Novel
Fanni hagyományai
Not translated into English
József Kármán · 1794
Opening lines
Ó, be jó itt!... Veteményeskertünk ajtaja megett, melyen a gyümölcsösbe járnak, a sövényt vastagon befutotta a komló, amely általfonódik egy szép kökényfácskára, és ezen nyájas boltozat alatt áll az én kis asztalkám, amelynél oly jóízű az olvasás.
Oh, how good it is here!... Behind the gate of our vegetable garden, through which one goes into the orchard, hops have thickly overgrown the hedge, twining round a pretty little blackthorn, and under this friendly vault stands my little table, at which reading is so pleasant.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from mek.oszk.hu
Synopsis
A stranger sends the editorial office of a journal the diary and letters of a young girl from a provincial noble house. Fanni has lost her mother; her father, a hard man, has remarried, and the new wife has no tenderness for her. She befriends a baron's widow, to whom she writes her confidences. At a country ball she meets the young T-ai Józsi, who shares her love; but gossip reaches her father, who rejects this suitor without fortune.
Context
The text appeared in Uránia in 1794 and 1795, under the title “Fanni. Daily notes and letters”, without the author naming himself. An introduction presents these pages as sent in by an unknown person: the journal's readers believed it to be a real diary, and Ferenc Toldy, who published Kármán's writings in 1843 and so drew him out of half a century of oblivion, also took the story to be authentic. Critics have since debated at length the novel's debt to Goethe's Werther, whose intimate form it takes up, with a heroine in place of the hero.
Who it is for
A short novel made up of diary pages and letters, in the sentimental style of the late eighteenth century; no French or English translation has been located.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the major work of Hungarian sentimentalism and as the first psychological novel in the language.