Generation West

Nyugat is Hungary's most renowned literary, cultural and social magazine. It was published between 1908 and 1941, and directly affected literary and cultural modernism in that country. Contributors of Nyugat were part of the 'Great Generation' of talented artists and intellectuals who developed their works under the pressures of rapid political, social and cultural transformation in Hungary, and in turn I call them Generation West. My study conveys a story of Nyugat by focusing on three of its authors and their key works during the Hungarian modernist turn, namely Dezs¿ Kosztolányi, Margit Kaffka, and Antal Szerb. Their lives and works depict and epitomize the experience of Hungarian identity in which the notions of aestheticism, high culture and scholasticism are expressed through the the themes of language, nostalgia and commemoration. The book will appeal to specialists in Central European and Hungarian Modernist Studies, and to interdisciplinary scholars in literature, social and cultural theory, and social history, as well as to larger audiences interested in the fin-de-siècle Central European art, literary and coffeehouse culture, and print media.