Századok – 2014
TANULMÁNYOK - Dénes Iván Zoltán: Mesterelbeszélések VI/1425
MESTERELBESZELESEK 1463 A Magyar történet a nemzeti liberális kánon felülírása, kiiktatása jegyében született. Erre tett kísérletet mindkét szerző, különösen Szekfű Gyula. Minthogy azóta sem született egy vagy két szerzőtől mesterelbeszélés, hajlamosak vagyunk teljesítményüket önmagában nézni. A műfaj, a problémafelvetések és megoldások, a kompozíciók, a kulturális transzfer-értelmezések, az európai minták és a nemzeti befogadó-átalakító közeg kölcsönhatásainak interpretációi ma is rekonstrukcióra, elemzésre és értelmezésre ösztökélnek, ám ennek során érdemes figyelembe vennünk a kontextust. Azt, amivel szemben a szintézis született és azokat a diskurzusokat, amelyek kibontakoztak körülötte. MASTER NARRATIVES by Iván Zoltán Dénes (Summary) The twenty volumes of the History of Hungary in ten volumes, which appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, have frequently been compared to the Hungarian history written by Bálint Hóman and Gyula Szekfű. That is, a largely non-synthetic work written by a great number of scholars to a synthesis composed by two authors. Although comparison between the two ventures is timely and relevant nonetheless, another comparison is worth making as well: one between two syntheses, the History of the Hungarian Nation written in the 1890s, and the volumes prepared by Hóman and Szekfű cited above. The conceptual framework and the methodology needed to undertake such an essay were provided the contextualist speech act theory of the Cambridge School, the key-notion reconstructions of the Bielefeld school of conceptual history, and the mentality analyses of the Annales circle. What or who was it whose history was written by the authors of the millennial History of the Hungarian Nation and by those of the Hungarian History? What principles directed their efforts to break down their work into various periods? What kind of scientific canon did they follow in composing their narratives? To whom exactly were these narratives aimed? In 1931 a British historian and religious philosopher, Herbert Butterfield, stigmatized the whig interpretation of history as a noxious and biased scheme. He thought that getting rid of it is a necessary precondition of doing serious history writing. The ten volumes of the History of the Hungarian Nation appeared between 1895 and 1898. The series narrated and represented the political history of the constitutional evolution of the Hungarian nation and the cultural history of its civilisation. Those among the some twenty thousand buyers who did read the altogether seven thousand pages of the whole series became acquainted with a positivist national liberal narrative, which depicted a development which led from the tribal organisation to the constitutional nation-state, and from the militant nomadic lifestyle to the settled and peaceful milieu of educated city-dwellers. The narrative followed a straight line from the distant past to the present, from Asia to the Carpathian Basin, from the tribal wanderings through settlement and state formation to the political agenda of the constitutional nation-state and its accomphshment, that is, from the distant past to the realised goal of national history. This positivist, national liberal master narrative was one, indeed the first, in a series of intellectual ventures commemorating the millennium of the Hungarian landtaking. The authors of the Hungarian History faced no fewer questions. Can the historian be impartial? Can he be able to present distant ages as measured by their own standards? Why do most historians simply project their own attachments and convictions onto the past, or, otherwise, why do they get lost in the sea of details? The aim of Bálint Hóman and Gyula Szekfű with their Hungarian History was to overwrite the History of the Hungarian Nation. They wanted to do this by revealing the inner relations of periods of equal rank and importance, each featuring an intrinsic system of values and standards, rather than simply projecting back into the past a normative present. They did not follow a
