Historical Spotlight: Magda Szabó

This month I have decided to look at the life of Magda Szabó's whose book The Door  I reviewed in May. The character Magda in The Door is based on Szabó and left me wondering more about the author. 

Szabó was born in 1917 in Debrecen, Hungary. Debrecen is the second-largest city in Hungary and is known as the "Calvinist Rome." She was raised in a devout Protestant and intellectual family where Szabó's father taught her to converse in German, English, Latin, and French. She studied Hungarian and Latin at the University of Debrecen. After graduation, she worked at a Calvinist girls school as a Classics teacher during the German and Soviet occupations in Hungary in 1944 and 1945. In 1945 she began to work for the Ministry of Education.

Two years later, in 1947, she married Tibor Szobotka, who was a writer and translator of James Joyce and George Elliot. During this time, she came into contact with the New Moon Group who defined poetry of that generation in Hungary. Her first book of verse The Lamb was published in 1947, and her second collection, written in 1949 Back to the Human, was awarded the Baumgarten Prize, one of Hungary's most prestigious literary awards. However, the award was taken away the same day as Szabó was declared an enemy of the people by the recently installed communist party. That same year she was also fired from the Ministry of Education.

Under Stalinist rule from 1944 to 1956, she was not allowed to publish her works because her writing did not align with the guidelines of Socialist Realism. Instead, her writings are filled with female characters she referred to as "terrible women" because they did not behave in conventional ways. Although she was banned from publishing, Szabó did not stop writing and began to write fiction. In 1958, two years after Stalinist rule ended, her first fiction novel Freskó was released. The next year she won the Jozsef Attalin Prize for her new book The Fawn. Szabó would go on to write Abigail, Katalin Street, The Ancient Well, An Old Fashioned Tale, The Door, as well as verse for children, plays, short stories, and non-fiction. Szabó was also made a member of the European Academy of Sciences and a warden of the Calvinist Theological Seminary in Debrecen.

Szabó has gained great literary fame as she is the most translated Hungarian author with publications in 42 countries and over 30 languages. In 2003 the French translation of The Door won Frances Prix Femina Étanger, and in Hungary, her novel Abigail is ranked #6 is Hungary's version of the BBC's 'Great Read' which lists the 100 favorite books of all time. In 2007 Szabó passed away in her hometown, where she was found with a book in hand. I could not imagine a more fitting end for a woman of such merit. 

Sources:

The New York Review of Books. “Magda Szabó.” 

The New Yorker. “The Hungarian Despair of Magda Szabó’s “The Door.”

Hungarian Literature Online. “The Grande Dame: Magda Szabó- A Portrait.”