Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
NYRB Classics (2014), Paperback, 184 pages
Description
"Publishing during the 100th Anniversary of World War I , an NYRB Classics Original. The budding young Hungarian artist Bela Zombory-Moldovan was abroad on vacation when World War I broke out in August 1914. Called up by the army, he soon found himself hundreds of miles away, advancing on Russian lines--or perhaps on his own lines--and facing relentless rifle and artillery fire. Badly wounded, he returned to normal life, which now struck him as unspeakably strange. He had witnessed, he realized, the end of a way of life, of a whole world. Recently discovered among private papers and published here for the first time in any language, this extraordinary reminiscence is a deeply moving addition to the literature of the terrible war that defined the shape of the twentieth century"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member yooperprof
Magyar gentleman artist serves as an officer in the first major battles on the eastern front in late summer 1914. He survives, but his entire life is changed forever.
This is a newly discovered memoir which sheds light on the vanished way of life of high bourgeois society in "Royal" Hungary. It has
This is a newly discovered memoir which sheds light on the vanished way of life of high bourgeois society in "Royal" Hungary. It has
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been beautifully translated into English by the author's grandson, and was published for the first time anywhere in the world in 2014, by the exemplary NYRB Press. The subtlety took me by surprise. Show Less
LibraryThing member MacDad
Readers seeking a firsthand account of the First World War have no shortage of memoirs from which to choose. Thanks to the growth of literacy in Europe over the previous decades, most soldiers marched into battle equipped educationally with the means to describe their experiences in writing. Even
For the English-language reader, though, there is an inherent bias in the options available to them, in that the overwhelming majority of them deal with service on the Western Front. This is an understandable consequence of having two major combatants fighting on that front for whom English was their primary language, coupled with the translations of works in other languages from the associated interest in it. Thus, while readers interesting in reading about the war in France can turn to the memoirs by John Hay Beith, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, Ernst Jünger, and Louis Barthas to name just a few, anyone seeking accounts in English about the war on other fronts has a far more limited range from which to choose.
This is one of the reasons why Béla Zombory-Moldován’s description of his experiences in the first months of the war is to be valued. A Hungarian artist, Zombory-Moldován was among the many hundreds of thousands called up at the start of the war. Sent with his unit to Galicia, he was wounded in combat in the first months of fighting and sent home to convalesce. After surviving the war in a series of training and administrative postings, he returned to his life as a painter and art teacher until dismissed from his post after the Communists’ takeover of his country in the late 1940s. It was only in his final years that Zombory-Moldován began writing his account of the war, one that he left unfinished at his death in 1967.
What Zombory-Moldován did complete was a description of his personal experiences during the first ten months of the war. It’s an extremely impressionistic account, which recounts his activities and interactions with others but with little context. The effect is almost dreamlike in its result, with an elegiac sense of place but very little sense of time. The experiences of months come across as those of a few days or weeks, as Zombory-Moldován is swept up by events and sent into an experience very different from the artist’s life he describes in his early pages.
Zombory-Moldován’s conveys nicely the disruption caused by the war and the heady early days when men felt themselves marching off to adventure. These particularly stand out from the later pages, in which the author is a scarred veteran haunting the places of his prewar life. It’s an unreflective account, with much of the war’s effects on the author conveyed by his reaction to his encounters with the people and places of his past, and the reaction of his family to seeing him after his return from the front. What Zombory-Moldován focuses instead is the lament for an idyllic bygone life, one that now seems to him in the distant past despite having been lived just a short time before.
Written as it was in Zombory-Moldován’s final years, it is difficult to say whether this reflected his thoughts at that time or whether they were the sentiments of an old man reminiscing nostalgically about his long-ago youth. Yet the distance of time does little to diminish the value of this book for the underrepresented voice it provides for English-language readers. Supplemented by his grandson Peter’s introduction and endnotes, it’s a welcome addition to the collection of available accounts of the war, and should be sought out in particular by those interested in the Eastern Front of the war and accounts of service in the Austro-Hungarian armies.
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as the war raged many rushed their accounts into print, inaugurating a genre that only grew in the years after the war as veterans detailed their service and its impact upon them. Though the quality of these works varied, they all provided accounts that shared the authenticity that came with being participants in momentous events.For the English-language reader, though, there is an inherent bias in the options available to them, in that the overwhelming majority of them deal with service on the Western Front. This is an understandable consequence of having two major combatants fighting on that front for whom English was their primary language, coupled with the translations of works in other languages from the associated interest in it. Thus, while readers interesting in reading about the war in France can turn to the memoirs by John Hay Beith, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, Ernst Jünger, and Louis Barthas to name just a few, anyone seeking accounts in English about the war on other fronts has a far more limited range from which to choose.
This is one of the reasons why Béla Zombory-Moldován’s description of his experiences in the first months of the war is to be valued. A Hungarian artist, Zombory-Moldován was among the many hundreds of thousands called up at the start of the war. Sent with his unit to Galicia, he was wounded in combat in the first months of fighting and sent home to convalesce. After surviving the war in a series of training and administrative postings, he returned to his life as a painter and art teacher until dismissed from his post after the Communists’ takeover of his country in the late 1940s. It was only in his final years that Zombory-Moldován began writing his account of the war, one that he left unfinished at his death in 1967.
What Zombory-Moldován did complete was a description of his personal experiences during the first ten months of the war. It’s an extremely impressionistic account, which recounts his activities and interactions with others but with little context. The effect is almost dreamlike in its result, with an elegiac sense of place but very little sense of time. The experiences of months come across as those of a few days or weeks, as Zombory-Moldován is swept up by events and sent into an experience very different from the artist’s life he describes in his early pages.
Zombory-Moldován’s conveys nicely the disruption caused by the war and the heady early days when men felt themselves marching off to adventure. These particularly stand out from the later pages, in which the author is a scarred veteran haunting the places of his prewar life. It’s an unreflective account, with much of the war’s effects on the author conveyed by his reaction to his encounters with the people and places of his past, and the reaction of his family to seeing him after his return from the front. What Zombory-Moldován focuses instead is the lament for an idyllic bygone life, one that now seems to him in the distant past despite having been lived just a short time before.
Written as it was in Zombory-Moldován’s final years, it is difficult to say whether this reflected his thoughts at that time or whether they were the sentiments of an old man reminiscing nostalgically about his long-ago youth. Yet the distance of time does little to diminish the value of this book for the underrepresented voice it provides for English-language readers. Supplemented by his grandson Peter’s introduction and endnotes, it’s a welcome addition to the collection of available accounts of the war, and should be sought out in particular by those interested in the Eastern Front of the war and accounts of service in the Austro-Hungarian armies.
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Language
Original language
Hungarian
Physical description
176 p.
ISBN
1590178092 / 9781590178096