A jubilee volume commemorating the 60th birthday of literary historian, critic, and essayist Zoltán Bertha was published under the title Nemzet–Sors–Identitás (lit. Nation–Destiny–Identity), with the subtitle európai látószögű magyar (lit. Hungarian with a European perspective), a phrase borrowed from László Németh. Edited at Károli Gáspár Reformed University, the volume features contributions from over fifty authors. Since 1994, Zoltán Bertha has served as an associate professor in the Department of Modern Hungarian Literature at the university.
One of the introductory articles of the studies dealing with Hungarian history, modern and contemporary Hungarian and world literature, and Hungarian literature beyond the borders—especially Transylvanian literature—is the congratulatory essay of Gábor Ködöböcz (A végtelen mondat és a végtelen szeretet embere [lit. The Man of Infinite Sentences and Infinite Love]), which was delivered on 15 May 2015 at the introduction of Zoltán Bertha, who was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts. Among other things, Ködöböcz identified loyalty and independence—or the fulfilled capacity “for immovable commitment and immense inner freedom”—as the characteristic qualities of “muszáj-Herkules” (lit. destined-to-be Herkules) [1] people like Zoltán Bertha. “Zoltán Bertha’s selfless attitude and elegant generosity, motivated by evangelical spirituality, is almost legendary among his colleagues, students and friends, yet it is a great mystery what he has the time, attention, affinity, and energy to do”, says Ködöböcz, “His achievement is of a superhuman and awe-inspiring, which only a man of God’s rich talents and ascetic spirit could be capable of. [...] Zoltán Bertha has done an unimaginable effort to ensure that we could at least spiritually, if not otherwise, overcome the tragic consequences of the Treaty of Trianon. [...] His strikingly coherent, large-format, and wide-ranging work as a literary historian and critic is defined by his thinking in terms of the nation as a whole, his universal approach, and his constant dialogue with the canon of Hungarian and world literature.”
The title of the oeuvre interview with Zoltán Bertha, also conducted by Gábor Ködöböcz, carries a message of poetic value: Meghallani a magyar Atlantisz harangszavát (lit. To hear the chimes of Hungarian Atlantis) (Magyar Napló, 2010/10; In: Nyitott műhely I–II. – 100 interjú a mai magyar irodalomból (lit. Open Workshop I–II – 100 interviews from contemporary Hungarian literature, edited by János Csontos, Budapest, Magyar Napló Publishing House). The author sought to encapsulate in this thought behind the title all the responsibilities and commitments that bind Zoltán Bertha to the past and present values of Hungarian culture. After all, in all schools (first in Sárospatak, then in Debrecen), he was taught to save values and to protect the nation. He projected the European horizon onto his life and the works he studied, in light of his awareness of Hungarian destiny. His approach is fundamentally sacral: he interprets humanity in the light of divinity, and this unique interpretation of the world and humanity presupposes a turn-of-the-millennium Renaissance approach that is at odds with postmodernism. It is therefore understandable that, as a student, he became interested in minority Hungarian literature and discovered significant achievements that had been deliberately squeezed out of the national consciousness of the time (mutilated by the communist dictatorship). He is a firm believer that it is still not too late to take stock of the values of Hungarians beyond the borders, so that “we can save for the future all that has accumulated over thousands of years, centuries, as a treasure of values, as a thesaurus, throughout the entire territory of the Carpathian Basin”. And together with Endre Ady, he follows as an element of identity, as a guiding principle, the national self-characterisation often quoted by Mihály Czine (”the wandering preacher of Hungarian literature”), according to which “Hungarian identity is a necessity and a value for humanity and humanity’s path to the stars”. After all, Hungarian identity and humanity are inseparably linked concepts, and it is in the spirit of this fateful belonging that it is understandable that “the hardy Hungarian life and the culture-creating Hungarian spirit, even in its eternal threat and endangerment, have always been nourished by the hope of survival, and this can be our main credo today: to help raise awareness of, promote, and enrich this empire of values”.
As a literary historian and literary and art critic, he primarily strives to account for and interpret the autonomous values of Hungarian literature and culture, and to appreciate the “dignity of originality”. A special task for him is to strengthen the integrity, protection, and respect for Hungarian literature, art, and culture, which are unified in their natural organicity, and to effectively and continuously broaden the reception and participation. He is committed to contributing to the research, processing, and analytical and theoretical outlining of the identity values of Hungarian literature and culture, and to the enumeration, emphasis, and evaluation of the qualities that constitute the national literary paradigm. Such characteristics include, for example, a specific linguistic, cultural, spiritual, and intellectual national ethos, a moral, spiritual-religious humanontological, and cultural-anthropological view of the nation and its community.
He also aims to convey the inspirational and tradition-defining significance of Christianity, its sacral and historical impact, and the symbolic meaning of national identity as a community-building element (also as a central element of the culture of remembrance). For national survival, too, it is a question of destiny with an existential and transcendental perspective, and the condition of survival is the unfolding and the perception of the unfolding of archaic-popular, folkloristic-mythological, cultural-literary, and poetic dimensions and perspectives of depth. His writings are almost permeated by the unquestioning demand of modernity and universality embodied in the Bartók model—following the confessionally enthusiastic words of Zoltán Bertha: the historical experience of collective vulnerability, the anxiety-inducing atmosphere of human and national oppression, the cataclysmic experience of national fragmentation, and the formulation of a desire for freedom and completeness that is both historically rooted and contemporary.
The focus of his interest is thus on literary currents and works related to paradigm-shaping and characteristic qualities of value (paying attention to authentic contemporary literary achievements, re-reading our forgotten or silenced values, and making efforts to encourage the translation and dissemination of specific works of Hungarian literature into foreign languages). By articulating the human and national, specific and universal, identity-preserving and identity-creating power of literature, he proclaims the perspectival authenticity of Hungarian literature and the Hungarian spirit in terms of national self-awareness. He does all this with reference to Sándor Karácsony, who says that being Hungarian is “not a matter of race or blood, but of the soul”, and in this spirit, he affirms that “spiritual nation” and “common inspiration” are at the heart of the cultural survival of the Hungarian nation.
Zoltán Bertha delivered his induction speech, titled Nemzet a csillagokban (lit. Nation in the Stars), at the Hungarian Academy of Arts on 15 May 2015. He stressed that the mutually presupposing culture, community, and nation do not reduce but create a totality of material and spiritual values. Instead of oppositions or “theoretical attempts at dismantling”, we should focus on the orchestration of the series, the harmony of common sounds, and the specific strength of the sounds themselves. “The linguistic articulation of the national awareness of Hungarian destiny is not expressed out of servitude, but on the contrary, out of the utmost aesthetic freedom and ideological dignity of artistic emanation”. And following Endre Ady’s admonition: instead of the sins, injustices, whims, and hypocrisies of Europe, “we need the expression of our own Hungarian character and spirit through the assertion of the true and eternal values of European culture”. Because our European task is to be human in Hungarian, and the condition for maintaining our cultural identity is ethnic and communal survival. One of the paradigmatic features of Hungarian culture and literature is precisely the artistic reflection of the constant struggle for identity and a sense of responsibility. “Multiple Trianon fragmentation, colonial authoritarian repression, revolutionary crushing, internal and external exile, emigration, dispersion, statelessness, and the terrible social and minority wreckage of the Hungarian nation, and its being forced into the diaspora: this is what has been marking and fragmenting the Hungarian nation’s calvary path even in recent times”, he said. In several of his studies and lectures, he also drew attention to the fact that the desire to survive and the search for a solution “as it may be” has been a striking feature of authentic national identity statements from János Arany to the present day, but the evangelical identification of the fate of the Hungarian people is not missing from the national and linguistic self-interpretations either.
In his appreciation speech for Zoltán Bertha’s Transylvanian Hídverő (lit. Bridge Builder) Prize (2009), József Máriás described the Attila József Prize-winning literary historian as one of the “consistent, knowledgeable, and faithful keepers of Transylvanian literature”—and rightly so. He recognised early the idealism and commitment he shared with László Németh, the professionalism and orientation he established with András Görömbei, and the heritage he had acquired and learned in the light and spirit of his schools in Sárospatak and Debrecen: “Transylvanian Hungarian literature is not only a source of aesthetic experience, but also a reflection of destiny and a mirror of fate that goes far beyond itself, a compendium of signs and cross-sections of destiny that is both uniquely Transylvanian and universally Hungarian.” And the turn towards Transylvania is not some kind of exodus from a country cut into stumps, but “the search for and the display of beacons that are the sources of the intellectual and spiritual enrichment of the entire Hungarian nation, the eloquent examples of the preservation of national consciousness, a torch that has been burning above the fate of the minority even in the darkest periods.” The focus of Zoltán Bertha’s interest is thus on the literary representations of Hungarian destiny and Hungarian existence beyond the borders— primarily in Transylvania—and the volumes of the last three and a half decades have also published the results of his research in this field. The call signs of “fate” and “Transylvanianism” also appear in the titles of the individual volumes: Sorstükör (lit. Fate Mirror), Sorsbeszéd (lit. Fate Speech), Sorsjelző (lit. Fate Sign), Sorsmetszetek (lit. Intersections of Fate), and Erdélyiség és modernség (lit. Transylvanianism and Modernity); the idea of intellectual commitment and responsibility is also present in the volumes entitled A szellem jelzőfényei (lit. The Beacons of Intellect) or Gond és mű (lit. Issue and Work).
“It is part of the specific character of Hungarian literature that for many centuries it has been closely intertwined with historicism, national-communal questions of destiny, the conscientious fate orientation of national self-awareness and self-consciousness, and the existential and linguistic self-affirmation of identity-preserving aspirations,” he writes. This characteristic is not a burden, as some consider it a factor that diminishes value, following the tradition established by Ady and László Nagy; rather, it is a quality that creates a special world of values, has its own poetic characteristics, and shapes language and aesthetics. “The specific thematic, conceptual, and existential character of Hungarian literature of fate and the human world of meaning expressed in it is an artistic, self-indulgent quality that is not reductive but an added dimension of humanity’s world culture. Genuine openness is not a disparagement but an appreciation of specific forms of quality and distinctive value traits”.
This appreciation, the study of the specific qualities and the characteristic value traits, the aesthetic and human character of Hungarian literature of fate, its strong orientation in shaping forms of existence, the intention to convey and mediate literary representations of national self-awareness and identity preservation are reflected in Bertha’s many excellent monographs and thematic volumes. It reveals that national self-consciousness and self-awareness constitute a qualitative framework of existence in which not only identity constructs can arch beyond the cognitive and aesthetic levels of self-realisation towards a kind of transcendent normative order, but also the aesthetic norms of canonisation (and sacralisation) can determine the interpretative context of works of art. In looking at the national literary paradigm, he also cites as a guide to expanding the framework of interpretation the principle of the metaphysics of national identity as expressed in communal self-expression, that the intellectual has a responsibility to reinforce historical memory and collective existence, and that aesthetics goes hand in hand with ethics, but cannot necessarily be separated (or disconnected) from public life. He borrows his content quotations from modern (postcolonial) critical discourses and canonised approaches in (poststructuralist) cultural studies, demonstrating that identity philosophy and ethical or collective self-awareness have retained their right to exist in contemporary literary theories, so that the argument for a fate-centred orientation is not alien to contemporary discourses. Rather, the studies argue that literary understanding or (national) self-knowledge through literature can be more authentically mediated through “fate metaphors”, together with embeddedness in cultural heritage.
In general, is there an authentic strategy for survival, and if so, “what kind of strategy for survival should be an adherence to an identity—a historical language and state of consciousness”? In exploring the values of Csángó [2] texts, Zoltán Bertha concludes that all literature that is a survivalist literature is a discourse of fate, that a focus on human dignity creates an ethical high ground, and that the example also contains a general message that significant aesthetic value is created by the combination of moral and artistic qualities. A healthy, self-identical sense of Hungarian identity and a natural sense of national belonging are also reinforced by the many nuances of contemporary literary endeavours in Upper Hungary (today mostly in Slovakia) and Transcarpathia, and the juxtaposition of the destiny metaphors also reveals that they are fraught with problems of existence and survival. In the creative everyday life, communities not only confront questions of written destiny, but also constantly attempt to rewrite it, since an important part of collective self-interpretation is not only memory, but also the constant redefinition of the present and perspective.
“Transylvanianism”—being at the centre of Zoltán Bertha’s work as a literary historian—becomes as much a defining question of destiny as collective self-knowledge in the universal Hungarian spirituality. László Németh, in answer to the question of “where a [...] minority destiny should seek its dignity”, said, “The right of the less to life is to be different”. And it is no coincidence that Bertha repeatedly refers to Sándor Makkai—the following quote, for example, can be found on the back cover of the volume Erdély felé (lit. Towards Transylvania) (2012), which contains his thematic essays, studies, and confessions: “The Hungarian spirit in Transylvania is destined to become a universally human spirit with great effort, in a small space of opportunity. Transylvania’s finest sons have always felt the need to rise and raise their people to heights from which they could see the towers of the palaces and bastions of Western culture, but from which they could also be seen by those who watched the frontiers of the progress of the human spirit” and “it would be desirable if the Hungarian spirit of Transylvania could and should be spoken of separately within the universal Hungarian spirituality only to use this name to designate the model of the healthy, vital and modern Hungarian spirit”.
Ultimately, Zoltán Bertha professes the same ideal—finding its authentic place in contemporary literary theoretical and critical discourse—“which directly links the specific minority with modern Europeanism and the moral universality of the human spirit, in the unconditional medium of existence and values of a fundamentally, essentially unified and indivisible national culture”. This ideal has guided the best of minority Hungarian literature, which has flourished in spite of the threats it has faced, and for Zoltán Bertha, turning towards Transylvania means turning towards “our broad and sustaining self-identity, our qualitative self” “with a will to remain, a faithful and vital hope that opens the future”. A sense of destiny that looks beyond national boundaries and artistic modernity work inseparably together—this is all the more validating of the desire for completeness shaped by (unmovable) loyalty and (inner) independence. As Gábor Ködöböcz, quoting József Eötvös, greets Zoltán Bertha: “only who has made the whole part of his heart can be part of the whole”.
[2016]
[1] Endre Ady: A muszáj-Herkules (lit. The destined-to-be Herkules) 1908
[2] The Csángós are ethnic Hungarians living mostly in the Romanian region of Moldavia.