Mór Jókai was born in 1825 in Komárom (present-day Komárno, Slovakia) into the Jokay family, ennobled in the 17th century; in 1848 he changed the aristocratic spelling (ending in -y) to the more democratic form. Following law studies at the Calvinist colleges of Kecskemét and Pápa (where he befriended Petőfi and achieved his first literary success), Jókai moved to Pest (1845), where he soon gave up the legal profession and became a full-time writer. His early short stories and his first novel (Hétköznapok, “Ordinary days”, 1845-46) were Romantic crime narratives in historic or exotic settings, written with extravagant fancy; they were favourably received and earned him a place among the young literati gathering around Petőfi in Café Pilvax. In 1847 he became the editor of the literary weekly Életképek, the organ of “The Tens”, devotees of French Romanticism.
In the 1848 revolution, Jókai took active part, helping to formulate the “Twelve Points” of political demands. That summer he married the leading dramatic actress of the era, Róza Laborfalvy – an alliance which cost him the friendship of Petőfi and the support of the Jókay family. Deeply immersed in political journalism and national propaganda, he followed the revolutionary government on its retreat from Budapest, and by mid-1849 hid in an eastern village under an assumed name.
Pardoned and back in Budapest by 1850, Jókai returned to the literary scene. Working to a tight daily schedule, he published profusely in a wide variety of genres (novels, short stories, poetry, journalism, drama, etc.) and participated as publisher, editor or journalist in a number of periodicals. He usually wrote at least a novel per year, and, well aware of the commercial opportunities offered by serialization, thus pioneered the introduction of the feuilleton novel in Hungary. His popularity and output earned him the epithet “the nation’s great storyteller” and a degree of affluence in spite of constant financial turmoil.
Jókai established his wide popularity with his 1850 volume of short stories about revolutionary events, Forradalmi és csataképek 1848 és 1849-ből (“Sketches of battle from the Hungarian War of Freedom”), in which he set about, as he put it, “mythologizing” the recent past: while remaining true to fact, to produce an idealized narrative in which the post-revolutionary Hungarian public could find comfort. Writing “mythologies” of Hungarian life remained the defining characteristic of his work henceforth, until a disillusionment that set in in the 1870s. Two successful early novels, Egy magyar nábob (“A Hungarian nabob”, 1853-54) and its sequel Kárpáthy Zoltán (1854), portrayed aristocratic figures allegorically as the leaders of a social, economic and moral renewal of the nation. Under the pen name Kakas Márton (“Martin the Rooster”) he conducted an immensely popular series of political satires in his own humorous weekly Üstökös (“The comet”, founded in 1858).
Jókai followed the style of Eugène Sue, Dumas père and Victor Hugo in presenting exaggerated characters in romance-like plots; while this melodramatic formula was found wanting in literary gravitas by some critics, it made Jókai the undisputed ruler of the Hungarian novel scene up to the late 1870s. From the 1870s he published a few novels in the manner of Jules Verne. From the 1880s he undertook some parodies of naturalism and some metafictional or literary experiments.
His larger-than-life realism exercised a formative influence on the political, social, geographical and emotional imagination of his readers. His rendition of the Hungarian Reform Age (1825-48) and the revolution of 1848-49 determined the subsequent collective remembrance of that period. Jókai, who claimed that Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe was the first novel he had read, published historical novels throughout his career, simultaneously raising a national-historical consciousness and commercially exploiting the public interest in national history. As he put it in 1867 in his memorial speech on Miklós Jósika (1794–1865), his Hungarian predecessor in the genre, this type of historical novel should present “national figures as they must have lived, spoken, acted; archetypes of ancient Hungarian characteristics”, calculated to make readers feel that “these are truly ours, we see and understand them, we feel with them, we are captivated by them, and the times and spaces to which they carry us are indeed the ages of our own story, the countenance of our own homeland”. In addition to his own historical novels, Jókai also published popular histories: A magyar nemzet története regényes rajzokban (“A history of the Hungarian nation in novelistic sketches”, 1854), repeatedly reissued and expanded until 1902, came to be used in general education. In later life, Jókai contributed historical and archeological information to the enormous panorama painting on the Magyar settlement in Hungary, executed by Árpád Feszty (his grandson-in-law) for the millennial celebrations of that event (1894). A talented painter himself, Jókai also suggested another grandiosely sized painting on the same theme (1893) by Mihály Munkácsy. Munkácsy’s work reflects Jókai’s political intentions (the chieftain Árpád appears not as a conqueror but as a dignified and benign leader dispensing just rule to the native Slavs); in addition, Jókai himself appears in the composition in the guise of a Hungarian chief on horseback next to Árpád.
National zeal is a constant feature of Jókai’s oeuvre. While he acknowledged the ethnically mixed nature of the kingdom’s population, and the existence of national movements besides the Hungarian one, the social elite he envisioned consisted exclusively of Hungarians. (Many of his later novels also celebrate the Székelys, a Hungarian community in east Transylvania.) His 1857 essay A magyar irodalom missiója stipulates that “the mission of Hungarian literature” is to gain recognition and affection for Hungarian culture abroad and among the country’s non-Hungarian minorities. One of his emblematic novels, Az új földesúr (“The new landlord”, 1862-63), narrates how a retired Austrian army officer (allegedly portrayed after the head of the Austrian army in 1849), freshly settled in Hungary, is reconciled with, and assimilated into, the peculiar mentality of his Hungarian environment.
Jókai was also obsessed with collecting and showcasing national characteristics. Receiving suggestions of plot, scene and character from his audience on a daily basis, he saw himself a late successor to the ancient Greek rhapsodes who digest and condense in their work the collective oral histories of the people. As the editor of the Üstökös weekly, Jókai asked for readers’ contributions of anecdotes, which he published in the journal and in the volumes of A magyar nép adomái (“The anecdotes of the Hungarian people”, 1856; 14 editions by 1914). In these anecdotes, on which he relied also in the fragmented narrative structure of his novels, Jókai saw the expression of a peculiar national humour; his inaugural address to the Hungarian Academy, A magyar néphumorról (“On Hungarian folk humour”, 1860), presented humour as the expression of a Hungarian Volksgeist.
Jókai’s nationalist sentiments are rarely stridently antagonistic. While his key concern is the celebration of national culture and patriotism (as in És mégis mozog a föld…, “And even so the earth moves”, 1872, on early 19th-century nation-builders), he took the multi-ethnicity of Hungary as a given. In his tales, the enemies of Hungary’s national development are usually nationally aspecific (the international financial sphere or Catholic Ultramontanism). The majority of his works were simultaneously published in German and Hungarian, and Jókai took part in the German literary life of Pest-Buda both as editor and entrepreneur.
Harmony between the various ethnicities of the Hungarian Kingdom (albeit under a Magyar primacy) remained his life-long ambition. In the postscript he was asked to write for the state-sponsored History of the Hungarian Nation (10 vols; published 1894-98 for the Millennial Celebrations), Jókai urged social and ethnic reconciliation allowing the various nations of the Dual Monarchy “without disowning their respective nationalities, [to] meet in a shared temple of philanthropy, patriotism and loyalty to the king”.
As this passage indicates, Jókai had by then turned from his initial democratic and nationalist radicalism to Habsburg loyalty. He played a leading role in the state-driven cultural-geographic encyclopedia of the Habsburg lands, Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (1886-1902), instigated by Jókai’s idol, Crown Prince Rudolf (and hence known as the Kronprinzenwerk), acting as the editor of the Hungarian-language version. The Kronprinzenwerk attempted to revive the notion of “imperial patriotism” (originally propounded by Josef von Hormayr in the 1810s) uniting the Dual Monarchy’s various nations, religious and ethnic groups in a joint monarchical loyalty. Jókai wrote several chapters for the volume on Hungary (language, historical origin, mythology, humour, superstitions and folk poetry). Similarly in the service of the Habsburg cult was his 1872-74 utopian novel A jövő század regénye (“A novel of the next century”); it drew equally on the contemporary utopian genre of Zukunftskrieg, his admiration of the Székelys and the myths of ancient Hungarian history: the plot is set in late-20th-century Hungary under the rule of Árpád Habsburg. This cult is silhouetted against Jókai’s evident fear of Pan-Slavism, represented in some of his future-war novels by the world-colonizing army of an anarchist-nihilist Russia.
In the later part of his career, Jókai enjoyed considerable international fame. His works were published in French, German and English (and were reportedly enjoyed by Bismarck and Queen Victoria). His greatest success was the Europe-wide triumph of Johann Strauss’s operetta, Der Zigeunerbaron (1885), the libretto of which was based on his rustic-idyllic novella.
In the 1890s, the 50th anniversary of Jókai’s literary debut was celebrated with great public éclat. As a homage from the nation, his collected works were published in a sumptuous hundred-volume edition, with among the subscribers the Emperor Franz Joseph and his wife Elisabeth (“Sissi”, reputedly the greatest fan of his novels). Nationwide celebrations followed – clouded only by the scandal that Jókai in 1899 married a young Jewish actress, Bella Nagy, fifty years younger than he. Jókai died in Budapest in 1904.
