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Antal Szerb (May 1, 1901, Budapest - January 27, 1945, Balf) was a noted Hungarian scholar and writer. He is recognized as one of the major Hungarian literary personalities of the 20th century. ==Life and work== Szerb was born in 1901 to assimilated Jewish parents in Budapest, but baptized Catholic. He studied Hungarian, German and later English, obtaining a doctorate in 1924. From 1924 to 1929 he lived in France and Italy, also spending a year in London, England from 1929 to 1930. As a student he published essays on Georg Trakl and Stefan George, and quickly established a formidable reputation as a scholar, writing erudite studies of William Blake and Henrik Ibsen among other works. Elected President of the Hungarian Literary Academy in 1933, aged just 32, he published his first novel, ''The Pendragon Legend'' (which draws upon his personal experience of living in Britain) the following year. His second and best-known work, ''Utas és holdvilág'', known in English as ''Journey by Moonlight'', came out in 1937. He was made a Professor of Literature at the University of Szeged the same year. He was twice awarded the ''Baumgarten Prize'', in 1935 and 1937. Szerb also translated books from English, French, and Italian, including works by Anatole France, P. G. Wodehouse, and Hugh Walpole.〔Tezla, Albert. ''Hungarian Authors: A Bibliographical Handbook.'' The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970.〕 In 1941 he published a ''History of World Literature'' which continues to be authoritative today. He also published a volume on novel theory and a book about the history of Hungarian literature. Given numerous chances to escape antisemitic persecution (as late as 1944), he chose to remain in Hungary, where his last novel, a Pirandellian fantasy about a king staging a coup against himself, then having to impersonate himself, ''Oliver VII'', was published in 1942. It was passed off as a translation from the English, as no 'Jewish' work could have been printed at the time. During the 1940s, Szerb faced increasing hostility due to his Jewish background. In 1943, Szerb's History of World Literature was put on a list of forbidden works. During the period of Communist rule, it would also be censored, with the chapter on Soviet literature redacted, and the full version would only be available again in 1990. Szerb was deported to a concentration camp in Balf late in 1944. Admirers of his attempted to save him with falsified papers, but Szerb turned them down, wanting to share the fate of his generation.〔Dalos, György. "Der romantische Aussteiger." ''Die Zeit'', January 22, 2004.〕 He was beaten to death there in January 1945, at the age of 43. He was survived by his wife, Klára Bálint, who died in 1992. 〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=nyrb Antal Szerb )〕 The author, who lived in Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century, is well known for his academic works on literature. In the ten years before the Second World War, he writes two monumental works of literary criticism characterized by a brilliant and ironic style intended for an adult reader rather than an academic public.〔, Poszler György. "Szerb Antal pályakezdése ." ''Akadémiai Kiadó.'', 1965.〕 Beside them, the author works on novellas and novels that still attract the attention of the reader. ''The Pendragon Legend'', ''Journey by Moonlight'' and ''The Queen's Necklace'', for instance, fuse within the plot the aims of the literary critic with the aims of the novel writer. The author gives importance to the exotic in the three novels with a meta-literararian look. In the three novels, the stage of the narrative action is always a European country: the space outside the routinarian Hungary allows the writer to transfigure the unique feats of his characters. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Antal Szerb」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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