Once again on the Conversation Lessons (Remarks on a Hungarian textbook by Mikszáth)

Abstract

In 1895, comissioned by the minister of public education, Kálmán Miszáth, an outstanding figure of Hungarian
prose writing wrote his short 16-page book titled Conversation Lessons, which was meant to be a language book. It was published as a language book for Hungarian as a foreign language to help teaching Hungarian in minority
schools in Hungary. It appeared in six different versions. As far as its structure is concerned, it contains 4 chapters
and 112 sentences or communication units written in Hungarian with translations in German, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian and Ruthenian. The book, which was released in 100,000 copies, generated heated debates both politically and language pedagogically on the turn of 1895 and 1896. This article has two ambitions: on the
one hand, to present the goals and the circumstances of the publication, as well as the debates and evaluations which followed it and which keep coming up even today; on the other hand, to gather the full bibliography related to the book.