Authors

Gabriella Mádi¹;  ¹ Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian College of Higher Education, Ukraine

Discussion

The territory of today's Transcarpathia has always been a multiethnic and multicultural world but politically belonged to Hungary until the end of the First World War. Following this, the territory became part of numerous different states, and its annexation to Czechoslovakia was the first among these. With this, Hungarians of this territory experienced being a minority for the first time, and the concept of Transcarpathia, the Hungarians of Transcarpathia, emerged. Based on the assumption that literature reflects reality in some form, literary works written in this era have a good chance of capturing the linguistic, cultural, and various other features of an emerging minority existence. And, by examining some literary works from the interwar period we can gain insight into the process of the formation of the minority existence. Studying the works of Tamás Mihály, a Transcarpathian Hungarian writer proved to be fruitful, since his novel Két part közt fut a víz [Water between Two Shores] is placed to a small Transcarpathian town, the writer’s hometown, after the First World War, while the works of Czech writer Ivan Olbracht capture the life of the Jewish and Ruthenian ethnic groups of the same period.Through the analysis of the prose of the two authors, we can observe how the changing social, political, economic, linguistic, and cultural conditions affected the members of various ethnic groups living in interwar Transcarpathia.