Check Out The Burning Of The World: A Memoir Of 1914 Originated By Béla Zombory-Moldován Distributed In Electronic Text

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 Englishlanguage 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 sitelinkJohn Hay Beith, sitelinkRobert Graves, sitelinkEdmund Blunden, sitelinkErnst Jünger, and sitelinkLouis 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 ZomboryMoldováns description of his experiences in the first months of the war is to be valued.
A Hungarian artist, ZomboryMoldován 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 lates.
It was only in his final years that ZomboryMoldován began writing his account of the war, one that he left unfinished at his death in.


What ZomboryMoldován did complete was a description of his personal experiences during the first ten months of the war.
Its 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 ZomboryMoldován is swept up by events and sent into an experience very different from the artists life he describes in his early pages.


ZomboryMoldováns 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.
Its an unreflective account, with much of the wars 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 ZomboryMoldován 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 ZomboryMoldováns 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 longago youth.
Yet the distance of time does little to diminish the value of this book for the underrepresented voice it provides for Englishlanguage readers.
Supplemented by his grandson Peters introduction and endnotes, its 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 AustroHungarian armies.

Many thanks to the New York Books for letting me read this book ahead of its publication in exchange for an honest review.


As a historical document and personal testimony, I think this text has enormous value but I'm not so sure it stands on its own as a piece of literature.
I don't know if the writing's constant choppiness and abruptness is due to the translation or the fact that this piece of writing is a personal journal that was never kept for publication, but the overall effect is one of detachment and distance that ultimately squashes any possibility for real emotional power.


It may have also been a question of authorial voice and editing, I could never fully immerse myself into the narrative flow, being constantly pulled in and out of the account because of the style and the author's own ambivalence towards his surroundings.
In the end, the text was oddly grating when it should have been moving and absorbing,

There must be much more powerful and evocative accounts of the early days of World War I and the "burning" of a world that loses all its familiar marks.
This was riveting and tremendously valuable historically, It is the only firsthand account of WWI I have ever read from a Hungarian, I had the fictionalized account from Kate Seredy's lovely The Singing Tree, But this is a fascinating firstperson account of a sensitive man, an artist, drafted into the officer corps, His actual fighting time as covered in this memoir was short but his account is very moving, This was actually discovered and translated by the author's grandson who also wrote the introduction, Haunting. This compelling memoir by Béla ZomboryMoldován, a Hungarian artist and illustrator, is at once both historically insightful and deeply personal.
It spans the eight months from the outbreak of WWat the end of Julyto the spring of the following year, a period that resulted in sustained losses to the AustroHungarian forces, the nature of which left an indelible mark on Hungary in the years and decades that followed.
Its a remarkable piece of work, very moving in its depiction of the experiences of the war through the reflections of one man.
Highly recommended reading, especially for anyone with an interest in the Great War or the AustroHungarian Empire in general,

You can read my review here:

sitelink wordpress. com/ In this year of the centenary of World War One, it is valuable to recall what happened during those war years when the geography, the culture, the peoples of Europe were changed so drastically and the groundwork for future unrest and war was also laid.
The Burning of the World is one man's journal of his experiences during the first year of the war, the early days, initial battles, being home on leave after injury.


There is a curious feeling of detachment in much of this journal but then it was written without the intention for publication, as a personal reminder of events and life.
Where emotion occasionally erupts most clearly, it seems to be in the form of bitterness during battle and happiness or pleasure when contemplating the natural world or attempting to capture it with his painting while on leave.
All else is reported factually and sometimes with apparent distance,

There is an excellent introduction which explains the historical setting of Hungary in that time, Hungary being the weaker partner of Germany in this war.
It also discusses Bela's wanderings while on leave, the wanderings that seem so detached, According to the introduction,


There are intriguing echoes here of the early twentieth
century texts of the city as locus of alienation and memory.

It is a quintessentially "modern" predicamentdislocation,
the fruitless search to recover a past that was once whole
and charged with meaning.
loc


One example of Bela's reaction on hearing the news of war, He is on vacation at the time,


We sat silently a good while, watching the glittering
sky and listening to the demented rasping of the cicadas.

Everything as it was yesterday, The death of one man, of
a hundred, of a million, is nothing to nature's hurdy
gurdy, Everything goes on as before, Perhaps it is only
man that makes such a fuss about dying,
The dining room had changed, All the usual convivial
noise, larking about and tittering had ceased, The guests
had now gathered at separate tables according to their
nationalities.
loc


So this journal does have its moments to contribute but it does not rise to the emotional highs or cover the emotional depths of others that are written of/in this same time period.



A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review, Bela ZomboryMoldovan was a Hungarian artist called to service as a junior officer in the AustroHungarian army at the outbreak of World War I.
Wounded in the first offensive against the Russians, he spent the rest of the war in a noncombatant role, The Burning of the World is a memoir which relates ZomboryMoldovan's experiences during the first days of fighting and his recovery from his wounds at home in Budapest.
It's an appropriate subject in this the centennial of the war's beginning,

After the war ZomboryMoldovan returned to his life as an artist, Following World War II, after Hungary became part of the Soviet bloc, he ran afoul of the Communist authorities and was forced from his official post as head of the Budapest School of Applied Arts.
It's thought that the writing of this memoir followed this dismissal, when he was unable to work officially and was left to his own painting and private work.
It's also thought the memoir

was intended as merely the beginning of a much larger work, Following his death inthe memoir was found in his papers, It was translated into English by his grandson Peter, who also gave it the title taken from the text, This New York Books edition is the first publication of the work,

Only the first half of the book, the account of ZomboryMoldovan's experiences at the front and his return to Budapest, is truly engaging.
While he was able to convey the effects of the war's beginnings on the country, the first weeks of military service, the move to contact with the Russians, and the initial actions, the prose is a little flat.
He does tell a harrowing story of how he returned wounded to Budapest, largely on his own, But the recovery period, the remainder of the book, is difficult to relate to because it's obscure, and the prose in general lacks energy.
The narrative relates interaction with a swirl of family members and artist colleagues without any real explanation of who they are, The biggest problem may be that ZomboryMoldovan wasn't a writer, and he was unable to give family and friends any depth and unable to give his account enough texture to make it compelling for the reader.
It reads as if the reader is expected to know who these people were, making an imaginative description unnecessary, It reads as if it was a record intended for family, Unpolished as it is, it reads like the papers one finds stuck away in the personal effects of a deceased family member.
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