ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two novels of private, domestic attempts to restore order in the city: Dezso Kosztolanyi's 1926 novel that opens with Bela Kun fleeing Hungary, and Zsigmond Moricz's 1936 satire of an unhappy middle-class marriage. This is followed by an analysis of competing public polemics of the interwar years, in particular the 1930s, that sought to redefine and reorient Hungarian culture, including the capital city, namely the official, statist discourses of unity, and the nepi-urbanus vita, the dispute between peasantist intellectuals and their critics of the 1930s. The two novels, by Kosztolanyi and Moricz, dwell in the unstable domestic environs of the officially celebrated Christian middle class. While the peasantists promoted radical change from below, their critiques of a non-Hungarian, alien Budapest often resonated with those emanating from establishment figures. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the anti-assimilation (Gyula Farkas) and pro-assimilation literary debates of the late 1930s.
