Kuncz Aladár: Monográfiák

It is less known that the majority of Aladár Kuncz's activity is not in the field of prose, and his activities as a Transylvanian literary organizer, editor and translator in the 1920s – highlighted and acknowledged by many – also cast a shadow over his early works as an essay writer. The works published in the fourth volume of this series are monographs of this early period of Kuncz's life, 'bringing to light' the results of his synthesising literary historical work. The young scholar produced three major works between 1907 and 1913. His university prize-winning thesis was the basis for his doctoral dissertation on Ferenc Toldy in 1907, and between 1908 and 1910 he wrote the ambitious thesis on the development of the theory and method of Hungarian literary history since Ferenc Toldy, now published for the first time. This is also the title of his 1912 essay Thököly a francia irodalomban (Thököly in French Literature), which was published in 1914 as a special edition of the Bulletin of the Erzsébetváros State High School.

Kuncz's monograph on Ferenc Toldy was a valuable contribution in its time, since Toldy's figure and activities had been forgotten by 1907, and he had not been studied for decades. The work summarises Toldy's life's work in six chapters, mostly in the sense of the characteristics, faculté maitresse, highlighted by Hyppolite Taine. The rather developmental picture becomes much more nuanced in Kuncz's later writings, including his much more ambitious summary of the history of literary science, for which the Toldy monograph also served as a kind of preparation. The synthesizing work, originally written as a thesis, The Development of the Theory and Method of Hungarian Literary History since Ferenc Toldy, which has been hiding in the Manuscript Collection of the National Széchényi Library, attempts to summarize with a good sense of proportion and a comparative approach everything that has been important and worth knowing in Hungarian literary history writing since Toldy's activities as a literary historian up to the end of the first decade of the 20th century, also from a European perspective. The 354-page manuscript is also an excellent document, an accurate picture of the main trends in Hungarian essay writing, critical and literary history in the first decade after the turn of the century. The language of this work is mostly essayistic and sometimes, if necessary, demonstratively ironic, while at the same time it gives a complete picture of the Hungarian literary history writing of the previous half century (and its shortcomings), and offers a harsh critique of some of its elements.

The publication of Aladár Kuncz's works on the history of literature and science, edited by László Boka and Zsuzsanna Rózsafalvi, can justly reconcile the two fields of this career, which forcefully fragmented by the First World War.

Volumes of the series:

• Aladár Kuncz: Black Monastery. Memoirs of the French Internment
  Edited by Éva Jeney
  Budapest–Cluj-Napoca, NSZL–Kriterion, 2014.
• Aladár Kuncz: A Piece of Marble
  Short stories, vignettes, feuilletons, notes, drama
  Compiled and edited by Tamás Gusztáv Filep and Ágnes Varga
  Budapest–Cluj-Napoca, NSZL–Kriterion, 2014.
• Aladár Kuncz: Cloud over the City
  A Novel.
  Proofreading and preface by Andrea Juhász
  Edited by Gyula H. Szabó
  ​Budapest–Cluj-Napoca, NSZL–Kriterion, 2016.