Antal Szerb Livres

This collection showcases the essays of Antal Szerb, a prominent Hungarian writer and critic, renowned for his influential role in inter-war literary life. Despite his significant contributions, Szerb's career was tragically cut short by the rise of Fascism, leading to his deportation and death in a concentration camp. This volume marks the first time his important essays have been translated into English, highlighting his enduring legacy and the impact of his work on literature, both in Hungary and internationally.

A comic fable from one of the masters of twentieth-century prose

In August 1785, Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everything—an eminent churchman, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. Its centrepiece was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled, and the tangle of fraud, folly, blindness and self-delusion it provoked. The humiliation the affair brought on the royal family contributed to their appalling deaths in the Revolution just four years later. In this unusual, witty and often surprising version of the story, the great Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb takes the narrative as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age—including aspects of it seldom considered by more orthodox historians. The author’s vast knowledge is worn very lightly and the book teems with amusing anecdotes, but it is, at heart, a deeply personal work, a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which it was written.

A collection of Szerb's shorter fiction, which superbly demonstrates his development from young idealist to mature ironist.

In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice, on a journey overshadowed by the coming war and charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had once exercised a strange and terrifying power over his imagination, he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries, reappraisals and inevitable self-revelations. From Venice, he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna, to stand, fulfilling a lifelong dream, before the sacred mosaics of San Vitale. This journey into his private past brings Antal Szerb firmly, and at times painfully, up against an explosive present, producing some memorable observations on the social wonders and existential horrors of Mussolini's new Roman Imperium.

At an end-of-the London season soiree, the young Hungarian scholar-dilettante Janos Batky is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumours. Invited to the family seat, Pendragon Castle in North Wales, Batky receives a mysterious phone-call warning him not to go... Antal Szerb's first novel The Pendragon Legend (1934), set in Wales is a gently satirical blend of gothic and romantic genres, crossed with the murder mystery format to produce a fast-moving and often hilarious romp. But beneath the surface, the reader becomes aware of a steely intelligence probing moral, psychological and religious questions.

A collection of Szerb's shorter fiction, which superbly demonstrates his development from young idealist to mature ironist

Europäische Literatur von Weltformat! «Alles fing an … oder vielmehr, es fing eigentlich überhaupt nie an, denn ich las und schrieb schon immer, fast vom Augenblick meiner Geburt an (ich war die bebrillte Art von Kleinkind) …» Kein Wunder, dass der ungarische Literaturhistoriker und Romancier Antal Szerb (1901–1945) sich in der Bibliothek aufhielt, wo er die meisten seiner Texte verfasste. Für Szerb war Literatur weit mehr als ein Studienobjekt; sie war ein unverzichtbares Lebenselement. Mit einer persönlichen Sichtweise und viel ästhetischem sowie psychologischem Einfühlungsvermögen versuchte er, Literatur zu fassen, geprägt von Sensibilität für Nuancen und tiefer Humanität. Szerbs Credo besagt, dass Literatur die Ewigkeit repräsentieren und überhistorische Relevanz besitzen sollte. Sein Begriff der Weltliteratur umfasst nur das, was er für das Beste hielt, also Autoren und Werke, die über die Jahrhunderte und Grenzen hinweg Bestand hatten. Neben Romanen und Erzählungen wuchs ein reicher Schatz an literarisch-historischen Porträts. Der Komparatist András Horn, emeritierter Professor für Literaturtheorie an der Universität Basel, hat für diese Ausgabe sieben solcher Porträts ausgewählt und erstmals ins Deutsche übertragen, die für die europäischen Literaturen von besonderer Bedeutung sind. Szerb widmet sich darin Autoren wie Stefan George, Baldassare Castiglione, Henrik Ibsen, William Blake, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Miguel de Ce

Mysteriózní povídka maďarského spisovatele A. Szerba, odehrávající se kdysi dávno v Neapoli, zachycuje jímavý vztah mladého chlapce a krutovládce, který musí projít všemi peripetiemi poznání až k nevyhnutelnému konci, kdy se vymyká z rukou oběma zúčastněným stranám, i když jde pouze o logické vyústění dané skutečnosti.