Csokonai és Debrecen

The paper asks how the literary legacy of Mihály Csokonai Vitéz (1773–1805) has been handed down: why did Csokonai’s legacy remain so intact that it is still accessible to modern research (a significant part of the material is currently housed in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), and how did Csokonai become such a timeless marker of Debrecen’s urban space and local identity in the 19th century and later? The answer lies in the fact that there were people in Csokonai’s immediate Debrecen environment (his family and circle of acquaintances) who, immediately after his death, considered it important to preserve his intellectual legacy. The role played by Csokonai’s mother in this process should be highlighted. Later, after his mother’s death, there was a person (László Gaál) who not only preserved his own memories, but also passed on Csokonai’s legacy and his own memories to the persons and institutions of the slowly centralising scientific community in Pest, who were able to shape the outlook and canon. In other words, the survival of Csokonai’s legacy and its emphatic inclusion in the literary historical canon was the result of the cooperation of local and central factors. This did not mean, however, that Csokonai was discovered by the city of Debrecen itself: the discrepancy between the preservation of manuscripts and the preservation of the Csokonai-related material world is striking. While the former reaches the most important places of the institutionalised literary memory almost as fast as lightning, the musealisation of objects does not follow, and the Csokonai Circle (Csokonai Kör), which was founded in Debrecen only much later, in 1890, vainly tried to collect such relics, but could hardly find anything that could be authentically connected to Csokonai.