symbol is the capital city, Vienna, provides the point of departure and reference in each of the novels on which the interviews focus.

The new emergence of the historical novel coincides with the reappearance of significant levels of overt racism in these countries. The shift to the nationalist right is occurring amidst new waves of immigration to Austria and elsewhere in Western Europe and large-scale emigration of Hungarians from their country, also in a Westerly direction. Not co-incidentally, both The Stuffed Barbarian and Chikago engage with the interstitiality of polities, languages, nationalities, religions, and social classes, drawing uncomfortable parallels between the present and the most shameful aspects of xenophobic intolerance in the “national” past.

The subject matter in the two novels addresses entirely different issues, different historical periods, and different social classes. But both novels arise from almost identical concerns preoccupying people in the same region of the former Habsburg Monarchy (German-, Croatian-, Slovak-, and Hungarian-speaking “old Hungary”). The Stuffed Barbarian and Chikago belong to anti-Heimatliteratur: the opposite of the kind of writing that turns ignorance and brutishness into national virtues and that is the darling of state socialism, Christian socialism, and fascism alike.³ In the center stands the “outsider,” the dispossessed marginal “other,” the exotic spectacle in the hostile gaze of the manipulated majority of “insiders.” As historical novels, these two books delve into events in the past that strongly resonate in, and shed light on, the present. By writing of the past, these texts describe and caution the present. They implicitly warn that by denying, rewriting, or dismissing the troubled past, rather than analyzing and discussing it, we are gradually allowing its errors and the resulting consequences to shape our future. Further intriguing parallels occur in the avoidance by both authors of gestures to the dictates of postmodernism. Avoidance of stylized discourse stresses that the past— even when artistically recreated—cannot be seen from any vantage point other than our own, here and now. The characters and narrators in each novel speak contemporary conversational language: identities of people in past decades arise out of a “multi-contextual world” rather than “ready categories and historical affiliations.”⁴

Gergely Peterfy

Gergely Peterfy was born in Budapest in 1966. A direct descendent of two prominent twentieth-century writers, Lajos Aprily and Zoltan Jekely, he studied Classics and then earned a PhD in Cultural History whilst working as an academic at the University of Miskolc for the best part of two decades.⁵ In the meantime, he was emerging as an articulate essayist, a well-known public figure, and an outstanding prose writer endowing Hungarian prose fiction with his fresh, new idiom. His celebrity status among the small Hungarian cultural elite, the many awards his work has earned him, and the enthusiastic reception he has received abroad do not alter the fact that in Hungary’s “illiberal democracy...