Abstract
The Hungarian writer Antal Szerb (1901–45) was an excellent essayist, erudite literary historian and author of an award-winning History of Hungarian Literature as well as of a comprehensive A History of World Literature. Szerb also wrote outstanding fiction and very entertaining short stories, achieving a great deal in just two decades of writing. Born into a middle-class Jewish family which converted as early as 1906, and being educated in one of the best Catholic schools in Hungary, he was none the less subjected to the anti-Jewish laws enacted between 1938 and 1944 and bludgeoned to death in a forced-labour camp at Balf in January 1945.
In recent years most of Szerb’s prose has been translated into English by Len Rix and his best-known novel Utas és holdvilág (Journey by Moonlight) now exists in four translations. It is to the credit of the Modern Humanities Research Association that under its ‘Legenda’ label it has now brought out a selection of Antal Szerb’s essays on European writers and poets. After a short Foreword by Professor Galin Tihanov and a longer and informative Introduction by the Hungarian Professor Emeritus Ágnes Péter, we are offered 13 essays of varying length by Szerb, divided into two categories: Romanticism and Modernism. While this arrangement provides a certain thematic construction, it would have better served Antal Szerb’s development as an essayist to range all the essays chronologically: the early essay on the esoteric German poet Stefan George (1926) should have come before the excellent, thoroughly researched essay on William Blake (1928). And, as Ágnes Péter points out, in the 1930s Antal Szerb moves towards the defence of European Humanist values (see his essay on Thomas Mann). As for the ‘Neo-frivol’ breakthrough in his style (that is, the shedding of German academic influence), it is connected with his reading and impressions during the study trip to England and France in 1929–30. Most of the essays in this selection demonstrate Szerb’s Anglophile orientation: his interest ranges from Milton through Byron, Shelley and Keats to G. K. Chesterton. An essay which could also have been included is on Aldous Huxley, whose impact on Antal Szerb was certainly greater than that of Katherine Mansfield (on whom a piece is included in the book).
All the essays are impressively translated by Peter Sherwood who also provided notes on the main literary figures mentioned in the texts. In the Stefan George essay, however, it would have been helpful to have the numerous German expressions (such as for example sich fliehen) translated or explained in English. The very comprehensive six-page ‘Timeline of Antal Szerb’s Major Works’, provided by the Editor Zsuzsanna Varga, omits this important essay on Stefan George, and the publication date for Száz vers (a multilingual selection of poems from world literature) should read February 1944. The date is important, as editing that anthology was Antal Szerb’s last literary work and a political act: he selected the poems with a strong Anglophile bias at a time when Hungary was a wartime ally of Nazi Germany. Reflections in the Library is another testimony to the best European values in literature at a time when certain politicians ‘reached for their gun upon hearing the word “culture”’.