Aladár Kuncz’s Novel Fekete kolostor [The Black Monastery] in the Context of Hungarian Fiction Themes Tackling the First World War

Abstract

Aladár Kuncz's novel The Black Monastery, published in 1931, belongs to the second group of literary works thematizing the events of the First World War, among the novels that depicted recent authentic historical events from the standpoint of a one-and-a-half-decade perspective. In this sense, it can also be examined and interpreted in the context of European and Hungarian literature: their similarities, as well as characteristics that separate and remove them from the given genre line, are revealed. In the field of Hungarian literature of the period, it is most often compared to Rodion Markovits's novels Szibériai garnizon [Siberian Garrison] (1928) and Aranyvonat [Golden Train] (1929), while in Hungarian literature in Yugoslavia / Vojvodina – in addition to several other, less pronounced, or only partially World-War-I prose works – it can be interpreted in relation to Gábor Darvas’s novel “Mindent meggondoltam és mindent megfontoltam…”  [“I thought about everything and considered everything…”] (1930), Artúr Munk’s A nagy káder [The Great Cadre] (1929) and István Szabó–Dezső Andrée’s  Egy legionista naplója [The Diary of a Legionnaire] (1931). The presumption of the research is that The Black Monastery differs for the most part, and initiates a new series of novels in the history of Hungarian literature: it fits into the series of Hungarian (interning camp) novels depicting the world of (interning) camps. At the same time, the examination of the mentioned novel type in the topical sphere points to the development of the literary political lines of power that unfolded in the late twenties of the last century, and the synchronous processes of constructing minority literatures. The paper presents the results of these comparative studies.