Hungarian Studies Review Spring-Fall, 1993 [antikvár]

Hungarian Stiulies Review, Vol. XX, Nos. 1-2 (Spring-Fall. 1993)Our ContributorsKALMAN DREISZIGER has been involved in Hungarian community folk-dancing since the 1960s. He has been choreographer and artistic director for groups in Toronto and Montreal, has conducted folk-dance research in Hungary and Romania, and has been a guest teacher with Hungarian and international folk-dance groups in Canada and the United States.TIBOR GLANT received his undergraduate education at Lajos Kossuth University in Debrecen, Hungary, and his M.A. degree at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the present. He is a member of the faculty of the Institute of English and American Studies at Kossuth University.VIRGINIA L. LEWIS was an Annenberg Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her Ph.D. in modern German literature. She has published a book and several articles on German and Austrian prose writers from the late nineteenth century. Currently she is Assistant Professor of German at Drake University.NORA NIXON is Associate Director of Academic Year Programs at Educational Resource Development Trust in Marina Del Rey, California, and a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship. She graduated from the Teaching English as a Second Language department at University of California at Los Angeles, and has trained teachers in this field in the United States, Hungary, Italy, and the People's Republic of China.M. TAMÁS RÉVÉSZ teaches at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He has published on Hungarian legal history widely, and has given papers at conferences in Europe and North America.STEVEN BELA VARDY is Professor of History at Duquesne University, Director of Duquesne University History Forum, immediate past Chairman , ; jof the Department of History, and Adjunct Professor of East EuropeanHistory at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author or co-author of over a dozen books and a great many papers, including several in our journal. M " ; ' t ! 'Hungarian Stiulies Review, Vol. XX, Nos. 1-2 (Spring-Fall. 1993)The Price of Emancipation: Peasant-Noble Relations as Depicted by Novelists József Eötvös and Marie von Ebner-EschenbachVirginia L. LewisThe year 1848 marks a critical caesura in the rural class relations of the Habsburg empire. The emancipation of the serfs had far-reaching consequences not only for the daily lives of nobles and peasants, but also for the economy, social structure, political process, and cultural life of the monarchy. Prior to 1848, the serfs in Austria and Hungary were suppressed and exploited by the feudal order. After 1848, they were abandoned by it and left to fend for themselves with neither the economic nor the political means to do so.' The emancipation engendered developments in agrarian society that were unique to the nations under Habsburg hegemony. By this time, serfdom had ceased to exist in the western half of Europe.^ It continued, however, in parts of the Balkans and in Russia.' The conjuncture of the social developments leading up to and following in the wake of the 1848-49 Revolution with the increasing role of objective portrayal and social engagement in literature resulted in a distinctive brand of literary realism in East Central Europe.While there was certainly increasing attention paid to bourgeois and industrial society even in overwhelmingly agricultural Hungary,'' rural themes continued to dominate East Central European literature up to World War I and beyond. The stranglehold of the landed oligarchy and feudal institutions on the economy and government of the Habsburg Monarchy simply did not permit industrialization and urbanization on the scale at which it proceeded in Germany, France, and England in the nineteenth century.' The demographic realities of East Central Europe, where more than half of the population still consisted of peasants as late as 1900,^ are reflected in the literary works produced there. Rural class reform was a major theme in Austrian and Hungarian literature up to 1848. After the failure of the Revolution, passionate hope of reform was gradually replaced by resignation and eventually fatalism as it grew ever more clear that the situation among the lower classes in Austria-Hungaryj-i,had if anything worsened since the emancipation of the serfs. The tran-^ ^ i!i