Hugó Meltzl


Hugó Meltzl of Lomnitz was a Hungarian scholar, professor at, and later rector of, the Franz Joseph University.

Life

Hugó Meltzl was born in Szászrégen, Hungary. His native language was German. He studied at the University of Kolozsvár and in Germany. He was appointed as professor of German history and language of the newly founded Franz Joseph University. From 1880 to 1889 he was the leader of the Faculty, then in 1894 he became the rector of the university. He was abroad at several times, including visiting Algeria. One of his major successes was that he made well known the works of Sándor Petőfi and József Eötvös in abroad.
He was an honorary member of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift of Frankfurt, the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, the Akademisch-Philosophischer Verein of Leipzig and the Scientific Aceademy and Petőfi Institute of Palermo.
Between 1877 and 1888, with Sámuel Brassai he was the co-editor and publisher of the multilingual Összehasonlító Irodalomtörténeti Lapokat, often quoted to be the first journal of comparative literature. As a multilingual journal, it welcomed writers from Turkey, Egypt, India and Japan, following Goethe's idea of a weltliteratur. He signed as Hugó Lomnitzi. In the second volume, he cites as his motto a quotation from a letter written by Schiller in 1789: "It would be a pitiful, petty ideal to write for one nation only: for a philosophical spirit this limitation is absolutely unbearable. This spirit could not confine itself to such a changeable, accidental, and arbitrary form of humanity, a fragment ".
He died on 20 January 1908 in Nagyvárad, Austria-Hungary, and was buried in Kolozsvár. He had a wife, called Hermine Berger.

Further information

  • Bányai Elemér: Meltzl Hugó, Nyugat, 1908. 3. szám
  • T. Szabó Levente: Negotiating world literature in the first international journal of comparative literary studies. The Albanian case, Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai. Philologica 2012/2, 33–52.
  • T. Szabó Levente: À la recherche... de l’editeur perdu. Brassai Sámuel and the first international journal of comparative literary studies = Storia, Identita e Canoni letterari, eds. Angela Tarantino, Ioana Bot, Ayșe Saraçgil, Florence University Press, 2013, 177–188.
  • T. Szabó Levente: Negotiating the borders of Hungarian national literature: the beginnings of the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum and the rise of Hungarian studies, Transylvanian Review 2013/1. Supplement, 47–61.
  • T. Szabó Levente: Az összehasonlító irodalomtudomány kelet-európai feltalálása és beágyazottsága. Az Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum – egy kutatás keretei = “...hogy legyen a víznek lefolyása...” Köszöntő kötet Szilágyi N. Sándor tiszteletére, ed. Benő Attila et al., 2013, 449–460.
  • T. Szabó Levente: Mit tegyünk az első nemzetközi összehasonlító irodalomtudományi lappal? Szempontok az Összehasonlító Irodalomtörténelmi Lapok újraértéséhez, Literatura 2014/2, 134–147.