A JOURNEY TO VIENNA – THE FOREIGNNESS OF THE OWN AND THE OTHER

Abstract

Gergely Péterfy’s novel entitled The Stuffed Barbarian (Kitömött barbár), published in 2014, relates Ferenc Kazinczy’s friendship with a black freemason evolving from slavery to becoming one of the most educated minds of his age, Angelo Soliman. The framework of the plot is a journey: after burying her husband Kazinczy, who fell victim to the 1831 cholera epidemic, his widow, Sophie Török, goes to the imperial city to see the stuffed body of Angelo Soliman, soulmate of her deceased husband, in the attic of the Museum of Natural History. The journey, as a particular mode of initiation is, one of the many Masonic symbols that appear in the novel. The outer journey is also a path of revelation, in the course of which the evocation of the memories in the form of an interior monologue of a woman – also mediated by her husband – offers the reader an insight into the eighteenth-century dilemmas that are still topical, such as advancement and ethics; the foreign and the own; reform and revolution; enlightenment and backwardness; patriotism and alienation; barbarism and refinement.