Autopsychografia Eleméra Táboryego. Od literackiej interpretacji snów po psychomedyczną diagnozę nowoczesności

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the first modernist novel by the Hungarian writer Mihály Babits entitled Caliph the Stork (The Nightmare). The author points to the multidirectional character of psychomedical knowledge dissemination in the Hungarian modernist literature at the beginning of the 20th century. A close reading of Babits’ first novel in the light of psychoanalytic theories (especially Sigmund Freud’s and Otto Gross’s) and psychiatric theories of the split personality (developed primarily in France, then in the United States and Great Britain) allows the author to shed new light on Hungarian modernist literature and its relationship with the modern psychomedical discourses. In the article, Babits’ novel is interpreted as a space for creative appropriation and reinterpretation of the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century discourses on the human psyche.