To be born into exile

The paper deals with the roles the literary and political legacy of Kelemen Mikes (1690–1761) and his Letters from Turkey have come to play in Hungarian literary emigration. Unlike Mikes’s 19th century cult, which interiorized exilic experience inasmuch as it provided an allegory for domestic political claims, in the 20th century the consecutive exilic waves (1944–45, 1947–48, 1956) increasingly identified Mikes with a peculiar exilic consciousness, which they felt to mirror their own in various ways. Accordingly, the figure of Mikes was designed, mainly in essay and in poetry, to represent and reinforce a wide range of diverse political and literary self-images, from nationalism to apolitical aesthetic modernism, from the experience of the Hungarian writer as a castaway to that of genuine human foreignness