Revelation to John: the birth of modern Hungarian environmental literature

Abstract

János Térey’s poem-novel, “The Smallest Ice Age”, recounts the first one and a half years history of a minor climatic-environmental apocalypse. In the spring of 2019, volcanoes erupt, first in Iceland, later in Italy and then a global scale cooling begins, forcing contemporary societies into adaptation. The plot starts on Iceland, but the geographical focus is Budapest, and mostly Svábhegy in fact, the residential area of the contemporary Hungarian elite. The novel has more main characters, like Ágoston Mátrai, the late married career diplomat, the ex-restaurant owner upstart Győző Labancz, or the prime minister Zoltán Radák, who the shamanist assassins made the martyr of the never fulfilled contemporary Hungarian prosperity.

In my short study, I try to demonstrate and verify that climate change and the physical environment are just as active and determining characteristics of the plot as the human characters. With the method of word frequency and the content analysis, I tried to prove that the poem fits into an international literary current, called environmental literature, launched in the 1980s. Cheryll Burgess Glotfelty, the elaborator of the concept, did not consider the physical environment as the static background enduring human action, but as one of the main agents of the human ecosystem, which latter, in turn, can be contemplated holistically and function in an interactive manner.

Térey, however, also follows a tradition existing for a long time in Hungarian literature, that is, the interpretation of relationships to the physical environment. The Hungarian environmental-literary tradition had important milestones, like the poem of Sándor Petőfi’s Tisza, one of the optimistic program poems of the age of water regulation, or the pessimistic vision of the Eskimo scene in Imre Madách’s Tragedy of Man, an astonishingly contemporary vision from the 19th century. I consider János Térey's poem novel as the first representation of the (post)modern Hungarian environmental literature, which I hope will have many followers.