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 M�ricz's prose. First published in 1921, the novel is brimming with vivid detail from the provincial life that M�ricz 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.
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"It is impossible to read this book without recovering something of the intesity of one's own childhood emotions."
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Hungarian
Original Language: Hungarian
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful book,
By
This review is from: Be Faithful Unto Death (Central European Classics) (Paperback)
I don't see how one of the previous reviewers could complain about the main character of this novel being weak and naive...after all he is a small child! This book is one of the finest depictions of of child's coming of age that I have ever read. The book should not be taken as indicative of Hungarian mentality, but it does reflect the tragic tone of the Hungarian society at the time the book was written: just after World War One. The writer projects these feelings back into an autobiographical child's world of 1889. If you can't understand this book, then you must have forgotten what is was like to be a child: confused by the behavior of adults, often scared, and undoubtedly impressed by your own potential to grow. Another good book by this author, translated into English is "Relations", published by Corvina.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE book to read to understand the Hungarian psyche.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Be Faithful Unto Death (Central European Classics) (Paperback)
Be Faithful Until Death is a classic in Hungary; nearly every Hungarian has read it. A foreigner wanting to understand the Hungarian psyche would be well-advised to read it as well. In the form of a story of an 11-year-old boy, Moricz has captured the essential "world view" of Hungarians. Much of what they feel about themselves, about their history, and about their role in European history is explained by the characters and in the excellent and comprehensive notes. The sympathetic reader can only question whether Moricz has captured the essential Hungarian attitude or if he has only perpetuated it by the book's continuing popularity in its native land. Either way, the contemporary Hungarian attitude IS quintessentially distilled in this novel. Any serious understanding of the Magyar people begins here.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Boy Meets World, Misjudges It and Is in Turn Misjudged,
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This review is from: Be Faithful Unto Death (Central European Classics) (Paperback)
Moricz wrote this novel, autobiographical in its background details, during his 42nd year. Originally serialized, it was published in book form in Hungarian in 1921. It gives us the world (in this case, Hungary in the year 1892) as seen through the eyes of its twelve-year old protagonist, Misi Nyilas. Misi comes from a time, place, and social group representative of one of the finely graded statuses of the semi-feudal society which the Hungarian gentry sought to preserve - he is from a small village on the great plain, where his father is a carpenter and general mechanic whose fortunes fluctuate wildly, making the support of his family of seven an endless trial. Misi's brains are to be his escape from poverty and obscurity, although it is not clear to him if he really wishes to escape the world of his parents whom he loves and admires. These brains bring him to the old and venerated College of Debrecen (an institution central to Hungarian Calvinism) as a scholarship student, setting the stage for a bittersweet story which unfolds during early adolescence. Note that "college" here embraces the fifth through the twelfth grades of secondary education.
The story - one based on events brought about by a false accusation of theft - follows the expected arc of such a "timeless tale" in the setting of a boarding school, but it is in the portrait of the mind and feelings of Misi that Moricz excels, capturing the fluid, intense emotional life of a boy who is perhaps too sensitive for his own good. We see Misi veering between elation, anxiety, hope, and despair in his dealings with the adult world and his classmates (e.g., in his friendship with Gimesi -- equally poor and small of stature, but always firm and defiant -- and his on-again, off-again alliance with the wealthy and somewhat spoiled Orczy). Misi wishes "to know everything, all at once" but is unhappy with the student's life which may or may not be a path to knowledge. His activities beyond the school's walls (tutoring a classmate, reading to a blind man, visiting a family with whom he had boarded) open up new vistas to him: the attractions of women (Bella Doroghy), the mysterious lives of the wealthy (the Orczys), and the bitter dissensions of family life on the verge of disintegration (the Töröks). His involvement in life outside the school also creates the situation that almost brings him down and contributes to his inner confusions about the adult world to which he wishes to belong but which also repels him in its casual betrayals and cruelties. Misi himself is no saint - he commits petty theft as a form of revenge, lies in order to spare himself social embarrassment, and tends to see the whole world melodramatically and solely in terms of its effect on him (these are the natural failings of adolescence). The portrait of the boy does not lapse into idealization (the adolescent as rebellious hero) or sentimentality (the adolescent as pure innocent victim). His story leads him to the choice of a calling - he discovers he wishes to be a writer. Although he cannot say exactly what it is he can or will write about, he believes that it is a lofty and important calling, especially in his native land (where an artist may be considered, without a hint of irony, to be "the voice of the people" or "the conscience of the nation", even a "teacher of mankind"). His most cherished possession is his finely bound notebook with its blank pages, on which he intends to write his first poem or his first story, but which remains empty throughout the course of the novel - in his mind it represents something like an invitation to greatness, which he is certain he will attain in the future. The idea and ideal of the notebook are charged with the same intense emotional swings that characterize all of his thinking, at times pulling him up into an imaginary world of heroic deeds commemorated through poetry and at other times plunging him into agonies of shame over what he perceives to be his humiliating existence. Understanding Misi as Moricz's literary alter-ego allows us to judge the author's own boyish commitment to his future as a writer. In this case the grown man fulfilled and far exceeded his juvenile dreams, although Moricz himself said that he did not find his true voice as an author until his 28th or 29th year, after a decade of churning out works modeled on the quick successes of "genre writers". During the remaining three decades of his life he became prolific, successful, and beloved, in a career that progressed through several phases (including one as the "voice of the peasantry", another as chronicler of small-town life, and yet another as the "dissector of the values of the gentry"; this dissection led him into harsh criticism of that traditional class that was hanging onto its economic and political privileges with a vengeance). "Be Faithful Unto Death" combines elements of all of these phases and is one of the better "coming of age" novels -- a category that forms a distinct stream in the broader spate of European literature -- in any language. The English translation is excellent, as might be expected, since it is by the talented Hungarian-born novelist and critic, Stephen Vizinczey, who, as a post-1956 exile from his homeland, writes in English. Vizinczey also supplies an Introduction and useful end-notes on particular historical allusions in the novel. In this the book is in conformity with the translations of other works chosen for the admirable publication series that goes under the name of "Central European Classics". As long as Vizinczey keeps to literature in general and Moricz's career in particular his remarks are cogent, especially so in his examination of the character of Misi. But this introduction also makes strange departures into history and politics which present an incredibly partial and one-dimensional portrait of Hungary as the "poor eternal victim" of European power politics, a linguistic and cultural orphan floating in and battered by a surrounding sea of unsympathetic nations. Not only is this characterization vituperative in the extreme, it is somewhat inaccurate over the broad span of a millennium, and, worse, it lacks even an iota of self-consciousness (the fortunes of the Magyar nation, or at least its political class, have been up as often as down, and their record as rulers is neither better nor worse than their neighbors'). The reader who has delved into Hungarian history, while understanding the sources of his resentment, will judge Vizinczey's credentials as a historian doubtful (his passing howler about the Roman general Sertorius is symptomatic in this respect). However, in spite of this animus (which might itself be examined in the light of how Moricz's characters philosophize about history, particularly contrasting the "balanced" old geography professor "Nazo" with the fiery young dormitory proctor Nagy) his translation does justice to a wonderful book; in the light of this achievement his sins of omission in the introduction can be considered venial. In an introduction to another Moricz novel available in English translation, "Relations" (sometimes called "The Relatives"), G. F. Cushing brings to light some facts which have a bearing on the work under discussion. Here one reads that the intensity of Misi's final rejection of the College of Debrecen (a place that he had idealized earlier in the story) was meant, according to Moricz himself, to obliquely reflect the bitterness the author felt toward the Horthy regime's attempt to marginalize him because he had supported land-reform undertaken during the brief post-war government of M. Karolyi. Moricz was surprised that his Hungarian readers missed this aspect of the story. This is instructive, for it shows that even the author's intentions in this regard could not "contaminate" the self-contained nature of this well-made novel, which succeeds in its depiction of the turbulent self-consciousness of adolescence without respect to such political considerations.
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