La imagen estereotipada de Hungría transmitida por Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Abstract

The stereotypical image of Hungary transmitted by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. This study focuses on stereotyped images and topics relating to Hungary and the Hungarians, as presented by the Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez in his travel book Oriente (The Orient), written in 1907 en route to the Ottoman Empire. Two chapters from part one of the book are about a stage in his journey that was a boat trip along the Danube, starting in Vienna and finishing in Budapest. This section of the book deals with the Hungarian Kingdom within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In these chapters the author displays a rudimentary knowledge of Hungarian history, and interprets the political and social reality of the country in a simplistic, topical, distorted way. The author describes the landscape and the historic monuments, as well as making a political analysis of the ambitions of Hungarians within the Empire. He compensates for his his lack of knowledge by offering his readers stereotyped images of what, in his time, would be seen as typically Hungarian. Nevertheless, he succeeds in foretelling the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and suggests this would happen as a consequence of an armed conflict, even though he cannot imagine how near in time it actually was, or the circumstances surrounding it.