Kazinczy-értelmezések történész szemmel
Kazinczy-Interpretations

Summary/Abstract: Kazinczy Ferenc, the symbolic founding father of the modern hungarianliterature, is one of the most contested figure of the Hungarian national consciousness. A bewildering variety of highly controversial opinions characterizes the interpretations of his activity. Even the representants of the democratic trends are divided in their judgements. Ady Endre one of the greatest poets considered him, as a destroyer of the good hungarian language, on the other part the friend of Ady, Hatvany Lajos praised him as an outstanding fugure of the hungarian democracy. For the antiwestern orientation he remained the fi rst ennemy. In the hungarian modern marxistic historiography of the ‘60–70-es he became the bad boy, an ideologue of the so called feudal nationalism or that of the intolerant linguistic nationalism, the good boy is Berzeviczy Gergely, who professed a supraethnic state-nationalism, and the hegemony of the latin language. Their debat was really a prologue of the modern liberal nationalism. Their debate put an end to their friendship. Nevertheless the binary model is wrong too. The research in the archives led to the following alternative: Berzeviczy made an option for the dictatorship of the reforms, whereas Kazinczy argumented in favour of a balanced, but slowly reform on constitutional base. Berzeviczy had dubios relations with certain political cercles in Vienna, from which Kazinczy had a quite a strong phobia. His life is a story of the fi delity to the values of the enlightenment. The dialectics of his ideas is that of Rousseau. One can detect infl uences of Rousseau on Kazinczy, and there are some parallels and coincedences in their views concerning the problem of the rythm of the social change and the process of the nation building. In Hungary after 1956 the appreciation of Kazinczy was distorted by the new offi cial antinational trend, whereas in Újvidék (Novi Sad) and Kolozsvár (Cluj) the presentation of his work and life was less contamineted by the official communist ideology.

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