Jókai’s ambivalent attitude towards the “Tót (Slovak) people”: one of his most repulsive characters was modelled after Ľudovít Štúr, while he spoke of other Slovaks with the highest praise.
As Attila Merva has pointed out in several studies, Mór Jókai’s relationship with the Slovak community was always characterised by a kind of duality. Generally speaking, he rejected violent Magyarisation, and he spoke in superlatives about those Slovaks who sided with Kossuth and even actively fought for “Hungarian freedom” themselves. On the other hand, he considered the leading figures of the Slovak national movement, especially Ľudovít Štúr and Jozef Miloslav Hurban and their followers , who took up arms against the Hungarians in the revolution and war against the Habsburgs, as traitors and enemies of Hungary.
Jókai’s model Slovak
The fact that he never forgave the latter is well illustrated by the novel Those Who Die Twice, published decades after the War against the Habsburgs. The main antagonist in the episodes set in 1848/49 is Zsiborák, modelled after Jozef Miloslav Hurban, leader of the Slovak Free Forces fighting on the side of the Austrian imperial troops. In contrast with him there is Ferenc Illavay, whose character is based on the Slovak-speaking nobleman Lajos Beniczky from near Besztercebánya/Banská Bystrica.
Jókai became friends with the former revolutionary Home Guard colonel and government commissioner in 1862. He led his army of insurgents, largely made up of Slovaks, in several successful battles against the Austrian imperial troops invading from Galicia and the Hurbanist Czech and Slovak volunteers. After the fall of the War of Independence, he was sentenced to death, but was eventually pardoned and imprisoned in Kufstein for eight years. In 1864 he took part in a plot aiming to restore Hungary’s independence and was once again imprisoned. He was released after the Compromise, but his dead body was found in the Danube a few months later. Presumably he had been the victim of a political assassination.
So for Jókai, Beniczky was probably the “model Slovak”: although he did not deny his origins, and even accepted a shared fate with the simple “Tót people” during the revolution, he could only imagine the existence and development of the Slovak ethnicity within the modern, liberal framework of a free, independent Hungary, and he successfully crushed the political actions of the “pan-Slavic agitators” – Štúr and his companions.
Jókai’s Slovak anti-hero
Jókai, the uncrowned king of the Hungarian novel, who was born 200 years ago. The character of Lutheran pastor and poet Ján Kollár in Sorrowful Days, was modelled after the fanatic educator and, as we would call him today, activist, Tamás Bodza. In fact, he is a caricature-like figure, a mockery of Slovak nationalists, who, while still a student in Bratislava, ‘filled his soul with bitter hatred for everything Hungarian’, and who believes that all the peoples of Europe had Slavic ancestors, and that all the place names of Hungary are of Slavic origin. The novel is set in 1831, the year of the cholera uprising, when Bodza is stirring up a rebellion and, of course, looking to Moscow for help. Jókai thus identified with the propaganda of the government circles in Budapest, which claimed throughout most of the 19th century that all Slovak nationalist aspirations were in fact nothing more than the result of pan-Slavic agitation.
Between 1835 and 1837, Jókai attended the same Lutheran lyceum in Bratislava as Bodza in the novel, and which his predecessor Ľudovít Štúr was also attending at the same time as Jókai. They may have even met, although there is no evidence for this. However, it is a fact that later, in the mid-1840s, Jókai, who was at the time studying to become a lawyer, studied law with Alexander Boleslavín Vrchovský (in Hungarian sources, Sándor Wrhovszky), who had been Štúr’s mentor and role model, and who in the mid-1830s began to organise a nationalist student movement within the walls of the Lutheran lyceum, following the example of the Polish and Czech nationalist movements. In the instructions he wrote to the members of the movement, Jókai’s later boss and landlord, the revolutionary-minded national revivalist, articulated much more radical aspirations than educating the people or the cultivation of the mother tongue: ‘Do not teach our people eternal patience, as our priests have done so far, but encourage them to throw off the yoke of violence and oppression.’
Štúr’s role model – Jókai’s mentor
After all student associations in Hungary had been banned by the Habsburgs, Vrchovský and some of his associates founded a secret society in 1837 with a similarly radical revolutionary spirit, called Vzájomnosť (Mutuality). Although it was not long-lived either, its importance is undeniable, as it laid the foundations for the later achievements of the blossoming national movement. Vrchovský is also credited with being one of the first to suggest the creation of a pan-national cultural, scientific and political institution, the Matica slovenská.
However, after the ardent young man took up a job as a lawyer in Pest in the 1840s, he gradually distanced himself from the Slovak national movement, although he never completely broke with it. Decades later, for example, when the formation of the Matica slovenská finally became a reality, he donated 200 forints to the cultural association. Here we would like to draw attention to an interesting parallel: as a Member of Parliament, Jókai was the only one who agreed with Viliam Paulíny-Tóth’s proposal that Matica slovenská should receive the same amount of financial support as other cultural organisations in Hungary.
It is difficult to say how aware the young jurate Jókai was of his mentor’s earlier radical ideas – which later inspired him to portray the leading figures of the Slovak national movement with such avid sarcasm. But as historian József Demmel has pointed out, their relationship was not only professional but they were also friends. Indeed, Jókai not only spent his internship in Vrchovský’s office in Pest, but also lived in his house during this time. According to Mikszáth’s biography of Jókai, it was at this time that he decided to choose a career as a writer instead of a lawyer, and his boss enthusiastically supported him in this.
Eventually, their relationship became so close that Jókai introduced the lawyer to his family, who in turn entrusted his sister to the Jóikai family, so that she could learn Hungarian in Komárom, in addition to learning about running a household. Vrchovský attended the Komárom lyceum with the same purpose in the early 1820s, but sources say that he never managed to master the Hungarian language perfectly.
One of the initial impulses for Jókai’s literary career, this former hotheaded national revivalist unfortunately saw an unglorious end. After it came to light that he had embezzled the funds entrusted to him by the Slovak Lutheran congregation in Pest, he disappeared in 1865, probably throwing himself into the Danube. His death was commemorated in a poem by Jókai, by then a famous writer.
As a final remark, it is perhaps worth noting that on 15 March 1848 Jókai, together with Petőfi and the other young revolutionaries of the Pilvax circle proclaimed radical democratic social and political principles very similar to those of the young Vrchovský.
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