Fraternity-Testvériség, 1959 (37. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1959-02-01 / 2. szám

6

FRATERNITY

and later, between 1934 and 1942, he published a monthly review (“NEW AURORA”, “LIFE AND LITERATURE”) which he practically wrote alone. So assured was he of his mission and genius that, as he himself said, “With my two-penny pen I shall transform, like a magician, the social

structure of the country.” His hero, János Bőjthe, is a symbol of the new type — a strong, healthy Walt Witman-character in a classless society.

However, Dezső Szabó was shortly to see that the resurgent conservative political forces were stronger than his two-penny pen. Disgusted by the reactionary political scene, in the summer of 1920, he retired from Budapest to a small Trans-danubian village, Somogyvámos. Here, midst peaceful surroundings, he had originally intended to write a continuation of his political novel which ended with the outbreak of the 1918 revolution. He wanted to write a political novel of the two recent revolutions of which he had been a close observer. One volume was completed and later published under the title, “The Rain Begins”, but seeing the peaceful village and vineyards before his eyes as he wrote,

he became loath to reawake the bloody scenes and terrorism of the

revolutions and left his work unfinished. Instead, his greatest nonpolitical masterpiece, “WONDERFUL LIFE”, a tale of magnificent fantasy that covers the wide world, was undertaken.

Here, a Peer Gynt-like Hungarian peasant boy, implicated in a village brawl and under the illusion he has committed a murder, flees from

home. Restless, he passes through strange cities, works as a laborer, wanders as an adventurer, receives higher education, and then becomes a Councillor to a great statesman and wins political power in a fabulous overseas empire. Then, as commander-in-chief of the army, conquers the enemy, is offered the hand of the King’s daughter in marirage with half of the empire as dowry but escapes on his wedding night still restless. He becomes a hermit in a desert and in his wanderings there discovers the remains of a caravan buried by the sand and laden with treasure. With it, he repairs to a great city where his great palace becomes the meeting place of poets, artists and writers. From a Maecenas he becomes himself a celebrated poet but, like Shakespeare’s Timon, ends forsaken and his fortune in ruins. Picked up on the roadside by a wandering circus company, half dead, in clown’s livery he is left behind in a village cemetery. On his awakening, he finds himself on the tombstone of his parents in his native village. He learns that he had not committed a murder and so begins a new life, freed from the old tormenting restlessness, and, through his wisdom and love becomes a respected patriarch and leader of his beloved Székler homeland.

Around this tale the author has built, with magic fantasy, a wonderful masterpiece which is comparable only to Homer’s Odyssey or, in modern literature, with Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Sádko” or Ibsen’s Peer Gynt or Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird. (Like the two latter, it would make a most sensational film with profound meaning.) As a novel, it surpasses everything written since Tolstoy’s works and Mistral’s Mireio.

This short essay cannot be a detailed inventory or full appreciation of all the thirty-five volumes this Hungarian writer left behind. (This I did in the biography: “D. Szabó and His Oevre” — Washington, 2 vols.,