Krleža's and Kosztolányi's Encounters: A Diagnosis of 'typically Danubian Idiocy'?

Miroslav Krleža and Deszõ Kosztolányi met each other twice during World War I. Both of them were outspoken adherents of internationalism: Krleža as a writer on the left and Kosztolányi as an advocate of Goetheian Weltliteratur. When they met in 1915 and 1916, they did so as citizens of the Habsburg empire. Krleža wrote much later about their two encounters, and even based a character in his novel Banket u Blitvi (A Banquet in Blitva, 1938 and 1963) on Kosztolányi. By then he was citizen of a different state. Kosztolányi, in turn, never wrote about the encounters, but in this chapter I will attempt to extract a possible response to Krleža's allegations from his novel Edes Ana (Anna Edes, 1926). Their encounter can be considered a quintessential Central European encounter, particularly because of the - over time - growing mental distance between them.