Fraternity-Testvériség, 1959 (37. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1959-02-01 / 2. szám
4 FRATERNITY DR. BÉLA TALBOT KARDOS: DEZSŐ SZABÓ — 1879=1945 THE WORKS OF A HUNGARIAN LITERARY GENIUS THE HUNGARIAN PASTERNAK AFFAIR On a snowy winter day, January 13, 1945, in an air raid shelter of a Budapest apartment house, a group of men stood in silence around the body of a nationally known great writer who had just passed on. The Russian Red Army was moving towards the heart of the city. A few hours later, when the first Russian soldiers entered the house, they found him on an improvised pall with a floral spray in his folded hands and a scrap of paper with the words: “Dezső Szabó, author of the great novel, ‘The Abandoned Village’.” Little did they know that, midst the turmoil of the siege of the Hungarian capital they had chanced on the body of the Hungarian Tolstoy. On opening his handbag, more than 2,000 pages of his last manuscript on which he was working up to the last, fell out. And on breaking into his apartment on the third floor, they found themselves in three large rooms — his library, rich with the masterpieces of world literature. There were rare books, best editions of the Bible, old and beautiful psalters, graceful Greek statuettes and a valuable collection of hand wrought cuckoo clocks, his hobby. On one shelf stood thirty-five volumes of his own printed works — Dezső Szabó’s legacy and testimony to the coming generations. Dezső Szabó was a “lone eagle” with an ever-young, revolutionary spirit. Born in Eastern Hungary, in Transylvania, a small multi-national Switzerland, surrounded by the mighty Carpathians, his youth coincided with the fin de siécle. Official Hungary was celebrating the millennium of the thousand-year-old kingdom. But Szabó and the revolutionary circle of writers with whom he first associated, saw the shortcomings, and felt the social and political climate differently. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Hungary’s most talented poets and writers centered round the literary monthly “NYUGAT” (West) and the periodical of the Hungarian Sociological Society, “HUSZADIK SZÁZAD” (Twentieth Century), edited by the late Oscar Jaszi who later became professor of sociology in an American university. Jaszi was a personal friend of Dezső Szabó and published in his review Szabó’s first essays on social problems before the First World War, at which time Szabó was a professor of French and Hungarian literature. However, because of his outspoken antagonism to the conservative policies of Count Stephen Tisza, strong-handed minister-president at the time, the young professor was frequently transferred to remote posts as punishment. Even this served him well because he learned intimately in this way the whole gamut of social structure from the most remote village peasantry and small town life to the sophisticated modern elite of large city bourgeoisie. A one- year fellowship in Paris and his rich library, his correspondence, lectures and papers kept him in close touch with his Budapest circle of poets and writers, and in the vanguard of modern literary life. Yet up to the
