La Chronique de 16h16
Citation: |
Hungarian fantasy is based on the pre-existing anglophone literary traditions and did not develop independently. Hungarian fantastic literature is varied but authors did not form a movement based on the common usage of the surreal and the fantastic, and did not have a mentor-student tradition. Fantastic elements may be significant in a writer’s work and even influences can be observed between authors and writings, but these were isolated examples, and therefore lacked the influence to start a boom of fantasy writings. That came with the abundance of translated foreign fantasy. Hungarian fantasy appeared in the footsteps of English fantasy literature in the beginning of the eighties, when Péter Kuczka (legendary editor of the Galaktika magazine) and other editors started to publish foreign fantasy within the intellectual and infrastructural boundaries of speculative literature (mostly science fiction). This boom was apparently independent from the autonomous artistic endeavors of the Hungarian fantastic literature of the 20th century. Hungarian fantasy publication at that time was mostly characterized by the monopoly of state owned publishers, the import of cultural goods, imitation of the anglophone trends in science fiction and fantasy, the national and local fan clubs and the amateur writing and publishing in the shadow of the professional book industry. The pioneers of Hungarian fantasy are mainly publications from the beginning of the eighties like the #45 issue of the Hungarian sci-fi magazine Galaktika (1982) that introduced one of the most popular subgenres: sword and sorcery. The translation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1981) became the standard of the popular high fantasy subgenre in Hungary. |