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

1959-03-01 / 3. szám

FRATERNITY

5

DR. BÉLA TALBOT KARDOS:

DEZSŐ SZABÓ — 1879=1945

THE WORKS OF A HUNGARIAN LITERARY GENIUS THE HUNGARIAN PASTERNAK AFFAIR

(Continuation)

The remaining two-thirds of Szabó’s writings, his fiction, doubless represents his more permanent contribution to literature. Dezső Szabó himself divided it into three main groups.

Group I includes those works which deal with the relation of the human ego to the cosmos — the place and meaning of the individual to the universe. The ego is born on the narrow strip of the present between two eternities, the past and the future. Why do we exist? What message does the mysterious forest murmur to us? Why does the unceasing ocean roll at our feet, the beautiful clouds sail above and the miraculous stars, sun and moon rotate in their spheres? What is the relation of the revolving macrocosm to our ego in which it is reflected in joys and sorrows? Groping along erroneous ways of life, disillusioned by many blind alleys and final redemption of the individual through suffering to a more harmonious relation of the ego and the macrocosm is the central theme of this group. Most were written in his early period, under 40 years of ago. Here we find the “Journal” written in 1910 to 1918, novels “Toward Damascus”, “Don Quixote Penitent”, “Further Travels of Gulliver”, “Happy Mike”, “Open Sesame” and others written between 1912 and 1919. The youthful, lyrical-musical tone of these masterpieces remind one of Wagner’s young Siegfried roaming in the enchanted pre- medieval forest, communing with the birds and trees, challenging and slaying the dragon, boldly defying fate and rushing through fire to find and awaken his personified destiny in Brünhilde. In these novels the young Hungarian author equals the most poetic passages in Nietzsche’s “Morning Glow” and the beautiful prose poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Also to this cycle belongs his longer novel, “No Escape” (1917). The hero, a descendant of an old Transylvanian family, returns from European universities to his home, wanders restlessly between the large city of Budapest and his own small village always searching for his true relation to the soil, to people, to woman, to useful work, religion. Buffeted by by these tensions, he becomes finally a twentieth century Hungarian Hamlet or Werther.

Group II deals with the relation of the Hungarian nation to the world and history at large. Here he has profited by the works of Balzac, Zola and Tolstoy. His “Abandoned Village”, mentioned above, is only the first of a political novel series — the Hungarian “Comédie Humaine”. The second in this series, “The Rain Begins”, is unfinished, but a higlhy dramatic account of the two revolutions following World War I. The third consists of three volumes entitled “Help” (1925). This great political novel