SELF-REFLECTION AND RECKOGNING IN THE PROSE OF ERZSÉBET JUHÁSZ

Abstract

Since the beginning, Erzsébet Juhász has created situations in her epic works which established the identity issues of her protagonists. In her collection of short stories Gyöngyhalászok [Pearlers], it is the family that represents the social environment influencing identity on a fundamental level, and in her novel Műkedvelők [Art Lovers], she presents the cultural conditions defining minority existence in the period between the two world wars. Her posthumously published last novel Határregény [Frontier Novel], which remained in fragments, is set in parallel in the present of the Balkan Wars and in the period following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The structure indicative of the frame of the great epic composition was formed by the editors based on the completed fragments; however, even these make the author's intent of a parallel between the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the falling apart of Great Yugoslavia palpable. The 1993 collection of essays and 1997 collection of studies of Erzsébet Juhász can in a sense be considered the predecessors of Határregény [Fontier Novel]. In her essays, she examines the situation ensuing after the Balkan Wars, the state of existence as a national minority, the question of Central-Europeanness, and the chances of hope from the perspective of a creator. She discovers hope only in a dimension beyond the reach of everyday existence—reading and writing. Her studies on the literature of the Monarchy bear witness to these life experiences as well. This paper examines how the revelations described in the collections of essays and studies of Erzsébet Juhász are represented in the epic text of the Határregény [Frontier Novel].

Keywords: identity issues, Balkan Wars, Central Europe, minority existence, experience.