“‘The Sabbathmen have two excellent virtues,’ said the king. ‘One is truth-telling, the other is secrecy.’”
“[…] Dávid Tatrangi, who this morning detained the king as a guard and did not let him in until he had given the password, should be praised for this act in the daily order read publicly before the line of battle.”
The social problems and conflicts outlined in the plot are resolved by the development of technology. With the help of the airplane, equality and thus world peace can be achieved in the novel. Jókai’s interest in natural sciences and his wealth of diverse knowledge can be clearly seen throughout this novel. Technological innovations and the expansion of scientific knowledge have always brought with them social change. Industrial revolutions, new inventions, and achievements are tangible marks of man’s desire for progress. Belief in this development and a utopian vision of the future are reflected in the story of the novel itself.
“As the horizon of the civilized world extends to every corner of the Earth, as inventions continually produce new results; as the vast history of genocide begins to be replaced by the bustling mosaic picture of social life, which rushes and boils in an uninterrupted version in the mass of news of daily events: then one of the most evil ghosts of humanity, the last demon, ‘boredom’, slowly fades away.”
One of the most important motifs in Béla Kondor’s art is flight, which can be both ascent and descent, and thus can carry both positive and negative values. Knowledge of his biography can partially help in interpreting this duality. As a child, the artist lived in Pestszentlőrinc, near the airport, and enthusiastically watched airplanes and built models, but later, during World War II, he was a reluctant witness to bombing and aerial battles. As an adult, he admired space flight, the first Sputnik and the moon landing, but 12 April 1961, meant not only Gagarin’s first space flight for him, but also the death of his friend, writer Imre Sarkadi, who fell out of the window of Béla Kondor’s apartment on that day. In his drawing titled The Death of the Tsarina, illustrating Jókai’s text, the artist had the opportunity to depict both flight and fall in the same image. In Béla Kondor’s paintings and graphics, both living and inanimate objects can participate in flight, sometimes simultaneously. The living beings are winged figures, mainly angels, which indicate a transcendent orientation, but human figures can also wear angel wings, perhaps most notably as a sign of artistic involvement. An inanimate flying object is usually some kind of machine: an airplane, a helicopter, a rocket, a lunar shuttle. Sometimes the living and the inanimate are not strictly separated: there are also insects that resemble machines, such as wasps or dragonflies, and even the artificial “mechanical crickets” that already carry a sense of the artificial in their name. Béla Kondor not only depicted complex structures in his two-dimensional works, but also built them from wooden sticks and tracing paper. He preserved these in his photogram series at the end of his life.
“But the ‘white eagle’ has self-awareness; the aerodrome said: ‘I was not born to kill people by the hundreds of thousands, but to prevent murder,’ and therefore high up, equidistant from the two camps, he detonated the ‘destroyer’ with a lightning fuse.”
“Budapest!
We had just cut through a dark mass of clouds, now we emerge from it, and suddenly the City opened up before us… Everyone rushes to the window. We can already see Csepel, a green-backed snake coiling in the middle, the soldiers who are assigned for us…
We circle in a large arc, the wind is blowing, we are looking for a suitable layer of air… All four engines stop for a minute; we stand like a peg in the air.
‘Wow, how many cars…
And how the people line up along the roads… An entire city, frozen in amazement, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle…
We caused such a stir.
Oh… we are slowly starting to circle and sink down…’”
Csaba Rékassy: Virtus [Virtue], 1984, National Széchényi Library Map, Poster and Small Print Collection
Rector’s decorative sword from the legacy of Lajos Martin, Hungarian Museum of Technology and Transport
Tape measure, Hungarian Museum of Natural History
Telescope, Hungarian Museum of Natural History
Chemical bottles, Hungarian Museum of Natural History
19th century microscope, Hungarian Museum of Natural History
Alcohol thermometer, Hungarian Museum of Technology and Transport
Hygrometer, Hungarian Museum of Natural History
Blades from the Lajos Martin floating wheel, Hungarian Museum of Technology and Transport
Béla Kondor: Ikarusz [Icarus], 1964, National Széchényi Library Map, Poster and Small Print Collection
Béla Kondor: Repülés [Flight], 1966, National Széchényi Library Map, Poster and Small Print Collection
Ferenc Herczeg’s Flight Report, 1903, National Széchényi Library Manuscript Archive
Jules Verne: Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1874, National Széchényi Library Core Collection
Machinae novae Fausti Verantii Siceni, 1616, National Széchényi Library Old Prints Collection