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

In his opinion the novel revolves around two groups of characters

: the Jurgis family and the industrial barons of Packingtown, who are the aristocrats of the canning industry. "Their conflict recalls the medieval trial by combat, the warrior armed to the teeth, his opponent naked and defenceless." All Sinclair's sympathy lies with the weak and downtrodden. Sinclair departs from the impartiality of the writer and adopts the stance of a protagonist. In his study of Sinclair, written in 1946, Kornél V. Nagy examined the reactions of two social groups who were readers of Sinclair, taking into consideration the response to the first Hungarian publication of The Jungle. The bourgeois readers enjoyed the report-style of the novel, and referred to it as the "Chicago meat novel". From "a report from the war correspondent of misery from the starvation front", the bourgeoisie was interested only in descriptions and facts relating to the slaughterhouses. They were indifferent to the realities of suffering, the drama of human tragedy, and "refused to admit the heartbreaking lines into their souls." They felt the astuteness of the writer was in cruelly relating that which he had lived through himself. The Jungle, with its sheer bulk of content, broke away from all previous classified genres, and stood Sinclair apart from the other writers of his time. "There was nothing left, but to call him 'modern' (nowadays he would be called a distructivist or revolutionary) and left it at that."

5 The novel was given a totally different reception by the literate working class readers. The proletariate greeted him with open arms, they considered him as their own writer, and this relationship solved the question of his identity: Upton Sinclair is a socialist writer. The novel's portrayal of misery, and the nobility and humanitarianism of Sinclair's heart gripped the interest of the reading working public. Sinclair empathises with his suffering heroes, but "his sympathy is not that of the sorrowful Dickens, nor the enraged clenched fist of Victor Hugo, nor yet the resigned apathy of Russian writers. Sinclair is a fighter whose desire is to bring aid to all those oppressed, all poverty-stricken, to free the whole class of expoited people and see them as human beings."

6 In the opinion of Géza Hegedűs "The Jungle depicts the interest and unlimited voracity of monopoly capital. In all probability he was the first to describe with the tools of a writer the escalation of the process of the monopolisation of capital, to the serious detriment of the small enterpriser."

7 Hegedűs' statement is really true ; Upton Sinclair was the man who recognized fully the life of American Big Business. These years were a turning point in the history of capitalism evolving from classical to monopolistic, and consequently to imperialistic. For Sinclair capitalism indicated more than Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane or Jack London, who could only have understood the beginnings of monopoly capitalism; basically, their experiences derived from an era of free enterprise. The last two concordant evaluations of The Jungle can be read in the reviews of Világirodalmi Tájékoztató in 1972, April and June in a view of lectoric reports. The attitude of both lectors was positive, both recommended that the novel should be published. But the book did not appear. 3. One year after the publication of The Jungle, in 1908, a new Sinclair book appeared on the Hungarian book-market. A Captain of Industry (1906) was translated into Hungarian by Károlyné Baross under the title of Az Ipar418