METAPHORICS AND OTHER FEATURES OF MIKLÓS MÉSZÖLY’S LANGUAGE


2022. № 1 (31), 247-254

University of Debrecen

Abstract:

The prose of the famous Hungarian writer of the mid-20th century Miklós Mészöly is worthy of the attention of Russian readers. Only his short novel “High School” is trans- lated into Russian, which is usually read through the prism of the poetics of absurdity, new realism and parable allegorization. The short novel can not be attributed to the genre of reporting of the 1950s, as it shows a critical attitude to popularization of the achieve- ments of the national economy. Moreover, the realistic description of both the life and training of birds on the falcon farm, and the relationship between the characters and animals, is imbued with strong metaphoricity. This means that the subjective-descriptive method, objective narrative collides with abstract imagery, giving the depicted world special poetic depth. A characteristic of Mészöly’s idiostyle is that he uses not the every- day vocabulary of colloquialism, but a lot of jargon, rare and outdated words for the best presentation of provincial life in nature. In his story you can see diff erent kinds of birds, but the main thing is not scientifi c accuracy, but the creation of unique poetic metaphors and comparisons, including “high school”. Both the bird and animal world and the human  world are divided into diff erent levels, and each of them is endowed with new semantic connotations, which are based on the Hungarian tradition. The article examines some important components of the fi gurative level of the novel text, as well as the motives for arrival and departure.