Modern Hungarian Culture and the Classics

"Pâeter Hajdu examines the cultivation of the Classics as an intellectual framework and crucial ingredient of the western aspect of Hungarian national identity. This book approaches the relationship of modern Hungarian culture to classical heritage from the various viewpoints of identity politics, education, translation history, scholarship, and its impact on literature. When the Hungarian nation-building project developed ideas of national identity, it necessarily incorporated the historical narrative according to which the Hungarians arrived at their current homeland in the Middle Ages, and only later did it adopt European culture. The duplicity of a mostly imagined Asian, pagan, barbaric or nomadic culture, and a Western, Christian, civilized identity, deeply rooted in European culture, has played and continues to play a role in the Hungarian discourse"--