Some Historiographical and Methodological Issues of 20th Century Hungarian Biography Writing

This paper attempts to provide a concise overview of some historiographical and methodological issues concerning the composition of the political biography of Vitéz Emil Borbély-Maczky (1887–1945). In the first part of my paper, I present some major accomplishments of 20th-century biography writing in Hungary, briefly covering the methodological context in respect of political biography vs. total biography. In the second part, I investigate the problems and opportunities of genre classification emerging during the composition of Emil Borbély- Maczky’s biography by presenting available sources. The primary goal of this paper is to set the biography of the most important public figure in interwar Borsod County into the context of 20th century Hungarian historical biographies