Gintli Tibor - Perújrafelvétel (2021)

"The mood characteristic of 19th-century anecdotism becomes more complex in the period of modernity. This is partly due to the fact that serenity, mixed with other attitudes and tones, creates layered qualities such as melancholic joie de vivre (Krúdy), gallows humor (Cholnoky) or the irrationality of existence sometimes reflective playful irony (Kosztolányi). Anecdotal serenity takes on a more profound form due to the fact that in the case of several authors (Tersánszky, Krúdy) it appears as an expression of the joy of existence, which lends it a certain degree of reflexive character. This version of serenity is close to Péter Esterházy to the peculiarity of his prose, which Miklós Mészöly - not without a damning edge - called ontological serenity, which, at the same time, the narrator of the Revised Edition was far from denying."

The literary public considers the anecdote and anecdotism to be a narrative form of a problem-free worldview, a universal consensus, which has become completely out of date by the time of modernity. In contrast to this simplistic and stereotypical approach, the volume tries to show that in the Hungarian prose of the first half of the 20th century, we can find not only forms of the anecdotal mode of speech that essentially leave the 19th century tradition unchanged but are becoming more and more out of date, but also versions that based on the prevailing approach and narrative poetics, they can rightly be classified as significant achievements of Hungarian literary modernity. The discussed works prove that the anecdotal tradition was capable of renewal in the first half of the 20th century, that this direction of the epic tradition, so popular and fertile in the 19th century, did not lose its aesthetic potential even in the period of modernity.