Bilingual Authors, Multilingual Printing Presses and ‘Informal Capital’: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This chapter introduces the cultural map of the twin cities of Pest-Buda, the early nineteenth-century administrative and cultural capital of Hungary, which began to assume an identity as an important node for multilingual and multiethnic cultural production after a long period of marginal existence. Inhabited predominantly by Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Greeks and Slovaks, Pest-Buda acted as a focus for print and theatrical culture in a region where secular literacy had been intermittent, interrupted and institutionally weak. The chapter maps out the ethnic, linguistic and religious affiliations of its inhabitants, with particular regard to the development of cultural production in languages of international circulation and in local vernaculars. The analysis of the multilingual book printing activities of the Buda University Press considers encyclopaedists who explored the linguistic and historical origins of different Central European ethnic collectivities. Pest-Buda also acted as the setting for the rise of Hungarian and Serbian theatre and as a site for the publication of literary and scholarly magazines in Serbian, Hungarian and Slovak. Through the example of the bilingual Serbian–Hungarian poet and literary mediator Mihály/Mikhail Vitkovics, the chapter illustrates the power and potential of this literary node in fostering the articulations of a territorial sense of hungarus identity and of strong ethno-linguistic affiliations. By highlighting such complexities, the chapter calls for a reconsideration of separate and parallel national literary histories through the prism of multilingualism and transnational hybridity.