Keď je fabulácia príťažlivejšia ako opis skutočnosti: Stopy Mórica Beňovského a Františka Tótha v kultúrnej pamäti strednej Európy

(When Fiction is More Appealing than the Description of Reality: Traces of Móric Beňovský and František Tóth in the Cultural Memory of Central Europe)

Stanislava Moyšová

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MOYŠOVÁ, Stanislava. When Fiction is More Appealing than the Description of Reality: Traces of Móric Beňovský and František Tóth in the Cultural Memory of Central Europe. In Historický zborník, Vol. 33, 2023, No. 1, pp. 36 – 52.

Abstract: In the 18th century, travelogues and memorialistic texts were of great interest to the reading public because, in the spirit of the Enlightenment approach to exploring the world, they brought new information and at the same time fulfilled the entertaining function of a literary text. Many of the travelogues became contemporary bestsellers, such as František Tóthʼs Memories of Turks and Tatars and Móric Beňovskýʼs Memoirs and Travels. Both travelogues are linked by the ethnicity of their authors and by some of the historical coordinates that intersected in their life paths. Nonetheless, these memoirs also differ in their literary characteristics, which are related not only to the use of stylistic devices in the French language in which they were written, but also to the degree of fabulation with which both authors approached the creation of the text. The study focuses to the question of how the literary approach to biographical material influenced the subsequent fates of archetypal figures of 19th and 20th century literature to whom both travelogues contributed or were directly inspired by.

Keywords: memorialistic prose; travelogue; fiction; literarity; literary influences.