Ferenc Békássy’s Correspondence with James Strachey
Ferenc Békássy’s Correspondence with James Strachey

Summary/Abstract: Ferenc Békássy belongs to that small but distinct group of people who before the First World War were “at home” in two languages: Hungarian and English. In fact he wrote poetry in both and could have gone on to write even better poems had he not fallen in 1915 during the First World War fighting the Russians. He was only 22 years old at the time, but his death was mourned by Mihály Babits, one of Hungary’s leading poets and also by his best English friend, the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was so fond of young Békássy that in the summer of 1912 he visited him in Western Hungary where the Békássy family owned property.1 It is now also clear that he was instrumental in the publication of a collection of Ferenc Békássy’s verse written in English, under the title Adriatica and Other Poems (The Hogarth Press, London, 1925). In recent years interest in Békássy’s work has increased in his native Hungary2, so his relationship with James Strachey, the younger brother of Lytton Strachey is worth investigating.

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