Századok – 2014
TANULMÁNYOK - Dénes Iván Zoltán: Mesterelbeszélések VI/1425
1464 DÉNES IVÁN ZOLTÁN politico-historical schedule, and thus did not regard cultural history as a mere appendix, but rather extended and deepened the exterior and interior world of the past towards society, economy, the mind and the soul. They aimed at interconnecting the great European intellectual influences and the autochon nature of the Hungarian nation. Instead of a series of multiauthored monographies, they wanted to produce a real synthesis elaborated by two authors along uniform guidelines. A synthesis, that is, that would hopefully help the nation after Trianon in forming a real self-knowledge instead of a mere set of illusions. How, and along what lines can one define the periods of histoiy? Do they show up divergent features in Europe and Hungary? What connections did exist between the great european intellectual trends and the history of the autochton Hungarian nation? Were the ideas of the Gothic art, Renaissance, Humanism, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Baroque, Enlightenment, Liberalism, Nationalism and Socialism simply aped in Hungary, or were the adopted intellectual systems tuned to local conditions and thus given a special flavour in the process of reception and application? As reflected by the titles of his volumes, Gyula Szekfű followed in the Hungarian History a periodisation according to centuries. One does find there, nevertheless, all those European categories of ideology and style, which appeared and became rooted in Hungary from the 15th to the 19th century: Renaissance, Humanism, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Absolutism, Baroque, Enlightenment, Nationalism, Romanticism, Liberalism and Socialism. Yet it was not these which provided a basis for periodization. Not even the centuries themselves. For what underlay the latter was the aim of Szekfű to tell in his volumes of the Hungarian History the history of the split between the territory of the state and the values of the political classes. Despite the titles of his volumes, he basically distinguished three major periods: the 16th and 17th centuries as one unit, the 18th century and the 19th. The basis for distinction was the kind of challenge posed by the necessity to maintain, then restore, and again to preserve the territorial and organisational integrity of the Hungarian state, and the reasons behind the dissolution of the unitary value system of the Hungarian political elite and the consequent failure to restore it. The Hungarian History was destined to overwrite and suppress the national liberal canon. It was this goal which guided both authors, but especially Gyula Szekfű. Since no master narrative has since then been produced by one or two authors, one is inclined to regard their achievement in itself. Their genre, problem definitions and solutions, compositions, interpretations of cultural transfer and of the interaction between European patterns and national reception and transformation continue to incite reconstruction, analysis and interpretation, yet in doing so it is important never to lose the context from sight. That is, the background against which the synthesis was made, and those discourses which it fuelled in turn.
