La politica e la poetica dell’outsider nella prosa di Miklós Mészöly e Iván Mándy

Dávid Szolláth; Claudia Tatasciore

doi:10.6093/1826-753X/9865

Dávid Szolláth Institute for Literary Studies, Research Center for the Humanities – Budapest http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5554-1299
Claudia Tatasciore, trad. / transl. University of Florence http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2735-9577

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/1826-753X/9865

Keywords: censorship, contextual narratology, the Mándy-Mészöly-Ottlik triad, the writer as outsider, twentieth-century Hungarian fiction

Abstract

Article english title: The Politics and Poetics of the Outsider in the Prose of Miklós Mészöly and Iván Mándy

Iván Mándy (1918-1995) and Miklós Mészöly (1921-2001) are placed among the greatest masters of twentieth-century Hungarian fiction. The subsequent generation of writers (like Esterházy, Krasznahorkai, Nádas, etc.) regarded them, alongside Géza Ottlik, as masters. In addition to their outstanding artistic merit, Mészöly and Mándy owed their esteem to two factors. On the one hand, to their narrative innovations, which were an inspiration for writers in the next decades, and on the other, to the fact that, despite political stigma and publication restrictions, they kept their political independence during the communist regime. After a brief introduction of the two writers, the second part of the study explores the similarities between their narrative art and assesses whether their narrative practices can be linked to the political context that shaped their careers. In the third part, a contextual narratological approach examines how their marginalization is reflected in their works.

Author Biographies

Dávid Szolláth, Institute for Literary Studies, Research Center for the Humanities – Budapest

Dávid Szolláth PhD (<szollat.david@abtk.hu>; ˂dszollat@yahoo.com˃) is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies, Research Center for the Humanities – Budapest. He is an editor in chief of the Hungarian scholarly journal Literatura and author of three books, A kommunista aszketizmus esztétikája (Aesthetics of Communist Ascetism, Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2011), Bábelt kövenként (Babel, stone by stone, Budapest: Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, 2019), and a monography on Miklós Mészöly (Budapest: Jelenkor Kiadó, 2020). He was editor of the literary journals Kalligram (2006-2008) and Jelenkor (2008-2018). His studies and articles are related to the fields of modern and contemporary Hungarian literature, history of Hungarian Marxist criticism and literary theory. List of his publications: <https://m2.mtmt.hu/api/author/10017009>.

Claudia Tatasciore, trad. / transl., University of Florence

Claudia Tatasciore (<claudia.tatasciore@unifi.it>), after a first doctorate in Translation Theory (University of Bologna) and with experience both as a contract lecturer and as a literary and editorial translator from Hungarian and German, is enrolled in the third year of her doctorate in Comparative Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Florence and is working on her thesis entitled Memory as dissent, memory of dissent. Zsófia Bán between literary writing and critical non-fiction. Since 2021, she is president of the Italian-Hungarian Cultural Association of Tuscany. She is the author of the book Con la lingua, contro la lingua. On the writing of Terézia Mora (Aracne 2009).