Az Egri Ho Si Minh Tanárképző Főiskola Tud. Közleményei. 1984. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 17)

I. TANULMÁNYOK A TÁRSADALOMTUDOMÁNYOK KÖRÉBŐL - Lehel Vadon: The Reception of Upton Sinclair's Works in Hungary

This book, after The Jungle, is the most translated of Sinclair's work. Oil

! came to the hands of the Hungarian reading public in a very short time. Népszava had already begun to publish it in serial form by the January of 1928 in Soma Braun's translation from the unabridged original version in English.

65 The book's important success in Hungary can be seen from the fact that Népszava Publishing House edited the book twice that year, and that in all it enjoyed seven publications. The theme of the novel is Big Capital, its main characters the grabbing capitalists. Sinclair the "muckraker", as on so many occassions, all over the oil-well districts during the time of writing the book, and collected accurate evidence in order to authenticate his statements. As a result, the Boston censorship office, wanting to defend the oil-kings, prohibited the publication of certain pages of the novel. Sinclair overprinted fig-leaves onto the "objectionable" pages, and when the right of distribution of the book was withdrawn, donned a bill-board and in one of the busiest streets in Boston, outside the stone shetter of the traffic police, sold the sensation-creating fig-leafed copies of the book. Most Hungarian periodicals wrote about the resounding suecess of the fig-leafed Oil

!, and Literatura produced a photograph of Sinclair selling his book.

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6 The official circles of the government and politics did not give a kind reception to the distribution of Oil! in Hungary. In Figyelő, the literary supplement of Népszava, we can read that the Royal Hungarian Minister of Commerce had announced to the post-offices that he had withdrawn the right of transportation from the Berlin Malik Verlag publication of the book, and that it should be treated as prohibited printed matter. 18. Most of Sinclair's literary work can be read in Hungarian translation. For that very reason, it is remarkable that one of his most read, most exposing novels, Boston (1928), has not been published in Hungary. Nevertheless, at a time when the whole world was enraged by the judicial murder of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Hungarian press and public opinion followed their lot for years with attention, and the English and German publications of Sinclair's novel about the lawsuit was received with a greater attention than usual by Hungarian critics. In 1929, evaluations of Boston could be read in many periodicals. In Nyugat Róbert Braun called into doubt Sinclair's impartiality and justness. József Nádass, in the periodical Szocializmus, classified Boston as being among the best of Sinclair's novels. Nádass wrote that there could be no remaining doubt that the legal proceedings were a tragedy, the outrageous deed of American capitalism. He evaluated the book as a historical novel, a characteristic and faithful representation of an epoch, which "is an exact copy of all that which occurred in America for seven-and-a-half years, in, behind and during the law-case of Sacco and Vanzetti".

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7 In Új Szó István Szende appreciated the historical documentary value of the book. In his opinion Boston was not a novel but a historiography.

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8 In the opinion of Zoltán Fábry, "the novel has only one hero: Justice". In his book Sinclair formulated the ethics of American jurisdiction

: "who is poor and a stranger, is guilty, and who rids society of these elements, has acted in an ethical and legal manner". The most important merit of the book 426