The politician’s heart of stone

Jókai Mór’s political perspective and The Stonehearted Man’s Sons

Abstract

Over the past decades, the reception of Jókai Mór’s oeuvre has undergone significant transformation. In particular, The Baron’s Sons (lit. The Stonehearted Man’s Sons) has become a central object of renewed scholarly attention, despite having been extensively overread since the second half of the twentieth century. Earlier, partly cultic interpretations of the novel – as the “eternal epic” of the 1848–49 War of Independence, the literary expression of the nation’s heroic struggle, or a key instrument of patriotic education – have gradually been dismantled. Although the novel is still most often read through the perspective of 1848, both in scholarship and by the wider reading public, recent studies have approached it from increasingly diverse aesthetic and memory-political perspectives, challenging earlier rigid interpretive models.

Yet the dominant interpretive framework of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries neither justifies nor proves that the novel can only be read in this way. My study therefore proposes a radically different perspective, one that has not previously been applied to the text. I interpret the novel in relation to the political context of its composition: the turbulent public and party-political developments surrounding the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Jókai’s unusually active political role at the time, the election struggles of 1868–1869, and his relationship with Tisza Kálmán. From this perspective, the novel emerges not only as a narrative of the War of Independence, but also as a literary representation of political compromise and reconciliation.