Antal Szerb, the Inquisitive Martian and Budapest in the 1930s
Antal Szerb, the Inquisitive Martian and Budapest in the 1930s

Summary/Abstract: We, the present readers of Szerb’s Budapest Guide, are the Martian, the creature from far away. The city today is different, its landmarks are found elsewhere, associations (if any) different than those of Antal Szerb seventy years ago will come to mind when roaming the streets. It is best to read the Guide as if it were the gentle recollections of a distant, sunken world by a Romantic author of the early nineteenth century. Yet Szerb actually intended it as a “persiflage of a tourist guide”, as one critic put it at the time of its publication in 1935.

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