Bela Zombory-Moldovan (1885–1967)

Readers seeking a firsthand account of the First World War have no shortage of memoirs from which to choose. Thanks to the growth of literacy in Europe over the previous decades, most soldiers marched into battle equipped educationally with the means to describe their experiences in writing. Even as the war raged many rushed their accounts into print, inaugurating a genre that only grew in the years after the war as veterans detailed their service and its impact upon them. Though the quality of these works varied, they all provided accounts that shared the authenticity that came with being participants in momentous events.

For the English-language reader, though, there is an inherent bias in the options available to them, in that the overwhelming majority of them deal with service on the Western Front. This is an understandable consequence of having two major combatants fighting on that front for whom English was their primary language, coupled with the translations of works in other languages from the associated interest in it. Thus, while readers interesting in reading about the war in France can turn to the memoirs by John Hay Beith, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, Ernst Jünger, and Louis Barthas to name just a few, anyone seeking accounts in English about the war on other fronts has a far more limited range from which to choose.

This is one of the reasons why Béla Zombory-Moldován’s description of his experiences in the first months of the war is to be valued. A Hungarian artist, Zombory-Moldován was among the many hundreds of thousands called up at the start of the war. Sent with his unit to Galicia, he was wounded in combat in the first months of fighting and sent home to convalesce. After surviving the war in a series of training and administrative postings, he returned to his life as a painter and art teacher until dismissed from his post after the Communists’ takeover of his country in the late 1940s. It was only in his final years that Zombory-Moldován began writing his account of the war, one that he left unfinished at his death in 1967.

What Zombory-Moldován did complete was a description of his personal experiences during the first ten months of the war. It’s an extremely impressionistic account, which recounts his activities and interactions with others but with little context. The effect is almost dreamlike in its result, with an elegiac sense of place but very little sense of time. The experiences of months come across as those of a few days or weeks, as Zombory-Moldován is swept up by events and sent into an experience very different from the artist’s life he describes in his early pages.

Zombory-Moldován’s conveys nicely the disruption caused by the war and the heady early days when men felt themselves marching off to adventure. These particularly stand out from the later pages, in which the author is a scarred veteran haunting the places of his prewar life. It’s an unreflective account, with much of the war’s effects on the author conveyed by his reaction to his encounters with the people and places of his past, and the reaction of his family to seeing him after his return from the front. What Zombory-Moldován focuses instead is the lament for an idyllic bygone life, one that now seems to him in the distant past despite having been lived just a short time before.

Written as it was in Zombory-Moldován’s final years, it is difficult to say whether this reflected his thoughts at that time or whether they were the sentiments of an old man reminiscing nostalgically about his long-ago youth. Yet the distance of time does little to diminish the value of this book for the underrepresented voice it provides for English-language readers. Supplemented by his grandson Peter’s introduction and endnotes, it’s a welcome addition to the collection of available accounts of the war, and should be sought out in particular by those interested in the Eastern Front of the war and accounts of service in the Austro-Hungarian armies.… (lisätietoja)

Magyar gentleman artist serves as an officer in the first major battles on the eastern front in late summer 1914. He survives, but his entire life is changed forever.

This is a newly discovered memoir which sheds light on the vanished way of life of high bourgeois society in "Royal" Hungary. It has been beautifully translated into English by the author's grandson, and was published for the first time anywhere in the world in 2014, by the exemplary NYRB Press. The subtlety took me by surprise.… (lisätietoja)

This brief memoir was charming and chilling by turns. The author's grandson, Peter Zombory-Moldován, found it in a locked box and translated and edited it (letting the readers know in the introduction that there is more he is saving for another day). It begins with 30-year-old Béla, an artist and art teacher, learning while on vacation with friends that he is being called up to serve as a low-level officer in the war which is just beginning. It then details the brief few days before he leaves to report for duty, the all-too-short training period, a march towards the front, and then the gripping and horrifying description of the first (of several) battles between the troops of Austria-Hungary (in this case, Hungary) and Russia at Rava Ruska in what was then Galicia. He is wounded, the troops retreat, he eventually gets back to Budapest where he is treated for his head wound and not really treated for his psychological distress. He is put on leave for three months, and attempts to regain his equilibrium, but he cannot paint and doesn't want to see his old friends. Finally, he goes to the seashore and there finds some peace of mind and paints again. There the memoir ends, but his grandson tells us in the introduction that Béla did not again serve on the front lines.

The strengths of this memoir are its portrait of the life of a relatively privileged young man who is thrust into a war he never expected, the description of the confusion of battle, and the insight into the artistic life of pre-war Budapest (the grandson helpfully footnotes the names of multiple artists and writers). One point that interested me was that the jokes the people in the army told were about Jews (Cohen and Weiss); they weren't mean or antisemitic jokes (most, as might be expected, were about sex), but it felt odd to me that these non-Jewish Hungarians were telling jokes about Jews.… (lisätietoja)