Series of the Hungarian Hinterland Novels

Jenő Józsi Tersánszky: Viszontlátásra, drága... (Goodbye, dear...)

Abstract

Endre Ady, in his review published in the Figyelő column of the literary journal Nyugat on 1 December 1916, described Jenő Józsi Tersánszky’s novel Viszontlátásra, drága… (Goodbye, dear…) as „the first real war novel”. Reception has identified it as a companion piece to the novel A margarétás dal (Song with Daisies) (1929) on the basis of several explicit features (e.g. war themes, female protagonist, confessional feature, etc.), while recent research – reflecting on Artúr Munk’s A hinterland (1933) – places it in the series of so-called Hinterland novels. The paper presents the mentioned work in the milieu of this web of contexts. Taking into account the similarities and differences, it seeks to answer the question of how Tersánszky’s novel fits into the genre variations of the First World War novels, and whether the premise that a new, previously non-existent novel genre and discourse emerged in the history of Hungarian literature with the publication of Viszontlátásra, drága... can be justified. The process of searching for tradition, on the other hand, serves to explore the predecessors and models of the work (e.g. the 19^th century Hungarian epistolary novel, Russian realist prose).