„Beteg, nagyon beteg volt e haza…” Vachott Sándorné: Szikláry Ilona, történeti beszély az ifjúság számára
„Sick, very sick was this country...”: Ilona Szikláry of Mrs. Vachott, a historical story for the youth (1861)

Summary/Abstract: In the two decades after the defeat of the1848-1849 Hungarian Revolution, Mrs. Mária Vachott (her husband, Sándor Vachott was a famous literary editor in the 1840s and at the time of the revolution the secretary of Lajos Kossuth) successfully carried out a programme of disseminating Hungarian language youth literature, especially for girls. She edited anthologies and started a series of books (Vachott Sándoné ifjúsági iratai – Mrs. Vachott’s Papers for Young People etc.). These include her historical patriotic novel for girls from 1861, Ilona Szikláry. At the suggestion of her mentor, the writer-politician, Baron József Eötvös, Mrs. Vachott wrote the story as set at the end of the 16th century, during the reign of the Turks in Hungary. However, the story is an adaptation: the turning points in the plot strongly resemble to those of the plot of Christoph von Schmid’s biedermeier novel Rosa von Tannenburg (1823). Von Schmid was also a popular writer in Hungary, widely read in both German and Hungarian, and in 1850 the 'Tannenburgi Róza' was published in Hungarian. It is a curious fact that neither the critic of Mrs. Vachott's novel, Ferenc Salamon in 1861, nor the members of the committee that awarded the literary prize to this novel, offered by Countess Karolin Zichy, didn’t recognise the obvious plagiarism – or tried to conceal the similarity.

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