Antal Szerb

The native form of this personal name is Szerb Antal. This article uses the Western name order.

Antal Szerb (May 1, 1901, Budapest - January 27, 1945, Balf) was a noted Hungarian scholar and writer. He is recognized as one of the major Hungarian literary personalities of the 20th century.

Antal Szerb.

Life and work

Szerb was born in 1901 to assimilated Jewish parents in Budapest, but baptized Catholic. He studied Hungarian, German and later English, obtaining a doctorate in 1924. From 1924 to 1929 he lived in France and Italy, also spending a year in London, England from 1929 to 1930.

As a student he published essays on Georg Trakl and Stefan George, and quickly established a formidable reputation as a scholar, writing erudite studies of William Blake and Henrik Ibsen among other works. Elected President of the Hungarian Literary Academy in 1933, aged just 32, he published his first novel, The Pendragon Legend (which draws upon his personal experience of living in Britain) the following year. His second and best-known work, Utas és holdvilág, known in English as Journey by Moonlight, came out in 1937. He was made a Professor of Literature at the University of Szeged the same year. He was twice awarded the Baumgarten Prize, in 1935 and 1937. Szerb also translated books from English, French, and Italian, including works by Anatole France, P. G. Wodehouse, and Hugh Walpole.[1]

In 1941 he published a History of World Literature which continues to be authoritative today. He also published a volume on novel theory and a book about the history of Hungarian literature. Given numerous chances to escape antisemitic persecution (as late as 1944), he chose to remain in Hungary, where his last novel, a Pirandellian fantasy about a king staging a coup against himself, then having to impersonate himself, Oliver VII, was published in 1942. It was passed off as a translation from the English, as no 'Jewish' work could have been printed at the time.

During the 1940s, Szerb faced increasing hostility due to his Jewish background. In 1943, Szerb's History of World Literature was put on a list of forbidden works. During the period of Communist rule, it would also be censored, with the chapter on Soviet literature redacted, and the full version would only be available again in 1990. Szerb was deported to a concentration camp in Balf late in 1944. Admirers of his attempted to save him with falsified papers, but Szerb turned them down, wanting to share the fate of his generation.[2] He was beaten to death there in January 1945, at the age of 43. He was survived by his wife, Klára Bálint, who died in 1992. [3]

The author, who lived in Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century, is well known for his academic works on literature. In the ten years before the Second World War, he writes two monumental works of literary criticism characterized by a brilliant and ironic style intended for an adult reader rather than an academic public.[4] Beside them, the author works on novellas and novels that still attract the attention of the reader.

The Pendragon Legend, Journey by Moonlight and The Queen's Necklace, for instance, fuse within the plot the aims of the literary critic with the aims of the novel writer. The author gives importance to the exotic in the three novels with a meta-literararian look.

In the three novels, the stage of the narrative action is always a European country: the space outside the routinarian Hungary allows the writer to transfigure the unique feats of his characters.

The Pendragon Legend

In his first novel, The Pendragon Legend, the author offers to his readers a representation of the United Kingdom and its inhabitants. England and, in particular, London, hosted Szerb for a year and suggested to him new and interesting directions for his researches and offered him the background for his first novel. The Pendragon Legend is a detective story that begins in the British Museum and finishes in a Welsh castle. The author provides a non-native look of the country, in a way that is consistent with the parody genre.

In The Quest for the Miraculous: Survey and Problematic in the Modern Novel, Szerb claims that among the literary genres he prefers the fantasy novel. It fuses the quotidian details of everyday life with the fantastic feats that he calls “the miracle”. In the case of The Pendragon Legend, this allows the reader a cathartic experience through the adventures of the Hungarian philologist who serves as the protagonist of the novel.

Traveler and the Moonlight (literal trans. of Utas és holdvilág is Passenger or Traveler and the Moonlight)

The novel, published in 1937, focuses on the development of the main character, Mihály - a bright and romantic albeit conflicted young man who sets off on a honeymoon in Italy with his newlywed wife, Erzsi. Mihály quickly reveals his bazaar childhood experiences to her over a bottle of wine, alluding to a set of seemingly unresolved longings for eroticism and death which Erzsi seems to only vaguely comprehend. The plainspoken disharmony between the newlyweds leads to Mihály's detached self recognition: he is not ready to be Erzsi's husband. He then leaves his wife in an aloof preparedness for his own journey through the Italian countryside and eventually Rome - figuratively tracing the sparkling fanaticisms of his juvenile imagination, even rekindling bonds with changed (and some unchanged) childhood friends - all among the impressive foreign landscapes and peculiar liveliness of its inhabitants. Szerb celebrates the exotic cult of Italy, the leitmotif of thousands of writers from the past and present, relaying his own travel impressions of Italy though the mind of his eccentric protagonist, Mihály. Szerb explores the altogether interrelatedness of love and youthfulness within bourgeois society.

The Third Tower

Szerb presents his journey in Italy also in an interesting diary, The Third Tower,[5] a diary of his travels in Italy which collects the impression of the author. He visits the cities of the north of Italy: Venice, Bologna, Ravenna, and, before going back home he visits San Marino, Europe's oldest state. This is an important stage for Szerb and "The Third Tower", since upon seeing the Montale (San Marino), he is filled with the inspiration of what the title of the diary will be. The diary is divided into paragraphs and alternates descriptions to his personal thoughts.

Selected bibliography

Translations

English

Czech

Dutch

Finnish

French

German

Hebrew

Italian

Polish

Slovak

Slovenian

Spanish

Serbian

See also

External links

References

  1. ↑ Tezla, Albert. Hungarian Authors: A Bibliographical Handbook. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970.
  2. ↑ Dalos, György. "Der romantische Aussteiger." Die Zeit, January 22, 2004.
  3. ↑ "nyrb Antal Szerb". New York Review Books. Retrieved 2015-11-23.
  4. ↑ , Poszler György. "Szerb Antal pályakezdése ." Akadémiai Kiadó., 1965.
  5. ↑ Szerb, Antal. "."A Harmadik Torony "Nyugat, "Budapest", 1936.
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