Europe as an extended Greece: Travelogues by Karl Kerényi and Gábor Devecseri

Abstract

This study is dealing with the travel notes and diaries in Hungarian and German from the 1950s and 1960s. The two examined authors are Karl (Károly) Kerényi (1897–1973) and Gábor Devecseri (1917–1971). Kerényi’s travel notes and diaries reveal the thoughts of a very wide-ranging scholar. Devecseri’s volume Crickets of Epidaurus, Sing (Epidauroszi tücskök, szóljatok) is actually a collection, condensed into the history of four trips: three to Greece and one to Italy. The present study examines the characteristics of these two perspectives, namely, the Western vs. the Eastern, the classic scholar’s vs. the scholarly poet’s using the contexts of travelogues and cultural memory as a point of departure. While for Kerényi, travel is a natural way of life, Devecseri travels and uses his idea based on his reading experiences as starting points. In the texts of both authors, we are confronted with both the archival and the current way of life of cultural memory.

Keywords

• hungarian literature
• travelogues
• greece
• cultural memory
• karl kerényi
• gábor devecseri