ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on works of Adolf Agai, Geza Csath, Viktor Cholnoky, Gyula Krudy and Frigyes Karinthy in an attempt to explore the city primarily in terms of its physical form. In Hungary, like elsewhere, a symbiotic relationship existed between the capital city and print journalism. The late nineteenth-century transformation of Budapest from Vienna's younger sibling and backwater into a large, modern capital had been accompanied by the proliferation of popular forms closely linked to the expansion of modern communication networks, mass media and professional journalism. The ensuing linguistic changes, including new lexical items and intonation, provided entertainment and colour for some readers, and unsettled purists. An atmosphere of unreality was combined with more concrete social observations by Cholnoky, an author for whom determinism and pantheism were of great interest and who, like Csath, also lived with addiction, in his case to alcohol. Krudy (1878-1933) is regarded as a pesti writer par excellence.
