Földvári Books

An Unpublished Book

Balázs, Béla

[Printed, and Crossed in ink:] Embermesék és tündérmesék. [In Handwriting:] Emberen innen emberen túl. ([Printed, and Crossed in ink:] Man-Tales and Fairy-Tales. [In Handwriting:] Within Man, Beyond Man.)

Budapest: Márkus Samu Nyomdája, 1911. Press proof of an unpublished book. Printed only on rectos. With corrections in ink on several versos and on almost every printed pages. Numerous inset leaves with holograph corrections. Balázs’s name and address in ink on flyleaf by his hand. In original green cloth. 179, (1) leaves. In fine condition.

Seven short stories by Béla Balázs (1884–1949) the Hungarian writer, poet, film maker and critic.

This collection has never been published. From this proof only the last story “Történet a Lógody-utcáról, a tavaszról, a halálról és a messzeségről” (Story About Lógody Street, the Spring, the Death and the Distance) has been published in 1912 (Balázs lived in Lógody street until 1912, on the flyleaf his later address is written). It was published by Jenő Gömöri whose handwritten note on the title page of this story is saying: “Only this should be set. Gömöri. Reduce it into 32 pages”.

“Csend" (Silence) has been puplished in 1908 in the literary magazine “Nyugat”. “Ibolya” has only published in the magazine “Renaissance” in 1910, later Balázs has never compiled it into any his collections, and it has never been published since. The other stories were published in books of collected short stories.

A unique piece.

Béla Balázs (1884–1949) was a Hungarian-Jewish film critic, aesthete, writer and poet. He is known as the librettist of Béla Bartók’s “Bluebeard's Castle” and the writer of the scenario for Bartók’s ballet “The Wooden Prince”. During his university studies in Budapest he became close friend to Zoltán Kodály, Béla Bartók and Georg (György) Lukács. He continued his studies in Paris and Berlin where he attended Georg Simmel’s lectures. In World War I he volunteered for the Hungarian army and served at the front. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 he fled to Vienna where he started to write film reviews for the newspaper “Der Tag”. His first book on film, “Der Sichtbare Mensch” (The Visible Man) was published in this period in Vienna in 1924. The book had influence on Russian film makers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. His second book on film “Der Geist des Films” was published in Berlin, where he moved in 1926. Balázs wrote the screenplay for G. W. Pabst’s film of “Die Dreigroschenoper”, and worked together with Leni Riefenstahl making the film “Das Blaue Licht”. In the early 1930’s he was invited to Moscow to make a movie about the Hungarian Revolution in 1919. He stayed in the Soviet Union, taught film aesthetics at Moscow’s State Film Institute until 1945 when he returned to Budapest. He was involved rebuilding the film industry, started to teach at the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts. His last work was the screenplay of Géza von Radványi’s film “Valahol Európában” (It Happened in Europe) in 1948

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Price: €6,500.00