Noszty Feri alakváltozásai
Metamorphoses of Feri Noszty

Summary/Abstract: The ethical evaluation of the protagonist in Kálmán Mikszáth’s novel The Young Noszty’s Affair with Mary Tóth (1907) is quite ambiguous, and this ambiguity was heightened when the author rewrote the text of the serial publication for book format. The novel offers a reading scheme of a Romantic story with a handsome guy falling in love at first sight, but it seems to withdraw this possibility of interpretation at the end. Stage and film adaptations of the novel after WWI happily accepted the Romantic interpretation of the plot, and presented Noszty as a perfect hero. Adaptations after WWII, however, tended to morally disapprove the protagonist’s behaviour, and Andor Kellér, who wrote a biography of a man presented as not only the model of the protagonist, but as the same person, transformed his figure into an anti-hero, a criminal of disgusting habits. Mikszáth’s readers seem to have been unable to accept the ambiguous attitude of the novel; they made their moral judgements absolutely clear.

• Details
• Contents