There are writers who seem to belong to their time, and then there are writers who hover above it, too cosmopolitan to be contained, too ironic to be enlisted, too subtle to be safe. Antal Szerb was one of the latter. Born in Budapest in 1901, he lived through the dislocations of the twentieth century’s first half: empire dissolved, borders redrawn, nationalism sharpened to lethal edges. He wrote novels that were charming, erudite, and slyly ironic; he wrote essays that could pivot from English Romanticism to the psychology of the modern novel. And in 1945, he was beaten to death in a forced labor camp.
A Cosmopolitan in a Narrowing World
Szerb’s career is a portrait of Hungary’s intellectual flowering between the wars. He studied in Paris, London, and Budapest; he read voraciously in several languages; he wrote a history of world literature so witty and intelligent that it is still in print today. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not bind himself to a single ideology or literary faction. He was Jewish by birth, Catholic by conversion, and European by temperament. This refusal to belong too easily made him vulnerable in an era that demanded allegiance.
The Fiction of Lightness and Irony
His novels — The Pendragon Legend (1934), Journey by Moonlight (1937), Oliver VII (1942) — resist easy categorization. They are part comedy of manners, part philosophical parable, part melancholy meditation. Journey by Moonlight, his most enduring work, follows Mihály, a Hungarian intellectual who, on honeymoon in Italy, drifts into an existential fugue. The book veers between travelogue and confession, evoking Thomas Mann and Kafka but also something distinctly Hungarian: a sense that life is always both tragic and absurd, that to belong nowhere is a form of destiny.
Scholar and Satirist
Alongside his fiction, Szerb produced formidable works of literary history. His History of World Literature (1941) is remarkable not only for its breadth but for its style — witty, epigrammatic, unafraid to mix scholarship with personal judgment. He could move from Homer to Goethe to Dostoevsky with the ease of a cosmopolitan critic who saw literature as a single conversation, not a series of national silos. That breadth, that refusal to narrow the frame, feels startlingly modern.
The Weight of History
But history did not grant Szerb the cosmopolitan life he imagined. In 1944, Hungary’s anti-Semitic laws stripped him of his university post. Despite his conversion to Catholicism and his prestige as a literary figure, he was deported to a labor camp in Balf. In January 1945, he was murdered there, along with countless others whose names we do not remember. That we remember his is testament not only to the brilliance of his work but to the resilience of literature itself.
Why Szerb Matters Now
To read Szerb today is to encounter a voice that feels uncannily contemporary: ironic yet sincere, sophisticated yet playful, rooted in a time yet restless for a larger belonging. He speaks to our own moment of fractured identities and resurgent nationalisms. Journey by Moonlight, especially, remains a cult classic across Europe — a book that captures the sense of being haunted by youth, by lost friends, by a past that refuses to recede.
The Melancholy of Survival
Antal Szerb is often grouped with Central Europe’s pantheon of tragic writers — Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, Danilo Kiš. Like them, he turned marginality into insight. His work suggests that irony is not evasion but survival, that cosmopolitanism is not a luxury but a necessity, and that literature can hold together what history tears apart.
Antal Szerb: A Timeline
- 1901 – Born in Budapest to a Jewish family.
- 1920s – Studies in Paris, London, and Budapest; earns a doctorate in Hungarian literature.
- 1934 – Publishes The Pendragon Legend, his first novel.
- 1935 – Elected president of the Hungarian Literary Academy at the age of thirty-four.
- 1937 – Releases Journey by Moonlight, now regarded as his masterpiece.
- 1941 – Publishes History of World Literature, still widely read.
- 1942 – Publishes Oliver VII, a satirical fairy tale.
- 1944 – Dismissed from his academic post under anti-Semitic laws; deported to labor service.
- 1945 – Dies in a forced labor camp in Balf, Hungary.
- 1980s–2000s – His novels gain renewed recognition in English translation, achieving cult status.
Suggested Reading
- The Pendragon Legend (1934) — A gothic adventure tinged with parody, set between London and Wales.
- Journey by Moonlight (1937) — His masterpiece, a novel of love, memory, and exile, often compared to Kafka and Mann.
- Oliver VII (1942) — A satirical fairy tale about a king who stages a coup against himself.
- The Queen’s Necklace (1943) — Historical fiction woven around the infamous affair that helped ignite the French Revolution.
- A History of World Literature (1941) — An indispensable work of criticism, still admired for its wit and lucidity.
Closing Reflection
Antal Szerb’s life ended in violence, but his voice endures — urbane, melancholy, unclassifiable. He wrote as if literature were a passport beyond borders, a way of being both inside and outside history. In that sense, he is not simply a Hungarian writer, or even a Central European one, but a writer for anyone who has ever felt estranged, and found in books a form of home.
Find his books here: https://pushkinpress.com/our-authors/antal-szerb/
My World of Interiors 