Presentation on Dezső Szabó’s style
As the first paper presentation in our seminar series focusing on specific themes, Daniel Abondolo introduced work by Dezső Szabó, one of the most influential writers and extreme right-wing thinkers of the interwar period, on Friday, 2 February. The discussion centred exclusively on Szabó’s style as a prose writer, intentionally disregarding what Daniel called Szabó’s “own brand of right-wing craziness”. This is not to say that Szabó’s political thinking is unworthy of our attention: he sympathised with any kind of extremism in contemporaneous political thinking, loathing equally Germans and Jews, disapproving both of the West and the Eastern origins of Hungarians. For that reason Szabó is hard to read for the native speaker who is simultaneously appalled by the content and put off by Szabó’s writing which comes across as furfangos (‘wily, tricky’) in Hungarian. On the other hand, this also explains Szabó’s unparalleled appeal to a certain type of political attitude, that of the extreme right, from the 1930s to this day.
The greatest merit of Daniel’s approach to Szabó’s work is that he looks at style without being biased by biographical data or Szabó’s political engagement, thus revealing Szabó’s worthiness as a writer and as homo aestheticus in the purest sense. Another merit of the talk was that it not only lists features of style but discovers patterns in Szabó’s artistic use of language and explores the “contradictory stylistic traits which pull Szabó’s language in opposite directions”. The talk was based on an article on which Daniel is currently working.