Disputed Past: The Friendship and Competing Memories of Anna Lesznai and Emma Ritoók
Disputed Past: The Friendship and Competing Memories of Anna Lesznai and Emma Ritoók

Summary/Abstract: This paper is part of a larger research project that explores the contributions of women intellectuals to the nationalistic, anti-liberal rhetoric of the early 1920s and the gendered aspect of the official ideology of the Horthy-era. The paper probes the connection of the personal and the political by exploring the shared history and competing memories of two woman writers, Anna Lesznai (1885-1966) and Emma Ritoók (1868-1945). The writers were friends and founding members of the Sunday Circle in 1915 but ended up in opposite camps during the 1918-19 revolutions. Ritoók, with Cécile Tormay, became a champion of the counter-revolution, contributing to its anti-Semitic ideology and rhetoric. Lesznai, the wife of Oszkár Jászi and a supporter of the Republic of Councils, was forced to flee and she spent the rest of her life in exile. Their diaries and autobiographical novels reflect the two writers’ diagonally opposing perspectives on their past and their shared intellectual and spiritual home, the Sunday Circle. The juxtaposition of their respective biographies and literary works offers insight into the process of re-interpreting and re-writing the past, whether for personal or political ends. It also illustrates the broader contours and irreparable breach between the Left and the nationalistic Right in Hungarian political and intellectual life after 1919.

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