Foreword
This collection of writings by the Hungarian thinker Béla Hamvas seeks to offer a sample of the breadth of his interests and knowledge, in art, literature, music, philosophy, and the history of religions. The reader should keep in mind that the volume brings together texts from different periods of the author. A deep cut occurred, for example, in the period of the Second World War. Called up, Hamvas ended up assigned to the Russian front, helped as an officer in the escape of Jewish citizens sentenced to forced labor, was transferred to Germany, deserted and returned to Budapest, where his apartment in the Remete-hegy area of Buda was bombed. so he lost a large part of his books and manuscripts. After the war, with the arrival of Stalinism to power, he was forced by the new authorities to abandon his position in the municipal library and dedicated himself to working in his brother-in-law’s garden in Szentendre, near the capital. In his writings he refers to this time as the year of perdition, the year of Job.
A decade earlier, in the 1930s, he still aspired to the creation of a spiritual community in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites and in particular the circle around Stefan George in Germany. And, in fact, he founded with the classical philologist Karl Kerényi a circle animated by the classical Greek ideals of heroism and beauty to which writers such as Antal Szerb or László Németh also belonged. The collaboration gave rise to the publication of a magazine called, like the circle itself, Sziget (Island). Some of the texts published here belong to that period of the 1930s: the articles on Schumann, Liszt and Montaigne, as well as “Golden Days”, “The Garden”, “The Temple of Aphaia”, “The Platonism of Writing” . It is certainly no coincidence that the circle was called “Island.” The driving idea was an alliance of thinkers, scholars, writers and artists gathered on an island to keep the flame of the spirit burning in a time of profound political, social and cultural crisis…
*Original content provided by the publisher Subsuelo
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/la-obra-de-una-vida
