Novel
Az elsodort falu
Not translated into English
Dezső Szabó · 1919
Opening lines
Az öregasszony az asztalhoz ült. Nem evett. Maga elé bámult. Nem látott.
The old woman sat down at the table. She did not eat. She stared in front of her. She did not see.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from mek.oszk.hu
Synopsis
From 1912 to the end of the Great War, in an imaginary village of the Székely Land, in Transylvania, and in three cities, Budapest, Kolozsvár and Ungvár. Böjthe János, back from the wide world, chooses to live as a peasant and wants to merge into the people. His friend Farkas Miklós, a writer of genius, wears himself out in Budapest on money and women; Judit, the beautiful daughter of Pastor Farczády, leaves the village for the city. When war comes, the book follows the ruin of the peasant, the schoolteacher, the priest and the petty nobility.
Context
Completed in 1918, the novel appeared in two volumes on 23 May 1919 from Táltos, under the Republic of Councils, at first printed in eight hundred copies; some two hundred thousand were sold over the following quarter-century. It places the country's hope in the peasantry and accuses the middle classes, won over, according to the author, by the spirit of the Germans and of assimilated Jews. In the Nyugat, Lajos Fülep saw in it less a novel than a chronicle doubled by a moral lesson. After 1945 it was reissued only in exile until the fall of the communist regime.
Who it is for
Two volumes and more than five hundred pages, in a heavy expressionist style; no French or English translation has been located.
Prizes and reception
An unprecedented success on publication, regarded as a reference of interwar Hungarian populism and as a key novel of the century.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.