Dezso Kosztolányi – författare

A skillful portrayal of the cruelty and emptiness of bourgeois life, Anna Édes was first published in 1926 and enthusiastically received by the intellectual coffee-house society through which it circulated. The novel was later acknowledged by authors such as Thomas Mann as a model of language and form, and in turn established Dezso Kosztolanyi as one of the most significant writers of Eastern European fiction. Anna is the hard-working and long-suffering heroine, the unhappy maid destroyed by her pitiless employers. Her tragic relationship with them is played out against the political turbulence in Budapest following the First World War. Yet her endurance and revenge are depicted with keen psychological as well as historical insight, becoming, in the words of the translator, "not merely an argument about social conditions but raised to genuine tragedy."

The short stories in this collection are by Austrian and Hungarian authors who were at the height of their powers during the brief, meteoric heyday of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918). A fascinating portrait of a vanished world, which for many was a golden age.

Dans cette sélection de proses brèves - authentiques manifestes - centrées sur le thème de la langue, Dezso Kosztolányi nous livre un véritable traité d''éthique et d''esthétique, souvent impertinent, mais toujours rédigé avec la juste distance nécessaire face à l''émotion, au savoir académique, à l''altérité, sans cesser d''interroger l''énigme du langage et de la beauté pour mieux laisser jaillir la force d''une pensée toujours en mouvement.