Sándor (Alexander) Rózsa, the most famous of the outlaw leaders who roamed the Hungarian plains in the decades before and after the failed 1848–1849 independence struggle, has lived on in Hungarian legend, song, folklore, literature, and film as a symbol of peasant cunning and resistance to an unjust social and political order. In this monograph, Shingo Minamizuka, author of several Japanese books on Hungarian history and the economic history of Eastern Europe, marshals thorough research in period newspapers and local and national archives to sort myth from reality and to analyze Rózsa in light of Eric Hobsbawm's seminal concept of the “social bandit.” Minamizuka provides a solid sense of the social, economic, and legal structure of the feudal and later semi-feudal society of the period and, in particular, of the region around the southeastern Hungarian town of Szeged where Rózsa was active.
After more than a decade on the lam following his escape from his first imprisonment in 1836–1837, Rózsa, in exchange for a pardon from Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian revolutionary leader, agreed in 1848 to form local outlaw bands into a quasi-guerrilla unit in the independence war. The heart of the monograph traces this development, which elevated Rózsa's status from that of “mere” bandit to actor in the centuries-long Hungarian freedom struggle and was much romanticized in later literature and popular memory. The narrative also covers Rózsa's two later trials, the records of which, along with the accompanying press coverage, constitute the greater part of the archival material the author has used.
The final chapters parse the afterlife of Rózsa in Hungarian literature and folklore, endeavoring to assess the truth of the legends that circulated well into the postwar period. The book closes with a brief discussion of Hobsbawm's idea and its extension by others to Western European, Latin American, and African contexts. It concludes that Rózsa and other outlaws constituted a form of “social power” that countered the “official power” of local elites and political structures (204), but that, with the economic and security changes of the post-Bach liberalization period and, finally, the newfound political legitimacy of Hungarian autonomous rule after 1867, the space for such a role disappeared.
Although providing an illuminating account of a colorful figure known to every Hungarian and of the social context that produced him and showing an impressive diligence in tracking down extant archival and even privately held documents and manuscripts, this volume is frustrating in many ways. Minamizuka quotes liberally from fictionalized and quite lively accounts by canonical Hungarian writers Mór Jókai, Gyula Krúdy, and Zsigmond Móricz and painstakingly juxtaposes them with the available documentary evidence; but in the absence of any methodological discussion of sources and the status of resources such as literature and folklore, it is often unclear on what basis he states that a particular incident is “confirmed” to have actually taken place or not. Certain contemporary press accounts seem to be held less reliable than others, without any discussion of the nature of the publications, media coverage of crime and trials, or of the truth-value of official trial records. Finally, the text is plagued by numerous grammatical and typographical errors and in general an intrusive sense of nonnative speaker expressions. This is only exacerbated by the author's choice—one which I might sympathize with, in theory—to add authenticity by using many Hungarian words in the English text and putting names in the Hungarian (to the non-Hungarian speaker's eyes, “backwards”) order (as in the book's title) without, however, any explanation or justification of these contraventions of standard scholarly practice. The fact that the author translated the book himself from the original 1992 Japanese version may help to explain some of these shortcomings. Manuscripts are cited without any indication of when they were produced or how obtained, and literary translations are given without any indication of whose they are (presumably the author's).
Although I hesitate to criticize any work on the basis of what it did not attempt to do, the fascinating case of Rózsa seems to cry out for analysis in terms of Hungarian national identity, especially the identity of “peasant Hungary.” Minamizuka extensively quotes and refers to interwar populist writer Móricz, without speculating on why someone so deeply engaged in the project of making the peasant the basis of the nation might see such a “social bandit” as an important figure. Tamás Hofer is just one figure whose work on folklore and Hungarian identity could have been profitably brought to bear here; and Maria Todorova's Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria's National Hero (Budapest, 2009) is a model for tracing the trajectory of such a mythical figure through time, in all its possible dimensions. Although two newer works are mentioned in passing, there is no engagement with the past two decades of scholarship (since the book's original Japanese publication), in which nationalism and national identity have been so prominent.
In sum, for the reader willing to put up with an uneven text and sometimes unclear premises, this monograph can be an informative and at times entertaining introduction to an important figure in Hungarian folk history and his mid-nineteenth-century century social context.
