Nation-Building or Nation-Bricolage? The Making of a National Poet in 19th-Century Hungary

Fórizs, Gergely (2021) Nation-Building or Nation-Bricolage? The Making of a National Poet in 19th-Century Hungary. In: Literary Canon Formation as Nation-Building in Central Europe and the Baltics 19th to Early 20th Century. National Cultivation of Culture (24). Brill, Leiden. ISBN 978-90-04-39839-9

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Abstract

The article analyzes the Hungarian situation of national poet creation and questions the applicability of the term “nation-building” to the region of Central-Eastern Europe. In this article I argue that the mechanistic and voluntarist aspects that are characteristic of this term are only applicable to research of the political nation formation of newly established ex-colonial states (such as the USA). In contrast to the latter, the modern nations of Central Europe, did not have a state equivalent in the 19th century (some had one only in the distant past) and understood themselves not as forging their national unit here and now, but rather as a primordial community seeking “revival.” For this reason, I consider the ideologues of this region’s nationalism not as builders of a nation with a clear plan of action (like America’s Founding Fathers), but rather as handymen (bricoleurs) who take to molding a nation, without a clear plan, out of the previously existing political formations, patchworks of recollections, or remains of mythical narratives in that territory. As an example of such a nation-bricolage I present the publishing and translation practices of Gábor Döbrentei and István Széchenyi. Wherever Dániel Berzsenyi’s text did not coincide with the modern Hungarian ideology of nationalism, it was edited according to the will of the translator or else re-interpreted according to the understanding of the publisher.

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