Česká a maďarská „středoevropskost“ jako cesta ke „světovosti“?
Czech and Hungarian “Central Europeanness” as a Path to “Worldliness”?

Summary/Abstract: Central European literatures oscillate between the West and the East. However, their disadvantage is the limited reception of their native language, a discriminatory factor of “small” or “undeveloped” literature, which is true in the case of Czech and Hungarian. The path of Central European literature to global recognition thus remains difficult, because these authors cannot ignore the moment of globalization and the spread of language, i.e., the extra-literary stimuli discussed in current debates on world literature (Marko Juvan, Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, Peter Hajdu, etc.). It is precisely the exceptional relationship between global “unity” and national “otherness” that implies the diversity of conditions for intertextual and intercultural transfer, thus creating specifically local “mechanisms.” This was facilitated by the Central European intellectual atmosphere as a crossroads of various intellectual currents, in particular the multilingualism of the monarchy, the phenomenon of migration and social mobility, which together created a breeding ground for the dynamic development of polyglossia and heterotopia (Tihanov). In this context, Central Europe and its literary space can be perceived in several ways: 1. as a relatively loose grouping of national literatures linked only by cultural-historical relations or analogous history; 2. as a geographically and, to some extent, geopolitically precisely defined entity characterized, among other things, by cultural unity; 3. as the result of communicative acts that can be understood as the circulation of similar literary types and genres in this space, anchored directly in cultural and literary structures.

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