Hugó Meltzl

Hugó Meltzl of Lomnitz (31 July 1846 – 20 January 1908) was a Hungarian scholar, professor at, and later rector of, the Franz Joseph University.

Hugó Meltzl
Born	(1846-07-31)31 July 1846 Szászrégen, Kingdom of Hungary, Habsburg Monarchy (now Reghin, Romania)
Died	20 January 1908(1908-01-20) (aged 61) Nagyvárad, Transleithania, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Oradea, Romania)
Scientific career
Fields	comparative literature
Institutions	Franz Joseph University

Meltzl's tomb of remembrance in the cemetery of Hajongard (Cluj-Napoca)

Life

Hugó Meltzl was born in Szászrégen, Hungary (now Reghin, Romania). His native language was German. He studied at the University of Kolozsvár and in Germany. He was appointed as professor of German (later French, Italian) 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 (elected 1886^[1]), 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 (Acta Comparationis Litt. et Fontes Compar. Litt. Universarum), 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^[2]. 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 (and what else is a great nation?)".^[3]

He died on 20 January 1908 in Nagyvárad, Austria-Hungary (now Oradea, Romania), and was buried in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca). He had a wife, called Hermine Berger.