In Claude Berri’s film Jean de Florette, based on a novel by Marcel Pagnol, a city-dweller inherits a plot of land in fabulous Provence. Jean, played by Gérard Dépardieu, moves there with his wife and daughter, and makes enthusiastic plans to grow vegetables and breed rabbits. However, as his neighbours secretly block the freshwater spring, Jean’s efforts to create a paradise are doomed to failure. He goes bankrupt, then dies in an accident.

This is a film that comes to mind when reading Gergely Péterfy’s novel, The Stuffed Barbarian, a book that has been a huge success in Hungary ever since its publication last year, both among readers and critics. It has just won the prestigious Aegon Prize, awarded to the best novel published in the previous year. As in Jean de Florette, envy, the rule of mediocrity, and blind chance are prime among the factors that lead to the fiasco of the protagonist Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831), who tries to live his life according to high ideals in a backward country. Today known primarily as the leading figure of the Hungarian language reform, Kazinczy was a prolific poet, translator, and an extremely energetic organizer of literary life. His burgeoning career was suddenly broken when he was sentenced to death at the age of thirty-six for being implicated in a Jacobin conspiracy. The death sentence was eventually changed to imprisonment, and after having served six years, Kazinczy continued to reform Hungarian literary life even more vigorously than before, becoming a sort of ’literary dictator’ (Antal Szerb).

Péterfy’s Kazinczy is a tormented and vulnerable soul, full of self-doubt, traumatized and stigmatized by his prison years. As narrated by Kazinczy’s wife, Sophie Török, this is a story of a talented man who starts out with high hopes and great dedication, but for whom gradually everything goes wrong. Eventually, Ferenc died poor and forlorn, in a cholera pandemic. A story of idealism versus realism – a realism of the kind that wilfully clogs freshwater sources.

There is another narrative, embedded in the sad life story of this fascinating figure, which is so eerie and absurd that it certainly steals the show: and this is the story of Kazinczy’s best friend, Angelo Soliman (1721–1796), a black slave who rose to become a prominent member of Viennese society. An extremely erudite person and a high-ranking freemason, Angelo Soliman was exploited by Viennese society in a variety of ways: some used him as a sexual toy; others as an intellectual stimulant whose presence would shed a new light on worn-out ideas. The ultimate embarrassment for posterity, however, is the fate of Soliman’s dead body. A husband, a father, a Christian, and a scholar, Soliman was skinned and stuffed after his death – a process meticulously documented by Péterfy lest the reader construe it as a mere abstraction – and exhibited in the Cabinet of Curiosities of the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

The fact that Angelo’s story is told by a Hungarian – or rather, three Hungarians, as Kazinczy tells it to his wife who in turn tells it to the reader, the third being the author himself – gives it a peculiar slant, and it may be especially interesting for readers of a blog about European literature. There is a scene in the novel where Ferenc and Angelo agree to meet in Vienna. To amuse his friend, Kazinczy dresses up in traditional Hungarian attire. When Angelo appears, it turns out the encounter is going to be even more fun than Ferenc expected as the former arrives wearing a gaudy kaftan and turban, flaunting a fan made of oystrich feathers. Angelo’s dress turns out to be a visual lesson to the young Kazinczy whereby the black freemason signals to the Hungarian: he should accept the fact that he would never be at home in the world. While this is certainly true of any mortal, it is especially true of these two, a couple of barbarians in the eyes of Viennese people.

This scene harks back to an earlier moment: the first visit of young Ferenc and his father to Vienna. Dressed in their best clothes, filled with rapturous respect for what we would now call ’Western civilization,’ a concept they associate with their better selves, father and son are made fun of by people in the street who regard them as nothing but a bunch of barbarians. The incident serves as a bitter lesson to Ferenc who realizes that the cultivated, highly civilized imperial city does not reciprocate his enthusiasm, or does so only insofar as he consents to being a curio.

Whether as a locus of fear, desire or contempt, each culture, society, and era incorporates, and thus in a certain sense domesticates, its own Other. These two stories illustrate, in various settings and to varying degrees, what happens when the Other does not quite fit the role we intend to give them – a well-behaved victim, an exotic creature or a satanic enemy. But the ultimate victim is, of course, one who cannot speak up for himself. In this novel, the latter is powerfully present in the form of Angelo Soliman’s stuffed body. As opposed to other famous mummies of modern times – that of Jeremy Bentham, who requested that his body be preserved and showcased after his death as an ’auto-icon,’ exhibited to date at the University College London; or that of Lenin, the God of Soviet political religion – Soliman’s body is transformed into a multivalent sign: a specimen of the ’African race’ for contemporary scientists, an object of fright or amusement for visitors of the museum, a sign of Western racism for today’s reader, an object of meditation for Sophie – and we could continue the list.

How far can we expand experience by incorporating ’untellable’ experiences into language, without domesticating images of horror into a convenient sense of otherness? What lies beyond the realm illuminated by the civic virtue of acceptance and tolerance in our minds? And how can we transcend, yet at the same time maintain, our ethnic and religious identities in an age that seems to be reverting to pre-Enlightenment times in certain aspects? These are some of the disturbing questions that may arise in readers as they are trying to make sense of Angelo Soliman’s story told by Ferenc Kazinczy, as narrated by Sophie Török trying to make sense of both.