Zsigmond Móricz - Hungary's greatest modern novelist. The novel is brimming with vivid detail from the provincial life that Moricz knew so well, and shot through with a sense of the tragic fate of a newly truncated Hungary

Zsigmond Móricz, Be Faithful Unto Death. CEU Press, 1995. [1921.]

Written by Hungary's greatest modern novelist, Be Faithful Unto Death is the moving story of a bright and sensitive schoolboy growing up in an old, established boarding school in the city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. Misi, a dreamer and would-be writer, is falsely accused of stealing a winning lottery ticket. The torments brought on by this incident which he is forced to undergo, and from which he grows, are superbly described, as Stephen Vizinczey's new translation unleashes the full power of Moricz's prose. First published in 1921, the novel is brimming with vivid detail from the provincial life that Moricz knew so well, and shot through with a sense of the tragic fate of a newly truncated Hungary. But ultimately it is the universal quality of the experience captured here, and the author's uncanny ability to rediscover for the reader precisely what it feels like to be that child, which makes this portrait of the artist as a young boy not merely a Hungarian, but an international classic."

Zsigmond Móricz, Torch. Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.



Móricz was born in 1879 in Tiszacsécse, a small village on the Great Plain, the eldest child of a peasant and a daughter of an impoverished Protestant minister. He moved to Budapest in the early 1900s and began working as a journalist. He was a correspondent during the First World War. Móricz is one of the so-called folk (népi – “of the people”) writers, writing about ordinary people. He travelled to the countryside collecting folk material and observing life. His voice feels as if it comes from somebody of an older generation. It is unadorned, grounded, clear-cut, and is after an eternal question of individual in a society. I was of two minds when reading his 1920 novel Relations (Corvina, 2007). I had a feeling that I had read it before, yet I did not. It was predictable, yet that predictability was one of the seasons – you know that autumn will force the trees to bend in the storm. You feel the crisis coming, and you know that Chekhov’s gun will fire. And as you take your eyes off the pages of Relations, you start looking at your own life.
Móricz’s other works available in English include the 1917 Torch (Alfred A. Knopf, 1931) and the 1920 Be Faithful Unto Death (CEU Press, 1995), an autobiographical story of an artist growing up. Be Faithful Unto Death, along with Kosztolányi’s Skylark and Krúdy’s Adventures of Sinbad, was published in the Central European University Press Classics series. The founding editor of the series, Timothy Garton Ash, assembled the list of potential works to be published by following the tradition of the coffeehouse culture almost a century later. Over conversations in the cafes of Budapest and Prague, contemporary writers from Central Europe introduced their ancestors to him. - Leo Kepler