A significant part of István Széchenyi’s vast posthuma is his correspondence: between 4,800 and 5,000 letters are known to have been written by him. A significant proportion of these were written in the context of his public activities, especially in the 1830s and 40s, the most active period of his creative activity. The size of Széchenyi’s correspondence is comparable to that of Ferenc Kazinczy, and its importance in terms of content for historiography is invaluable. Its publication could also greatly advance our understanding of many aspects of contemporary Hungarian affairs.
Today, most of the Széchenyi letters can be found in two public collections in Budapest: The National Archives of the Hungarian National Archives and the Manuscript Archives of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but more important collections are held in the Manuscript Archives of the National Széchényi Library, the Danube Museum in Esztergom and the Storno House in Sopron. The fact that all this is still available to us today is mainly due to the fact that the Széchenyi family had kept an organised archive since the 18th century and that István Széchenyi himself kept his documents in an organised manner.
The publication of the letters began as early as the end of the 19th century: in 1889-1891 Béla Majláth published 3 volumes of letters, with Antal Zichy 1. These publications, which appeared in the early stages of the institutionalisation of historiography, are far from the modern standards of source citation: on the one hand, they contain numerous misreadings, and on the other, they contain few notes to help the user interpret the text. In the 20th century, in addition to scattered source citations, László Bártfai Szabó, who wrote the history of the Széchenyi family, published a significant number of letters. Between the two world wars, the series entitled Sources of the Recent History of Hungary (Fontes) was already planned, and Gyula Viszota and László Bártfai Szabó even began to publish the correspondence in a scholarly manner. However, the publication of the almost completed first volume was prevented by the siege of Budapest in 1944, and only a fragment of the manuscript survives in the form of a test print. However, the legacies of the two historians contain much of the preparatory work.)
In the second half of the 1980s, the Institute of Historical Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, under the directorship of György Ránki, started a project to publish the letters.
However, due to professional differences of opinion and the health of the two leading researchers (György Spira and György Bárány), the work on source publishing slowed down and then stopped in the early nineties.
In the last decades, Széchenyi’s letters have been published in the context of document collections, mostly translated into Hungarian, and mostly published earlier. The most recent and most significant of these is the compilation of 260 letters in Hungarian, edited by András Oplatka and published in 2014.
In spite of the foregoing, it can be said that the biggest white spot in the Széchenyi publication is the correspondence. The task of filling this gap is important not only for the autonomous needs of historiography. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which was initiated by the “greatest Hungarian” and supported by a considerable private donation, and the Institute of Historical Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which was still part of it at the time of the start of the present project, also fulfils a moral obligation by publishing the entire correspondence in a scholarly manner. The National Research, Development and Innovation Office, which has been supporting the project since 2017, has provided an essential basis for fulfilling this obligation.
A particular difficulty in publishing the Széchenyi correspondence is its linguistic diversity. The letters were written in German, Hungarian, French and English, and sometimes even the same letter showed mixed language usage. At times, even experts with a thorough knowledge of the writing style and the language of the period were challenged by Széchenyi’s handwriting and his particular use of language. The frequent misreadings and the scattered or absent notes mean that all the surviving manuscript letters (including those previously published in print) have to be used to carry out all the usual tasks of critical editions.
This modern edition of the correspondence, which aims to be text-critical and complete, makes the invaluable source material easily accessible to historians. It is not only researchers of Széchenyi studies in the narrow sense, and not only researchers of the relevant decades, who can usefully consult the vast amount of primary sources. The correspondence will also provide an inexhaustible source of information not only for Széchenyi studies in the strict sense, but also for many other branches of history (political, ideological, social, economic histories) as will for more narrowly defined subfields (urban history, history of technology, history of mentalities, etc.). It is hoped that the publication of these letters will also find a positive response among an educated readership interested in history.
We believe it is only natural that Széchenyi’s correspondence will have to be placed on the shelves of libraries alongside previously published volumes of his oeuvre, but we will also make it available in an online database to meet the needs of today’s researchers and readers. For practical reasons, the online publication will also precede the print version in time: the letters, which have been critically processed and annotated, will be successively added to the public repository, sometimes together with a digital photograph of the original document. The website, which has been specially developed for this purpose, is intended to meet the strict professional requirements of scientific research and to make accessible to the interested reader the part of Széchenyi’s oeuvre that is perhaps most accessible to the modern man.
The letters are transcribed from the original manuscript, if available. If we have only a copy or a communication of Széchenyi’s letter, it is considered the basic text. In the case of a letter for which we have both the manuscript and/or the copybook example and the letter sent, we always consider the letter sent as the basic text. If several drafts of a letter have survived, the later one is taken as the basis for the transcription.
In transcribing the letters, we strive to be faithful to the text: we do not correct or mark spelling or grammatical errors in any of the languages used by Széchenyi, except cases of misunderstanding, where we make critical comments. For all other punctuation (commas, semicolons, underlining, drawings), we endeavour to reproduce it as it appears in the manuscript and as far as the word-processing software allows. Letters are accompanied by two types of annotation: a critical footnote, which traces the genesis of the text and its changes, and a content endnote, which explains the information that appears in the letter.
Our research is based on manuscripts that are held in public collections and are available for research, but given Széchenyi’s wide range of activities and his equally colourful social life, we can find letters written by him wherever he went, so we assume that there are still some in private hands. Thus, if we learn of a new letter, we will be able to add it to our database, making Széchenyi’s letters available to everyone in one place.
If you have any questions or comments, please contact us at: Czinege.Szilvia@abtk.hu
Szilvia Czinege – Zoltán Fónagy
Our work is supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (K 125364, FK 146398) by the Institute of History of the HUN-REN Humanities Research Centre and by the 200th anniversary of the foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Library, the MTA 200 celebration.
