Literary Journal 2019/4. Kazinczy

The Literary Journal’s latest issue presents Ferenc Kazinczy, the greatest promoter of Hungarian literature, the representative creator of the 18th and 19th centuries, on the occasion of the 260th anniversary of the author’s birth. Interviews with experts of Enlightenment literature provide insight into the current work and latest results of the Kazinczy research, while the studies summarize the curiosities of the author’s career, way of thinking and relationship with fellow intellectuals, and the analyzes and quotations point to the influence on cultural history of the master of Széphalom, the main aspects of his remembrance by posterity. The publication contributes to the outline of a 21st century image of Kazinczy through the need for a personal presentation. The writings, surrounded by rich visual material, bring to life the intellectual claiming democracy for the mind and the freedom of the writer; a farmer raising eight children in difficult conditions; the unceasingly active leader figure, exchanging letters with everyone and traveling constantly; the translator, author of poetry and prose, who sometimes wrote during the years spent in prison using his own blood, and who started a new life at the age of forty-two after captivity. The compilation is related to that direction of interpretation history that has developed in recent decades and allows for a more versatile approach to the oeuvre, rather than a view based on respecting the Kazinczy cult and attaching the significance of his activity primarily to language renewal.