CLASSIC AND MODERNITY, “THERE” AND “HERE”: PERCEPTION OF THE OTHER THROUGH TRANSLATIONS AND ADAPTATIONS DURING A GENERATION CHANGE
Despite the fact that the number of Hungarians speaking (at least studying) the Russian language has decreased after the compulsory education in it has ceased, the attraction to Russian literature continues. My essay traces the perception of other, and not someone else's, literature through translations and adaptations during the change of generations. Foreign modernist works of literature teachers in Hungary to this day often choose "The Master and Margarita". Understanding such a complex plot is today quite difficult for students. Performances of "The Master and Margarita" in theaters invariably go on with great success - almost not a single theatrical season can do without it. The prestige, fame, special and iconic position of Bulgakov's novel is still evident in the Hungarian reception. Istvan Kamarash in his research (for example, "Follow me, reader") notes through his polls, questionnaires, how and how the novel "The Master and Margarita" is understood by different layers of the readership - decades later. Istvan Kamaras even in his “reading novel” shows, using the example of several fictitious Hungarian characters, our contemporaries, how “The Master and Margarita” influences their lives, how they continue it in action, how they become its co-authors. Some works of Hungarian writers in Russian reception are important moments in catalyzing the process of national self-understanding and self-knowledge of Russians. Such was, from the point of view of Alexander Melikhov, the autobiographical novel “Woman and War” by the writer Alain Polz, a Hungarian psychologist, about the rape of Hungarian women by Soviet soldiers. Crime and Punishment, The Master and Margarita, Chekhov, Aleksievich and Ulitskaya became spiritually Hungarian, both creatively and critically. How we look at them - a century or decades later; in the line of alternation of certain generations - in theaters, in new translations, from Hungary?