Prilog izučavanju problema vremena i prostora u Krudijevim pripovetkama o Sindbadu

Abstract

A very prolific Hungarian writer of his time, GyulaKrúdy (1878–1933), in his young years strongly influenced by the anecdotal tradition of his long-term idol Kálmán Mikszáth (1847–1910), found his authentic narrative voice by breaking up with this tradition and creating a more sensitive, lyrical prose style. He created a modern prose in which seemingly “nothing happens”. Krúdy’s first and most important alter ego, Sinbad the Sailor, wanders across the landscape of small Austro-Hungarian idyllic towns and villages, trying to reconstruct and re-live his own past, the feelings of passion and love he once felt for various women. This paper aims to contribute to the narrative and poetical treatment of time and space in Krúdy’s short stories about Sinbad. Through the nostalgic evocations of the past (which probably never really existed as described in this stories), through the illusion of small towns “frozen in the past”, Krúdy’s narrator creates an unusually and almost unnaturally big distance between his own time and the not so distant past he aims to describe. The distances in space, which his alter ego covers, though geographically relatively small ones, in the narrator’s portrayal get enormous, sometimes even grotesque dimensions. Scholars do agree, however, that these journeys tend to be temporal and inner ones.