In this paper I will provide a brief overview of early twentieth-century, Hungarian
history in order to examine how anti-Semitism and anti-modernism influenced modernism’s
reception in fin- de- siècle Hungary. In 1908 the most significant Hungarian literary
review of the twentieth century was founded by Hugo Ignotus, Miksa Fenyő and Ernő
Osvát, all of whom were assimilated Jews. The journal’s title, Nyugat, [‘West’] unambiguously
marked the editors’ orientation and program of accelerating cultural modernization
by reviewing and translating Western European works. For conservatives this aim of
transferring aestheticism, late Symbolism and decadence was regarded as an attack
against the nation’s patriotic traditions. Anxiety surrounding the Jewry’s purported
“failed assimilation” was compounded by the fear that a foreign culture would have
an undue impact on Hungarian literature. It is my aim to analyze both the first and
second wave of modernism in Hungary so as to reveal the analogous relationship between
the argument that Western European modernism is alien to the Hungarian literary style
and language and the anti-Semitic argument stating that assimilation of the Jews is
superficial.
