Dezső Szabó (writer)

Dezső Szabó (June 10, 1879, in Kolozsvár, Austria-Hungary (present-day Cluj-Napoca, Romania) – January 5, 1945, in Budapest) was a Hungarian linguist, writer, noted mainly for his three-volume novel "Az elsodort falu" ("The Eroded Village") and his pamphlets.

Szabó came to live in Budapest in 1918 and started publishing short essays in the literary revue Nyugat which was the leading newspaper of Hungary's intellectuals.

Arthur Koestler, at the time a high school pupil in Budapest, recalls Szabó as one of the new teachers brought to his school by the revolutionary regime – "A shy, soft spoken, somewhat absent-minded man, he told us of a subject more faraway than the Moon: the daily life of hired agricultural workers in the countryside" [7] Support for the revolution was, however, a brief interlude in Szabó's life, and he soon developed into an outspoken and vehement opponent of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic proclaimed by Béla Kun.

Szabó has been considered the first "intellectual anti-Semite among Hungarian writers",[3] and he was a regular contributor to the journal Virradat, one of the most rabidly antisemitic papers of the inter-war period, in which he published no less than 44 articles during three years.

[12] Apologists for the writer note that in "The Eroded Village" Miklós (a key figure of this main work) says to an old Jewish friend: "If you should know that all my anger comes out from that I know that we depend on each other, because I love you".