Starost i razaranje idile u romanu "Daljine" Magde Sabo

Abstract

In her novel Iza’s Ballad, Magda Szabó focuses on the relationship between the two main characters, the young doctor Iza and her mother Etelka, who start living together again after many years. Immediately after her father’s death, Iza decides to sell their family home in a small town in Hungary and takes her mother to her apartment in Budapest, which turns out to be a wrong decision, and just deepens the generation gap and misunderstanding between them. Having gotten used to the peaceful life in a small town, Etelka finds it extremely difficult to adapt to the new circumstances, and the misplacement she experiences eventually leads to fatal consequences. The aim of this paper is to analyze the complexity of the generation gap between the two main characters, and then to focus on Etelka’s inability to start a new life after the death of her husband. For analyzing that aspect of the novel, Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes proved to be very applicable, as Etelka’s anxiety about starting anew can be interpreted as the destruction of the idyll, i.e., her idealized version of the life she had in the town where she spent her youth and where she got old.