„…it was more like a cigarette-end, than a cigarette, but we smoked it sparingly” What sort of life prepares Ottlik Géza’s School at the Frontier?

Abstract

The protagonists of the School at the Frontier have the same characters in their child- and adulthood. The time is out of joint in two ways: the structure of chapters makes controversial the process of the reading and the biological and social growing up of the novel’s figures; so the personality is not to reach but to save during the school –years.
Konrád’s book, The Visitor was published ten years after Ottlik’s novel. Its protagonist is a bureaucrat who is trying to find the ways of freedom in a world deprived of liberty. Though the School at the Frontier has been considered as a „possibility of the saved freedom” by the literary critics, it shows considerable analogies with Konrád’s novel.