The year 2018 was a huge turning point of my life. On a hot sunny Wednesday I’ve left behind Budapest, most of my literary activities, and all the plans (some business ideas of smaller investments in the cultural field) I’ve ever had related to the Hungarian literary life. It was a short road to my hometowm, but a long way to liberating myself from the ever suffocating, symbolic prison of my own mother language.
Having the Hungarian language as my primary working tool both as literary critic and as owner of a small publishing house I was stuck in a country and society where, despite born and grown up there, never really fit in.
As a literary critic and scholar (I also left an unfinished PhD course behind) I specialized in historical novels, which is a serious genre in Hungarian culture. There has been, since the birth of the genre two centures ago, an overall sentiment, based on the historical experience of always being stuck between, and sometimes occupied by the neighbour empires, that the official history, the history of the winner is and always has been a lie, therefore the fiction, the creative product of writers can only tell the truth. (In a commerce-driven, popculture-influenced present day creative market it might seem a bit outdated concept, but the sentiment is definitely still there.) Studying historical fiction, especially those ones, written in the decades of 1980-1990 referring on the “linguistic turn” of historiography also gave me the opportunity to dive into the theories about history itself.
But my interest wasn’t always that serious and theoretical. I have been obsessed with period dramas since my early childhood. Looking back to those days, it’s quite fascinating how many British television series were aired. Watching these programs, I developed through the years and decades a stronger connection to the British history than to the Hungarian one.
Therefore when I sometimes playing with ideas of writing my own historical fiction I used to turn to British history.
And there was a moment around late 2019, when I looked around and realized, that most of the shows I was watching, also my own story ideas were set in the 18th century.
So I started taking seriously my special attention paid to this time period. And a few years later I created this website, that serves as an old fashioned blog, where I share content not necessarily in a structured/organized way, just about things I find worth sharing occssionally.