Bársonyszék vagy tüzes trón (Babits presztízsváltozásai a Baumgarten Alapítvány kurátoraként)
Treasury bench or glowing throne (Changing of Babits’s reputation as trustee of Baumgarten Prize

Summary/Abstract: The Baumgarten Prize is an important page in the Hungarian literary history of the 20th century. It was founded by the rich literary historian Ferenc Baumgartner in 1923. The fund existed from 1929 until 1947. Baumgarten’s will appointed Mihály Babits, the great poet and literary figure of the age as trustee of the fund; awarding of the prize that went along with a high amount of money was depended on Babits’s personal aesthetic and ethic set of values. In the 1920s and 1930s already filled literary and political debates, Babits’s decisions on the prize generated expansive and sometimes immoderate controversy which called into question his personality and oeuvre as well. This study examines the causes and forms of this and the influence it had on Babits’s body of work.

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