Vi. Bölöni Farkas Sándor (1795-1842) and his Travels
IX. Fest Sándor, the Father of English Studies in Hungary
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IX. Fest Sándor, the Father of English Studies in HungaryIN THIS SECTION, we will cover:
In the years preceding the First World War, there was a tendency of attempting to break with the one-sided German orientation and turning towards the culture of other nations. Alongside the birth of German and French philology, the branches of Italian, Slavic and English philology are born, of which the clear sign was that such departments were established at the Hungarian universities. Fest Sándor (1883-1944), who is generally regarded to be the “father” of English Studies in Hungary, was born in Szepesváralja, Sopron county. The members of his family worked in administrative positions, or in the fields of economics or sciences. Fest Imre (1817-1883) was an under-secretary in István Gorove’s department of agriculture, industry and trade. Later he became the vice-governor of the Austrian- Hungarian Bank and had a great role in the preparation of the Compromise of 1867. The father, Fest Sándor, Sr., after various jobs, began to run an estate. His wife, Westphal Erzsébet, was a great intellect. She wanted to be a teacher, she spoke English and French very well (she died at the age of 96, in 1948, outliving her son). Fest Sándor was the third child in the family. He graduated from high school in 1902. Meanwhile, her mother taught the children French and English. Fest probably inherited his pedagogical talent from her; he always liked to teach and deal with children, and became an excellent teacher. He was said to have been strict and demanding but without any rigidity or superciliousness. He began his university studies in 1902, majoring in Hungarian and German. His main subject was Hungarian linguistics. He also had the privilege of being the student of the recently established Eötvös College. The Eötvös College was founded in 1895, based on the model of the French École Normale Superieur. Its aim was to provide elite education, with the help of scholarships, to talented students, of more or less humble middle-class origins, who prepared to be secondary school teachers. The principle was tutorial education, like at famous English universities. Each student had a tutor or mentor, with whose help he was immersed in literature, history, and other sciences. They could freely do research in the rich library at any time of the day. The idea was to go against the strict, formalised Prussian-based education system and introduce a French type of education. Fest’s masters were Simonyi Zsigmond, the famous linguist and Heinrich Gusztáv, a professor of German philology. Their influence can be felt throughout Fest’s career, since they educated their students in the spirit of Positivism, which was based on the faithful collecting and minute examination of data and facts. In 1906, Fest graduated as a teacher of Hungarian, German and French. During his studies, he also visited the lectures of the first English “lector” at Pázmány University, Arthur Yolland. This is all the more significant, since English as a subject was rather peripheral and the time and did not even form part of secondary school curricula. There were, however, some signs that proved Hungary’s interest in English studies (stemming, naturally, from the general 19th-century sentiment of “anglomania”): the Kisfaludy Társaság launched a scholarly journal called Magyar Shakespeare Tár (the aim was to create a new Shakespeare cult in Hungary and investigate Shakespeare’s effect in Hungary), Bayer József writes Shakespeare drámái hazánkban (1909), and in the same year, the British-American Literary Society organises a reading club. In 1903, Fest’s father sold his estate and emigrated to the USA. Fest followed him and made trips in the US three times between 1907 and 1911 (besides a number of trips to Britain). He mastered the English language and the English way of thinking as well; according to Arthur Yolland, Fest had a full command of English and was able to talk and write like a native speaker. Fest’s attention turned fully towards English studies, he went to Oxford and began to do research in the Bodleian Library concerning English travellers in Hungary. In 1912, he was commissioned to teach at the Eötvös College. Fest’s career may be divided into four distinct sections (1910-14; 1914-23; 1923-33; 1933-44) In the years between 1910 and 1914, his main field of research was to look for references to Hungary in English authors’ works. Although it seems that he digs up unimportant, minute and obscure references, still, with these interesting details, he is able to transmit the feeling of a whole literary period. His main question around which his research was focused was how our culture and history was mirrored in another nations’ consciousness. It was assumed that we can get a more faithful picture of ourselves and we can understand ourselves better if we know what others think about us. This way of thinking was really popular in the 1930s, and Fest was one of its first pioneers. In 1912, he gave a lecture on the necessity of teaching English in secondary schools. He talks about the painful lack of English studies in Hungary and referring to the whole of European culture, asserts that the national culture should be viewed as part of a European synthesis. He asserts that the danger for national culture is not its European or universal orientation but when its foreign orientation remains one-sided (referring to the German influence). He also refers to the often quoted fallacious concept that Anglo-Hungarian relations had been so scarce that it is not worth dealing with them. Fest maintains that if we do not look consciously for the traces of these contacts, naturally it will appear that there had been no such contacts. He sees the remedy for this situation in the introduction of English in high school curriculum. Of course Fest does not claim that we should replace the German orientation with the English one but only that English should be one of the optional subject and thus the scope of students could be broadened. Fest did not remain on the level of theories, he himself wrote a complete series of language books for high schools in collaboration with Országh László and Szenczi Miklós between 1939 and 1942 (published by Franklin Társulat). The second period of his career started with the outbreak of the First World War. It caused him considerable difficulty, since travelling abroad became significantly complicated. On the one hand, he started to summarise his research done that far, on the other hand, areas of his research were carried on by his students, Országh László, Szenczi Miklós, Róna Éva, Gál István, and others. (Which also meant that for several decades “English Studies” meant investigating Anglo-Hungarian relationships.) Fest found a new area of research for himself, based on the material he had access to in Hungary: he started to investigate English influences in Hungarian writers’ works (for instance, Arany János). He always made a careful distinction between conscious borrowings and imitations, and influences, which were often unconscious and were apparent in particular motifs or phrases He set out to study the latter type. On the other hand, he became interested in a new period, the Reform Age and the English influences, the “anglomania” of the time (Széchenyi, Wesselényi, etc). In 1917, he read out his dissertation at the Hungarian Academy entitled “Angol irodalmi hatások hazánkban Széchenyi István fellépéséig.” Interestingly, this is no literary history. He does not attempt to solve the great dilemmas in the field, such as Petőfi’s relationship to Shelley or Byron, questions of Shakespeare philology, Arany János’s relationship to English culture. He rather gives an image of the whole atmosphere of the age, and those circumstances that made possible the reception of English influences. In 1918, he completed his “habilitation” at Pázmány Péter University (a habilitation process, a German-origin term, qualifies one for teaching at a university). Fest became the professor of Older English Literature. (The fact that he became the professor of literature may shed light on certain political reasons in the background.) In the subsequent years, he taught Old English poetry, Chaucer and Shakespeare at the university. In 1923, a break followed in his career. On the one hand, the economic situation of the country after the war necessitated the reduction of state employees. On the other hand, his wife died and the bringing up of their daughter became Fest’s responsibility. He quit his job and retreated to his estate near Graz. He lived in relative isolation there for the next ten years. Of course, it does not mean he had no contact with the developments of scholarship. He regularly read foreign language magazines and journals, worked on studies, and even in the family the language of conversation was English. It was in this period that his new area of interest began to be outlined: the earliest contacts between England and Hungary, the story of Edmund Ironside’s two sons (see first lecture), Agatha, Saint Margaret of Scotland, the Golden Bull and the Magna Charta. The simple reason for this choice was that Fest had access to excellent materials regarding the Middle Ages in the library of the University of Graz. It was Fest’s merit that he cleared up problems that even English professors had failed to do before. In the final period of his career (1933-44), Fest returned to Budapest. He became the teacher of the Budapest Lutheran High School and resumed his old post at Eötvös College, and besides continued teaching at the university. In this period, he summarised his results, refined his former papers, “corrected” some of his old mistakes, digging up new and new pieces of evidence (shown by the fact that he wrote six versions of the St Margaret problem). In 1938, he became the correspondent member of the Hungarian Academy. The same year the English ambassador informed the Hungarian foreign secretary that the British Council had offered the organisation of an English Department at the University of Debrecen. (Let us refer back to Debrecen as one of the centres of Anglo-Hungarian contacts since the 17th century.) Fest became the first chair of the new department, where he taught Shakespeare and Anglo-Hungarian contacts. The scholarly journal English Studies in Philology (Angol Filológiai Tanulmányok) launched by Yolland, became the joint publication of the Pázmány and Debrecen Universities. The journal was almost exclusively devoted to the study of the Anglo-Hungarian literary and cultural contacts. Unfortunately, due to the ill-conceived political decision of the Ministry of Education in the communist era, all the Western foreign language departments were closed down after the Second World War in 1950. A period of forced interruption followed for seven years. In 1957, these departments were re-opened, and so the journal, under the name of Hungarian Studies in English was restarted in 1963 by Országh László, Fest’s disciple. The title of the journal was a bit misleading, however, since those unacquainted with it could not decide whether the studies were in Hungarian, or were concerned with Hungarian topics, or were written by Hungarians in the field of English studies. Later it changed its name to Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) and still exists. Depending on whether we count the years of interruption, as of 2013, it has been around now for 75 (or 50) years, and is thus the country’s oldest scholarly journal in the field of English studies and is also known internationally. But returning to Fest’s career: in 1944, he moved back to Budapest. His aim was to activate his English channels in moving forward talks with the Allied Forces, trying to start peace negotiations. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs granted him the permission to stay in England from 18 September to 31 December. On 30 December, however, he died in a bomb attack that hit the house where he rented a room and Fest died together with 40 other people. The corpses were buried in a mass grave. He was exhumed in 1948 and his body was only recognised from the train season ticket in his pocket. He was buried in the Rákoskeresztúri cemetery. Fest Sándor’s legacy is inestimable in the field of English Studies. After the Second World War, and the communist takeover, his work was not held in high regard. The main ideologists of the communist regime, including Lukács György and Lutter Tibor, accused him of not paying attention to achievements of Marxist ideology, and his method of Positivism (the careful collection of data) was characterised as “philological trifling.” After the unfavourable climate of the 1950s, his legacy was revived mainly by his former students and acquaintances. Let us here record once again the great old men (and women) of English studies: Országh László, Szenczi Miklós, Maller Sándor, Gál István, Róna Éva. Országh followed him as the chair of the English Department at the University of Debrecen (1947-50 and 1957-69). Országh was the only English Studies scholar in Hungary who was awarded the greatest order of merit by the Queen, and he became the Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1979 for his services in the spread of English culture. “Besides” this, Országh, was the founder of American Studies (“amerikanisztika”) in Hungary.
Abádi-Nagy Zoltán. “Anglisztika és amerikanisztika a mai Magyarországon.” Anglisztika és amerikanisztika: Magyar kutatások az ezredfordulón. Szerk. Frank Tibor and Károly Krisztina. Bp, Tinta Kiadó, 2009: 13-32. Fest Sándor. “Székfoglaló beszéd a debreceni egyetemen.” In: Fest, Skóciai Szent Margittól…, pp. 495-502. Szász Imre. Ménesi út: regény és dokumentumok. Bp: Magvető, 1985. [about the Eötvös College] Sarbu Aladár. “Crisis in English?” HUSSE Papers. Vol. 1: Literature and Culture. Debrecen, 1995: 9-18. Sarbu Aladár. “The Study of English and American Literature: Hungarian Orientations.” The Study of Literature. Bp: Akadémiai, 2008: 325-354. Sarbu Aladár. “Declining English? Some Recent Anxieties.” The Study of Literature. Bp: Akadémiai, 2008: 355-365. Virágos K. Zsolt et al. “The Life and Work of László Országh (1907-1984): A Round Table.” HJEAS 4.1-2. (1998): 367-406. Yüklə 125,07 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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