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The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914
The budding young Hungarian artist Béla Zombory-Moldován was abroad on holiday when World War I broke out in August 1914. Called up by the army, he soon found himself hundreds of miles away, advancing on Russian lines—or perhaps on his own lines—and facing relentless rifle and artillery fire. Badly wounded, he returned to normal life, which now struck him as unspeakably strange. He had witnessed, he realized, the end of a way of life, of a whole world.
Published here for the first time in any language, this extraordinary reminiscence is a deeply moving addition to the literature of the terrible war that defined the shape of the twentieth century.
Published here for the first time in any language, this extraordinary reminiscence is a deeply moving addition to the literature of the terrible war that defined the shape of the twentieth century.
184 pages, Paperback
First published August 5, 2014
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February 12, 2016
Last year I read nine novels about World War I from authors of the various participant countries. None of them captured the act of death in war as vividly as this abbreviated memoir.
Béla Zombory-Moldován was a Hungarian artist, ‘called-up’ as the War begins. He was made an ensign, in command of troops, although nothing except class seems to be the prerequisite for his assignment. He acquitted himself well, if only because he did not run at the worst of it. Wounded, a head wound, and he leaves the War. But no one really leaves the War.
His body would heal, eventually, but he would not serve in battle again. But first, recuperating on leave, he traveled to the Adriatic. There, at the coastal town of Lovrana, he clambered alone among the rocks and observed the marvelous spectacle of perfect waves being formed……
I was filled with happiness. The war had ceased to exist. There was quiet, there was peace; I was alone, and nature scattered her beauty before me. All I had to do was pick it up and present it to mankind, in all his folly.
He took out his watercolors – British watercolors, for those who like irony – and watching wave after wave crashing against a rocky spur he began to paint, "hoping to abstract the wave."
Béla Zombory-Moldován was a Hungarian artist, ‘called-up’ as the War begins. He was made an ensign, in command of troops, although nothing except class seems to be the prerequisite for his assignment. He acquitted himself well, if only because he did not run at the worst of it. Wounded, a head wound, and he leaves the War. But no one really leaves the War.
His body would heal, eventually, but he would not serve in battle again. But first, recuperating on leave, he traveled to the Adriatic. There, at the coastal town of Lovrana, he clambered alone among the rocks and observed the marvelous spectacle of perfect waves being formed……
I was filled with happiness. The war had ceased to exist. There was quiet, there was peace; I was alone, and nature scattered her beauty before me. All I had to do was pick it up and present it to mankind, in all his folly.
He took out his watercolors – British watercolors, for those who like irony – and watching wave after wave crashing against a rocky spur he began to paint, "hoping to abstract the wave."
June 2, 2014
Many thanks to the New York Review of 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.
December 4, 2021
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.
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.
December 4, 2014
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" predicament--dislocation,
the fruitless search to recover a past that was once whole
and charged with meaning. (loc 150)
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 273)
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.
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" predicament--dislocation,
the fruitless search to recover a past that was once whole
and charged with meaning. (loc 150)
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 273)
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.
November 14, 2014
This memoir by Béla Zombory-Moldován is both elegiac and deeply affecting. It begins in late July 1914 at an Adriatic resort, where the author is celebrating with friends. This pleasant idyll is cruelly broken on July 28th, when word is received that war has been declared on Serbia. Zombory-Moldován at 29 is at the start of a career as a successful artist and illustrator and feels no euphoria or excitement about going back into the Austro-Hungarian Army (where, 5 years earlier, he had fulfilled his obligatory year of military service). After all, he is a man "filled with plans and the urge to create... I was born to create, and I loathe destruction of any kind."
Nevertheless, after a brief spell at home and exploring many of his usual haunts, Zombory-Moldován reports to his unit (the 31st Regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army) early in August and spends the remainder of the month in training. Due to his prior military experience, he is given officer rank (Ensign) and put in charge of one of the regiment's platoons. Zombory-Moldován's descriptions of the various personalities in his unit and the surrounding villages and landscape are fascinating, shedding considerable light on the dynamics of a polyglot army (Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Croats, Austrians) and a society now living on borrowed time. And indeed, time is running out. Zombory-Moldován's unit is on the march by early September to Galicia, the easternmost province of the country bordering Czarist Russia to fight the Russians (who had entered the war in support of its ally, Serbia). His introduction to combat is at once jarring, chaotic, and traumatic. Men and horses are cut down indiscriminately by heavy artillery fire and the staccato chatter of rifles and machine guns. Zombory-Moldován himself is wounded in the head, which temporarily affects some of his motor skills. He is lucky to avoid capture in the general retreat that is ordered by the high command.
Home for Zombory-Moldován, while welcome, is "unspeakably strange." His affliction, as the war went on, would acquire the term "shell shock" which soldiers on other fronts under constant shell fire would also have to endure. For the rest of the country as yet untouched by war, people try either to lead as much of a normal life as possible when it becomes clear to them, after the initial excitement of late July 1914, that the war would not be a quick one. Or others among the civilian populace (e.g. Zombory-Moldován's Uncle Béla, whom he visited during his convalescent leave) wax ever patriotic, believing in ultimate victory for the Empire.
Months pass and Zombory-Moldován remains restless and aimless. Before he is expected back by the army for an evaluation to re-assess his fitness for a return to active service, Zombory-Moldován travels by train to Fiume on the Adriatic Sea, where he stays with the Mauser family. The roar of the sea and the surrounding area are a soothing balm for Zombory-Moldován. He takes up painting again with relish. He is also joined some time later by his fellow artist and close friend Ervin.
The 3 weeks spent in Fiume bring joy and a renewed sense of inner peace for Zombory-Moldován. But as it begins to become clear that Italy may soon enter the war against its ally Austria-Hungary (the date is March 1915), he has to return home and back to reality. "It was time to say goodbye - or rather to part. I thanked [the Mausers] sincerely for all they had done to lift me up from my fallen state. Mama Mauser was moved to tears. So, a little, was I.
" 'Auf Wiedersehen am nachsten Winter. Im Weihnachten ist hier auch sehr schon.'
"I promised that I would.
"I had to rise early, as my train left Fiume in the morning. But the whole family had beaten me to it. I left the drawings I had done of the girls as a memento, and I had ordered two huge bouquets of roses, one for each day I had spent with them: red roses for Elsa [the youngest daughter], white ones for Miri. They put them in their windows, from where they waved to me as long as they could still see anything of my departing cab.
"Auf Wiedersehen.
"I stood by the window all the way to Lic. From here, a thousand meters up, I caught one last glimpse of the panorama of islands lost in cobalt blue and violet, and the endless sea."
I was wholly absorbed by this memoir, which comes HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Nevertheless, after a brief spell at home and exploring many of his usual haunts, Zombory-Moldován reports to his unit (the 31st Regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army) early in August and spends the remainder of the month in training. Due to his prior military experience, he is given officer rank (Ensign) and put in charge of one of the regiment's platoons. Zombory-Moldován's descriptions of the various personalities in his unit and the surrounding villages and landscape are fascinating, shedding considerable light on the dynamics of a polyglot army (Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Croats, Austrians) and a society now living on borrowed time. And indeed, time is running out. Zombory-Moldován's unit is on the march by early September to Galicia, the easternmost province of the country bordering Czarist Russia to fight the Russians (who had entered the war in support of its ally, Serbia). His introduction to combat is at once jarring, chaotic, and traumatic. Men and horses are cut down indiscriminately by heavy artillery fire and the staccato chatter of rifles and machine guns. Zombory-Moldován himself is wounded in the head, which temporarily affects some of his motor skills. He is lucky to avoid capture in the general retreat that is ordered by the high command.
Home for Zombory-Moldován, while welcome, is "unspeakably strange." His affliction, as the war went on, would acquire the term "shell shock" which soldiers on other fronts under constant shell fire would also have to endure. For the rest of the country as yet untouched by war, people try either to lead as much of a normal life as possible when it becomes clear to them, after the initial excitement of late July 1914, that the war would not be a quick one. Or others among the civilian populace (e.g. Zombory-Moldován's Uncle Béla, whom he visited during his convalescent leave) wax ever patriotic, believing in ultimate victory for the Empire.
Months pass and Zombory-Moldován remains restless and aimless. Before he is expected back by the army for an evaluation to re-assess his fitness for a return to active service, Zombory-Moldován travels by train to Fiume on the Adriatic Sea, where he stays with the Mauser family. The roar of the sea and the surrounding area are a soothing balm for Zombory-Moldován. He takes up painting again with relish. He is also joined some time later by his fellow artist and close friend Ervin.
The 3 weeks spent in Fiume bring joy and a renewed sense of inner peace for Zombory-Moldován. But as it begins to become clear that Italy may soon enter the war against its ally Austria-Hungary (the date is March 1915), he has to return home and back to reality. "It was time to say goodbye - or rather to part. I thanked [the Mausers] sincerely for all they had done to lift me up from my fallen state. Mama Mauser was moved to tears. So, a little, was I.
" 'Auf Wiedersehen am nachsten Winter. Im Weihnachten ist hier auch sehr schon.'
"I promised that I would.
"I had to rise early, as my train left Fiume in the morning. But the whole family had beaten me to it. I left the drawings I had done of the girls as a memento, and I had ordered two huge bouquets of roses, one for each day I had spent with them: red roses for Elsa [the youngest daughter], white ones for Miri. They put them in their windows, from where they waved to me as long as they could still see anything of my departing cab.
"Auf Wiedersehen.
"I stood by the window all the way to Lic. From here, a thousand meters up, I caught one last glimpse of the panorama of islands lost in cobalt blue and violet, and the endless sea."
I was wholly absorbed by this memoir, which comes HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
December 11, 2014
3 Stars is a bit generous because I was expecting something more substantial on the fighting that occurred in the east in August-September 1914. There is little of that here, a very small part of the book. The book was gripping at the start as BZM goes for an early morning swim to ease his hangover only to meet the beach attendant bringing shocking news:
“Good morning.”
He stopped. “Well, I say goodbye now.” He struggled a little with the Hungarian.
“Why? You’re not leaving, are you?”
“Leaving? I must go in the army. There is going to be war.”
“What are you talking about?” Aghast, I stared at him.
“Please. The notice is there on the wall of the bathing station.” As if in a trance, I grasped the hand he was holding out to me; mechanically, I thanked him for his services and gave him a five-korona piece.
Then I raced to the bathing station. It was all shut up, and on its wall was a notice which listed call-up dates by year of birth. I was to report for service at Veszprém—Veszprém!—with the Thirty-First Regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army by the fourth of August. I stared at the poster as if I had just suffered a stroke, reading it over and over, until I realized that I was just looking at the words rather than taking in the meaning.
Only one word mattered: war.
There had been no war in Hungary for almost seventy years. When my grandfather spoke of 1848, we would listen with bored half smiles: it was all so alien to us, so far removed from us. This was the twentieth century! Europe at equilibrium in the era of enlightenment and democratic humanism. It seemed impossible that a dispute should be decided by fighting. This couldn’t be true! They were going to shoot at me, or stab me, or I was going to shoot at a complete stranger with whom I had no quarrel, whom I didn’t even know, who would be mourned just as I would be, into whom I would jab a bayonet fixed to a six-kilo rifle and feel the cracking and juddering as it tore his chest open. “A soldier dies, that others may live." Fine words! But I am twenty-nine, at the start of my career, filled with plans and the urge to create, with some early success. I want to work! I was born to create, and I loathe destruction of any kind.
My legs carried me on, as if automatically, along the familiar path. I had reached the bay. I stood transfixed by the sight of a sailing boat, gazing at its yard. What a pretty gallows it would make! One could hang a good half dozen men from that boom.
BZM relates how the holiday crowd on the Adriatic beach resort suddenly separates into national groups when they had been freely mingling the day before. The rest of the memoir covers his journey to war, being wounded and recovering. The author was an aspiring artist, one of the coffeehouse elite of the day. An honest memoir filled with innocence lost but also the condescension, paternalism and prejudice of that class toward peasants, Jews, Armenians and "others". I can see why the NYRB added it to their list.
“Good morning.”
He stopped. “Well, I say goodbye now.” He struggled a little with the Hungarian.
“Why? You’re not leaving, are you?”
“Leaving? I must go in the army. There is going to be war.”
“What are you talking about?” Aghast, I stared at him.
“Please. The notice is there on the wall of the bathing station.” As if in a trance, I grasped the hand he was holding out to me; mechanically, I thanked him for his services and gave him a five-korona piece.
Then I raced to the bathing station. It was all shut up, and on its wall was a notice which listed call-up dates by year of birth. I was to report for service at Veszprém—Veszprém!—with the Thirty-First Regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army by the fourth of August. I stared at the poster as if I had just suffered a stroke, reading it over and over, until I realized that I was just looking at the words rather than taking in the meaning.
Only one word mattered: war.
There had been no war in Hungary for almost seventy years. When my grandfather spoke of 1848, we would listen with bored half smiles: it was all so alien to us, so far removed from us. This was the twentieth century! Europe at equilibrium in the era of enlightenment and democratic humanism. It seemed impossible that a dispute should be decided by fighting. This couldn’t be true! They were going to shoot at me, or stab me, or I was going to shoot at a complete stranger with whom I had no quarrel, whom I didn’t even know, who would be mourned just as I would be, into whom I would jab a bayonet fixed to a six-kilo rifle and feel the cracking and juddering as it tore his chest open. “A soldier dies, that others may live." Fine words! But I am twenty-nine, at the start of my career, filled with plans and the urge to create, with some early success. I want to work! I was born to create, and I loathe destruction of any kind.
My legs carried me on, as if automatically, along the familiar path. I had reached the bay. I stood transfixed by the sight of a sailing boat, gazing at its yard. What a pretty gallows it would make! One could hang a good half dozen men from that boom.
BZM relates how the holiday crowd on the Adriatic beach resort suddenly separates into national groups when they had been freely mingling the day before. The rest of the memoir covers his journey to war, being wounded and recovering. The author was an aspiring artist, one of the coffeehouse elite of the day. An honest memoir filled with innocence lost but also the condescension, paternalism and prejudice of that class toward peasants, Jews, Armenians and "others". I can see why the NYRB added it to their list.
April 19, 2017
An interesting little memoir covering WWI for a few reasons.
The introduction gave a short and understandable history of Hungary up to WWI and includes the astonishing number of Hungarian casualties suffered during the war.
The book describes the early days of WWI from the Hungarian soldier's viewpoint including how woefully inadequate and outdated their training, order of battle and equipment were.
The book covers the confusion of wounded soldier suffering from PTSD who returns to a world were nothing has changed.
And the writer was an educated man, an artist. His writing was expressive, small nuances were highlighted and he retained his sense of humour.
The introduction gave a short and understandable history of Hungary up to WWI and includes the astonishing number of Hungarian casualties suffered during the war.
The book describes the early days of WWI from the Hungarian soldier's viewpoint including how woefully inadequate and outdated their training, order of battle and equipment were.
The book covers the confusion of wounded soldier suffering from PTSD who returns to a world were nothing has changed.
And the writer was an educated man, an artist. His writing was expressive, small nuances were highlighted and he retained his sense of humour.
December 31, 2015
In this memoir of the first eight months of World War I, the author, a Hungarian painter from the educated classes, called up to be an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, moves from guarded optimism over the outcome of the war, to a resigned pessimism after being nearly killed in one of the first battles. He sees countless casualties, gets injured and sent home to recuperate, and then wanders around the countryside as he tries to heal so he can return to active duty.
The prose is elegiac for a world crumbling around him. Zombory-Moldovan, the author, succinctly notes the swiftly changing mood of a populace promised easy and quick victory, only to succumb to the realities of modern warfare. As an artist, he is particularly sensitive and attuned to things he may never see again, to people's emotions and actions, and his own mortality. Never slipping into morbidity, he gives the reader a rather bleak picture of his future and that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Zombory-Moldovan never finished his memoir, and became a non-entity during the years of Communism. It's a wistful and almost sad affair, this memoir, but touchingly beautiful, causing me to tear up on a few occasions. The translation by his English grandson is lucid and flowing. Worth reading to get the viewpoint from an officer of the Central Powers.
The prose is elegiac for a world crumbling around him. Zombory-Moldovan, the author, succinctly notes the swiftly changing mood of a populace promised easy and quick victory, only to succumb to the realities of modern warfare. As an artist, he is particularly sensitive and attuned to things he may never see again, to people's emotions and actions, and his own mortality. Never slipping into morbidity, he gives the reader a rather bleak picture of his future and that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Zombory-Moldovan never finished his memoir, and became a non-entity during the years of Communism. It's a wistful and almost sad affair, this memoir, but touchingly beautiful, causing me to tear up on a few occasions. The translation by his English grandson is lucid and flowing. Worth reading to get the viewpoint from an officer of the Central Powers.
October 29, 2020
Every few generations acquires a time setting query — ‘Where were you when….?’ 9/11 occurred? Moon landing? JFK assassination ? Pearl Harbor?
For Europeans living with the diplomatic tensions of the era, in August 1914 it was, Where were you when you heard ‘There is War ‘ ?
A 28 year old reservist lieutenant in the Royal Hungarian Army managed to record his first eventful 100 days of service which led him to the Eastern Front against Russia. This journal was passed down through his family until his grandson translated, edited and created this glimpse into the events of those hectic early days at home and at the front.
If this was published after the war ended in the 1920s, we’d probably never have heard of it, as then it would have been a common tale, shelved in the archives. However being a contemporary publication (2014) it gives us a thoughtful insight, as if chatting with a veteran of the times.
The grandson projects a few phrases into the translation such as ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ which I don’t believe the author would have been using, however he does provide a compelling introduction, setting the scene for the tale, be sure to read that !
For Europeans living with the diplomatic tensions of the era, in August 1914 it was, Where were you when you heard ‘There is War ‘ ?
A 28 year old reservist lieutenant in the Royal Hungarian Army managed to record his first eventful 100 days of service which led him to the Eastern Front against Russia. This journal was passed down through his family until his grandson translated, edited and created this glimpse into the events of those hectic early days at home and at the front.
If this was published after the war ended in the 1920s, we’d probably never have heard of it, as then it would have been a common tale, shelved in the archives. However being a contemporary publication (2014) it gives us a thoughtful insight, as if chatting with a veteran of the times.
The grandson projects a few phrases into the translation such as ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ which I don’t believe the author would have been using, however he does provide a compelling introduction, setting the scene for the tale, be sure to read that !
September 7, 2022
There’s a canon of World War I reminiscence. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” blazed the trail, selling nearly 2m copies in its first year of publication, 1929. An avalanche of testimonials followed, several – including those by Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain, as well as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) – having stayed in print ever since. What marks this genre is that the books are not written from the helicopter perspective of politicians or commanders, but by junior officers or others on the ground, or in the forest, in which grand strategy falls away to reveal ground-level chaos and suffering. Literature becomes a form of therapy, or healing, for the writers. There’s a standard trajectory – from innocence
to disenchantment, via black humour, horror and the grotesque – that set the mould for later
testimony to conflicts ranging from World War II to Vietnam.
Published in 2014 on the centennial of the outbreak of World War I, “The Burning of the World” is a 135-page book (plus Introduction, Epilogue, and Notes) that is remarkable, both for the novel itself, but special credit must go to the grandson of the author, Peter Zombory-Moldovan, who has not only translated from a series of difficult original documents, but has edited and added copious informative notes, reflecting surely years of research into the characters and events described in his grandfather’s work. I would go so far as to almost describe the book as a joint endeavor, co-authored. I don’t believe that Béla would, or could reasonably object to this. Thank you Peter, thank you Béla.
This haunting, heartbreaking, and beautifully written memoir should stand above most memoirs of this awful war. Béla Zombory-Moldovan was a young Hungarian painter, graphic artist, and teaching instructor living with his parents, who was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. His artistic background is evident in the text. Béla has a painter’s eye for colour, for example when the author’s unit marches through an August wood: “The boughs were a deep green, but the springs of barberry, the wild rosehips, and the leaves of the sumac were already glowing in the flaming colors of carmine, cinnabar, minium, and orange.”
Béla Zombory-Moldován fought in the battle of Rava-Ruska (today located in Ukraine almost at the Polish border), which became an Austro-Hungarian rout. At the climax of the book, his unit is shelled with shrapnel and explosive from formidably accurate Russian field guns. The Hungarians, armed with four guns per brigade against the Russians’ 12, were trapped in the open without entrenching tools and had to scrabble burrows in the sandy soil with mess tins. The sand often rendered their guns inoperable. Béla was hit in the head, and evacuated on a peasant cart in scenes reminiscent of the campaigns of Napoleon.
From here on, as he returned to an indifferent Budapest, Béla was diagnosed as suffering from “traumatic neurosis.” He revisited the coast to resume painting, so toward the end of the book the tone of the narrative lightens. Béla eventually returned to military service but not to combat duties; later, in 1944, he would risk his own life by sheltering a Jewish family. Under the communists he was stripped of his job, and died in genteel poverty in 1967. Nonetheless, his story was one not only of madness and massacre but also of regeneration. He was wounded while serving on the Russian front and spent most of the war in a noncombatant role. But his relatively short exposure to combat is conveyed with an unforgettable intensity.
But this is not another chronicle of trench warfare. On the eastern front, the conflict was a war of maneuver and mobility, and Béla Zombory-Moldovan stresses the constant movement of the lines of the opposing armies and the confusion magnified by the constant sound of artillery and machine-gun fire. Unlike many recounters of war on the western front, Béla sees little soldierly comradeship. His was a polyglot army composed of the myriad ethnic groups of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who often were unable to communicate with each other on the battlefield. What they shared was confusion about the purpose and horror at the savage consequences of the war. This is a deeply moving account of a young man’s short but terrible plunge into an inferno.
The book is interspersed with antisemitism in the form of jokes and reflections on Jewish soldiers and more generally on Hungary of his time. On one occasion, Béla is offered a drink by a Jewish villager, but in an exceptional act of aggression threatens the Jew when he realizes he is expected to pay for the drink he has consumed. Antisemitism bubbles to the surface.
While in service, when faced with extreme difficulties, the author and other unit commanders routinely ordered one of the soldiers in their platoon to tell jokes to lighten the mood and, incidentally or not, all of the five jokes recalled in this memoir make fun of Jews. Three of these jokes are recited during a two-day long exhaustive march of the regiment from Veszprém, where they reported for duty, to the railway station of Tapolca, fifty kilometers to the southwest; the fourth is shared by the men while awaiting further commands in the firing lines of the lost battle of Rava-Ruska, with dying comrades and headless corpses scattered around them; the fifth, a word game, is recounted by the narrator himself just after being repatriated to Budapest following his injury in the battlefield. Four out of the five jokes are based on anti-Semitic stereotypes commonly referred to at the time about the excessive sexuality or the foolishness of the Jews, but the fifth already bears the marks of the post-war tendency to accuse the Jews of the defeat. This exchange, “Cohen meets Weiss. ‘So how are you?’ 'Exemptionally well!'” (90), implies that during the war the cunning Jews managed to avoid service in the army. Apparently, the frustrated painter who, while convalescing in Budapest, experienced the general indifference of the city dwellers of whichever denomination toward the war directed his anger at the Jews specifically.
But these anti-Jewish jokes suggest that it was perhaps hatred of Jews that helped to keep the reluctant battalion together, because none of the soldiers, Jews or Christians, really wanted to be there. In his introduction to The Burning of the World, Peter Zombory-Moldovan considers what he terms his grandfather’s “faint disdain [for Jews] characteristic of his class and age” (xiv). The memoir pre-dated the Nazi holocaust of European Jewry.
This "disdain" is not astonishing at all: the fragments of information extracted from the memoir and from the grandson’s introduction suggest that Béla Zombory-Moldován, who was most probably born into an underprivileged gentry family in Munkács, presently Mukačevo in western Ukraine and at that time a far-flung region of the Kingdom of Hungary bordering Austrian-ruled Galicia, made every effort to get into the Hungarian ruling classes that strongly looked down on minorities.
At the outbreak of the war he was barely at the start of a promising career, so no wonder that he sought to identify himself with the values and norms of the ruling elite. Even before the war, the young painter had earned his living by sending illustrations to Dörmögő Dömötör, a weekly for children issued by the Singer and Wolfner Publishing House, whose wide range of magazines supported and propagated the official ideology of the governing elite; and he had also been employed by the Budapest School of Applied Arts as a teacher. No wonder, then, that he expressed his dislike of modern tendencies in art, including those exemplified in the poetry of Endre Ady, whose philosemitism and critical stance toward the regime equally irritated the ruling classes (73).
It is Israeli writer and poet Avigdor Hameiri (1890-1970) who recounts most at length about the horrors of World War I for the Hungarian soldiers, the miserable poverty of civilians in Carpathian-Ruthenia and Galicia, and about the pervasive anti-Semitism he confronted. Born Avigdor Feuerstein in a small village near Munkács he was conscripted into the Hungarian Army in 1914 and became a commissioned officer. For approximately two years he served in Galicia, was captured by the Russians in 1916 and freed in 1917 due to the Russian Revolution. In his Hebrew memoir/documentary novel Hashigaon Hagadol (1929), which appeared in English as The Great Madness (New York: Vantage Press, 1952), but, ironically, in Hungarian only in 2009 (János Kőbányai, ed. A nagy őrület. Budapest: Múlt és Jövő), Hameiri also describes Jewish heroism that belies the traditional stereotypes of cowardly Jews. Moreover, he specifically discusses the shared patriotism of Jewish soldiers and other Habsburg subjects in the war in 1914. The diversity of ethnicity in this historical context contributes to thought on identity formation and in majority-minority relations in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. As Peter shows in his map of central Europe in 1914, national boundaries changed much in the following century and ethnic identities will have contributed to these changes.
For those interested, there are hundreds of testimonies in the public domain, many accessible on the Europeana 1914-1918 website at http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en
Other memoires and testimonies appeared in 2014, including:
To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May, edited by Gerry Harrison, William Collins, RRP£16.99, 304 pages
Poilu: The World War I Notebook of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914- 1918, translated by Edward Strauss, Yale University Press, RRP£25/$35, 472 pages
In writing this review I have drawn on the insights by Dr. Judit Kádár in a 2016 article published in Hungarian Cultural Studies.
to disenchantment, via black humour, horror and the grotesque – that set the mould for later
testimony to conflicts ranging from World War II to Vietnam.
Published in 2014 on the centennial of the outbreak of World War I, “The Burning of the World” is a 135-page book (plus Introduction, Epilogue, and Notes) that is remarkable, both for the novel itself, but special credit must go to the grandson of the author, Peter Zombory-Moldovan, who has not only translated from a series of difficult original documents, but has edited and added copious informative notes, reflecting surely years of research into the characters and events described in his grandfather’s work. I would go so far as to almost describe the book as a joint endeavor, co-authored. I don’t believe that Béla would, or could reasonably object to this. Thank you Peter, thank you Béla.
This haunting, heartbreaking, and beautifully written memoir should stand above most memoirs of this awful war. Béla Zombory-Moldovan was a young Hungarian painter, graphic artist, and teaching instructor living with his parents, who was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. His artistic background is evident in the text. Béla has a painter’s eye for colour, for example when the author’s unit marches through an August wood: “The boughs were a deep green, but the springs of barberry, the wild rosehips, and the leaves of the sumac were already glowing in the flaming colors of carmine, cinnabar, minium, and orange.”
Béla Zombory-Moldován fought in the battle of Rava-Ruska (today located in Ukraine almost at the Polish border), which became an Austro-Hungarian rout. At the climax of the book, his unit is shelled with shrapnel and explosive from formidably accurate Russian field guns. The Hungarians, armed with four guns per brigade against the Russians’ 12, were trapped in the open without entrenching tools and had to scrabble burrows in the sandy soil with mess tins. The sand often rendered their guns inoperable. Béla was hit in the head, and evacuated on a peasant cart in scenes reminiscent of the campaigns of Napoleon.
From here on, as he returned to an indifferent Budapest, Béla was diagnosed as suffering from “traumatic neurosis.” He revisited the coast to resume painting, so toward the end of the book the tone of the narrative lightens. Béla eventually returned to military service but not to combat duties; later, in 1944, he would risk his own life by sheltering a Jewish family. Under the communists he was stripped of his job, and died in genteel poverty in 1967. Nonetheless, his story was one not only of madness and massacre but also of regeneration. He was wounded while serving on the Russian front and spent most of the war in a noncombatant role. But his relatively short exposure to combat is conveyed with an unforgettable intensity.
But this is not another chronicle of trench warfare. On the eastern front, the conflict was a war of maneuver and mobility, and Béla Zombory-Moldovan stresses the constant movement of the lines of the opposing armies and the confusion magnified by the constant sound of artillery and machine-gun fire. Unlike many recounters of war on the western front, Béla sees little soldierly comradeship. His was a polyglot army composed of the myriad ethnic groups of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who often were unable to communicate with each other on the battlefield. What they shared was confusion about the purpose and horror at the savage consequences of the war. This is a deeply moving account of a young man’s short but terrible plunge into an inferno.
The book is interspersed with antisemitism in the form of jokes and reflections on Jewish soldiers and more generally on Hungary of his time. On one occasion, Béla is offered a drink by a Jewish villager, but in an exceptional act of aggression threatens the Jew when he realizes he is expected to pay for the drink he has consumed. Antisemitism bubbles to the surface.
While in service, when faced with extreme difficulties, the author and other unit commanders routinely ordered one of the soldiers in their platoon to tell jokes to lighten the mood and, incidentally or not, all of the five jokes recalled in this memoir make fun of Jews. Three of these jokes are recited during a two-day long exhaustive march of the regiment from Veszprém, where they reported for duty, to the railway station of Tapolca, fifty kilometers to the southwest; the fourth is shared by the men while awaiting further commands in the firing lines of the lost battle of Rava-Ruska, with dying comrades and headless corpses scattered around them; the fifth, a word game, is recounted by the narrator himself just after being repatriated to Budapest following his injury in the battlefield. Four out of the five jokes are based on anti-Semitic stereotypes commonly referred to at the time about the excessive sexuality or the foolishness of the Jews, but the fifth already bears the marks of the post-war tendency to accuse the Jews of the defeat. This exchange, “Cohen meets Weiss. ‘So how are you?’ 'Exemptionally well!'” (90), implies that during the war the cunning Jews managed to avoid service in the army. Apparently, the frustrated painter who, while convalescing in Budapest, experienced the general indifference of the city dwellers of whichever denomination toward the war directed his anger at the Jews specifically.
But these anti-Jewish jokes suggest that it was perhaps hatred of Jews that helped to keep the reluctant battalion together, because none of the soldiers, Jews or Christians, really wanted to be there. In his introduction to The Burning of the World, Peter Zombory-Moldovan considers what he terms his grandfather’s “faint disdain [for Jews] characteristic of his class and age” (xiv). The memoir pre-dated the Nazi holocaust of European Jewry.
This "disdain" is not astonishing at all: the fragments of information extracted from the memoir and from the grandson’s introduction suggest that Béla Zombory-Moldován, who was most probably born into an underprivileged gentry family in Munkács, presently Mukačevo in western Ukraine and at that time a far-flung region of the Kingdom of Hungary bordering Austrian-ruled Galicia, made every effort to get into the Hungarian ruling classes that strongly looked down on minorities.
At the outbreak of the war he was barely at the start of a promising career, so no wonder that he sought to identify himself with the values and norms of the ruling elite. Even before the war, the young painter had earned his living by sending illustrations to Dörmögő Dömötör, a weekly for children issued by the Singer and Wolfner Publishing House, whose wide range of magazines supported and propagated the official ideology of the governing elite; and he had also been employed by the Budapest School of Applied Arts as a teacher. No wonder, then, that he expressed his dislike of modern tendencies in art, including those exemplified in the poetry of Endre Ady, whose philosemitism and critical stance toward the regime equally irritated the ruling classes (73).
It is Israeli writer and poet Avigdor Hameiri (1890-1970) who recounts most at length about the horrors of World War I for the Hungarian soldiers, the miserable poverty of civilians in Carpathian-Ruthenia and Galicia, and about the pervasive anti-Semitism he confronted. Born Avigdor Feuerstein in a small village near Munkács he was conscripted into the Hungarian Army in 1914 and became a commissioned officer. For approximately two years he served in Galicia, was captured by the Russians in 1916 and freed in 1917 due to the Russian Revolution. In his Hebrew memoir/documentary novel Hashigaon Hagadol (1929), which appeared in English as The Great Madness (New York: Vantage Press, 1952), but, ironically, in Hungarian only in 2009 (János Kőbányai, ed. A nagy őrület. Budapest: Múlt és Jövő), Hameiri also describes Jewish heroism that belies the traditional stereotypes of cowardly Jews. Moreover, he specifically discusses the shared patriotism of Jewish soldiers and other Habsburg subjects in the war in 1914. The diversity of ethnicity in this historical context contributes to thought on identity formation and in majority-minority relations in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. As Peter shows in his map of central Europe in 1914, national boundaries changed much in the following century and ethnic identities will have contributed to these changes.
For those interested, there are hundreds of testimonies in the public domain, many accessible on the Europeana 1914-1918 website at http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en
Other memoires and testimonies appeared in 2014, including:
To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May, edited by Gerry Harrison, William Collins, RRP£16.99, 304 pages
Poilu: The World War I Notebook of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914- 1918, translated by Edward Strauss, Yale University Press, RRP£25/$35, 472 pages
In writing this review I have drawn on the insights by Dr. Judit Kádár in a 2016 article published in Hungarian Cultural Studies.
February 5, 2021
A short but moving memoir written by a young artist from Hungary who was drafted as an officer into the Royal Hungarian Army in World War I, and later wounded at the Battle of Rava Ruska. There is only one chapter about the battle; much of the story is about his preparation for departure and also his convalescence after his return, suffering from what we would now recognize as PTSD, although there was no name or official diagnosis for it for Zombory-Moldován. Instead, although he realizes how dramatically the world has changed, he tries to rest and recover while on leave in Italy, but (in one of the book's most poignant scenes) suffers from shock at the sudden sound and movement of an earthquake in his vacation villa. I think it is at this point that he realizes that the effects of war will never leave him completely, and that full recovery is tenuous at best.
I'll share a few paragraphs from the excellent translation, which give a sense of the alienation that Zombory-Moldován felt upon his return to Budapest, his disappointment that life seems to go on with no deeper understanding from those on the home front of the devastation of war:
"I wasn't getting much done in the studio. I came up meaning to start work; but I hadn't counted on the fact that my entire emotional and mental world had taken a different path, down which, for the time being, I could make no progress.
"Although my mind teemed with images of war, I didn't know where to begin. I had already made notes and compositional sketches for a dozen subjects, but they were confused and contradictory. I tried to distinguish them by leaving behind the bloody horrors, the limbless, headless corpses that are the real face of war. Not that: enough blood had been painted. However paradoxical it seemed, war created something. It brought about extraordinary qualities of spirit which could only be read about, in the cynical world of home, in the works of fervent popular writers. It is these higher feelings which make men human; they are what raises mankind, with all its wickedness, above the beasts.
"I too had experienced examples of this: wounded men holding each other up, a soldier burying his fallen comrade, a Russian soldier giving water to the wounded, and countless others. I occupied myself with such subjects, but it was too soon for anything to come to fruition. At any rate, they were completely alien to the spirit I had found at home" (96).
Definitely recommended for those interested in learning more about the First World War, particularly if, like me, the bulk of your knowledge comes from the experience of Americans and western Europeans. His descriptive language is remarkable, both of the horrors of battle, and especially of the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna of the places he visits in his travels.
I'll share a few paragraphs from the excellent translation, which give a sense of the alienation that Zombory-Moldován felt upon his return to Budapest, his disappointment that life seems to go on with no deeper understanding from those on the home front of the devastation of war:
"I wasn't getting much done in the studio. I came up meaning to start work; but I hadn't counted on the fact that my entire emotional and mental world had taken a different path, down which, for the time being, I could make no progress.
"Although my mind teemed with images of war, I didn't know where to begin. I had already made notes and compositional sketches for a dozen subjects, but they were confused and contradictory. I tried to distinguish them by leaving behind the bloody horrors, the limbless, headless corpses that are the real face of war. Not that: enough blood had been painted. However paradoxical it seemed, war created something. It brought about extraordinary qualities of spirit which could only be read about, in the cynical world of home, in the works of fervent popular writers. It is these higher feelings which make men human; they are what raises mankind, with all its wickedness, above the beasts.
"I too had experienced examples of this: wounded men holding each other up, a soldier burying his fallen comrade, a Russian soldier giving water to the wounded, and countless others. I occupied myself with such subjects, but it was too soon for anything to come to fruition. At any rate, they were completely alien to the spirit I had found at home" (96).
Definitely recommended for those interested in learning more about the First World War, particularly if, like me, the bulk of your knowledge comes from the experience of Americans and western Europeans. His descriptive language is remarkable, both of the horrors of battle, and especially of the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna of the places he visits in his travels.
October 18, 2016
“Auf Wiedersehen am nächsten Winter. Im Weihnachten ist hier auch sehr schön.”
As far as bourgeois World War I memoirs go, The Burning of the World is about as good as it gets. Set in the first year of the war from the Hungarian perspective, Zombory-Moldovan provides an officer’s perspective of the early hopeful year of the war from a country whose war literature is not exactly well-known. The memoir’s prose is exquisite and the author’s grandson must be commended for essentially creating a new piece of art in his own right with this translation.
Of course, like many other bourgeois pieces of literature, this memoir is marked with an unmistakable degree of solipsism. Zombory’s initial grievance with the war is that it interrupts his daily life and his ability to develop his career and his only concern after returning home from the war is escaping from his memories into a highly idealized notion of nature characteristic of the 19th-century Romantics. Although this escape seems successful to him, close readers of the memoir will see that this is obviously not the case.
But despite this text’s solipsism, perhaps it is precisely this quality that makes it such a successful aesthetic work. Unlike other WWI texts like Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, The Burning of the World never attempts to step beyond the bounds of what it is capable of representing and thus offers an intensely moving experience of the depths of this soldier’s subjectivity. The text’s very limitations are what sustain it as a truly moving tragedy that does not rely on the excesses of other pieces of war literature. Highly recommended.
As far as bourgeois World War I memoirs go, The Burning of the World is about as good as it gets. Set in the first year of the war from the Hungarian perspective, Zombory-Moldovan provides an officer’s perspective of the early hopeful year of the war from a country whose war literature is not exactly well-known. The memoir’s prose is exquisite and the author’s grandson must be commended for essentially creating a new piece of art in his own right with this translation.
Of course, like many other bourgeois pieces of literature, this memoir is marked with an unmistakable degree of solipsism. Zombory’s initial grievance with the war is that it interrupts his daily life and his ability to develop his career and his only concern after returning home from the war is escaping from his memories into a highly idealized notion of nature characteristic of the 19th-century Romantics. Although this escape seems successful to him, close readers of the memoir will see that this is obviously not the case.
But despite this text’s solipsism, perhaps it is precisely this quality that makes it such a successful aesthetic work. Unlike other WWI texts like Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, The Burning of the World never attempts to step beyond the bounds of what it is capable of representing and thus offers an intensely moving experience of the depths of this soldier’s subjectivity. The text’s very limitations are what sustain it as a truly moving tragedy that does not rely on the excesses of other pieces of war literature. Highly recommended.
December 20, 2015
A book about the end of an era and the loss of innocence. The author is a young Hungarian, called up at the start of world war one to fight for Austro-Hungary, a polyglot empire doomed to die as nationalism takes an ever greater hold in Europe.
The author is an artist and he frames much of the book in a very visual way, one which contrasts with the gore and reality of war. He is soon wounded in a pointless engagement - men in shallow foxholes against field guns and shrapnel.
Invalided home, he feels detached from the world he had left only a few short weeks before. He cannot relate to the civvies with their optimism and patriotism, and runs into shirkers and draft dodgers everywhere. A short recuperation in Austrian Istria (soon to be Italian/Yugoslav) allows him to reflect on the beauty and power of nature, then the book ends as he is about to go back to the front.
I know the author survives WW1, it would have been good to hear more about his war experiences.
A short but powerful book
The author is an artist and he frames much of the book in a very visual way, one which contrasts with the gore and reality of war. He is soon wounded in a pointless engagement - men in shallow foxholes against field guns and shrapnel.
Invalided home, he feels detached from the world he had left only a few short weeks before. He cannot relate to the civvies with their optimism and patriotism, and runs into shirkers and draft dodgers everywhere. A short recuperation in Austrian Istria (soon to be Italian/Yugoslav) allows him to reflect on the beauty and power of nature, then the book ends as he is about to go back to the front.
I know the author survives WW1, it would have been good to hear more about his war experiences.
A short but powerful book
May 19, 2021
A fine “found memoir” of one young, artistic and temperamentally conservative Hungarian man’s experience fighting on the rarely-mentioned eastern front against the Russians in the First World War, translated by that man’s grandson. I recommend the introduction as well, since it provides helpful perspective on the plight of Austria-Hungary on the eve of its final disaster. The chaos and absurdity and senseless violence of battle are all here, but I think the most memorable part of the book is our narrator’s recovery in hospital and at home and on the Adriatic coast after he sustained a serious injury fighting in Galicia (in what’s now western Ukraine). It’s palpable, that sense of a world slipping through your fingers, of an era calamitously passing, all around you, like a hail storm.
A good companion piece, perhaps, to Eleanor Perenyi's More Was Lost or Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and Water.
3.5 stars
A good companion piece, perhaps, to Eleanor Perenyi's More Was Lost or Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and Water.
3.5 stars
June 2, 2018
This compelling memoir by Béla Zombory-Moldován, a Hungarian artist and illustrator, is at once both historically insightful and deeply personal. It spans the eight months from the outbreak of WW1 at the end of July 1914 to the spring of the following year, a period that resulted in sustained losses to the Austro-Hungarian forces, the nature of which left an indelible mark on Hungary in the years and decades that followed. It’s 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 Austro-Hungarian Empire in general.
You can read my review here:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2018...
You can read my review here:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2018...
April 24, 2018
A very interesting memoir.
This book zips along like lightning. The author writes engagingly and seems very interesting.
The heart of the book to me was its account of the failure of the Habsburg Army in the opening campaigns of WWI. "The Burning of the World" is one of the few books to point out that the Imperial Russian Army was a formidable force at the start of the war. We see how quickly the Habsburg Army falls apart.
Also of interest is the memoir's description of its author's mental state after he is invalided out of the Habsburg Army. A good, early description of PTSD.
This will broaden anyone's knowledge of the First World War.
This book zips along like lightning. The author writes engagingly and seems very interesting.
The heart of the book to me was its account of the failure of the Habsburg Army in the opening campaigns of WWI. "The Burning of the World" is one of the few books to point out that the Imperial Russian Army was a formidable force at the start of the war. We see how quickly the Habsburg Army falls apart.
Also of interest is the memoir's description of its author's mental state after he is invalided out of the Habsburg Army. A good, early description of PTSD.
This will broaden anyone's knowledge of the First World War.
August 30, 2014
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 first-person 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.
May 11, 2021
obsessed w the narrative style of this book,,, an underrated gem of war writing, to be sure! bzm is so dramatic + self-deprecating, i think i would have adored him as a person :")
May 19, 2015
After reading Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear, a fictionalized account of his experiences in WWI, I read an entirely different account written from the Hungarian view: The Burning of the World: a Memoir of 1914 by Béla Zombory-Moldován. While the narrator in Fear conveys the initial, naïve sentiment that many men looked forward to the war as an “adventure,” a break in their monotonous lives, Béla Zombory-Moldován (Béla from this point on) makes it quite clear that the war arrived as an unwelcome interruption. Fear and The Burning of the World are such completely different books, while still on the same topic of WWI, that they act as good companion books to be read fairly close together. That said, it’s probably inevitable that we identify with one book more than the other.
Béla, a twenty-nine-year-old artist, and a member of a privileged Austro-Hungarian gentry family, is enjoying himself on holiday on an Adriatic beach, taking a solitary swim and trying to shake off the effects of the wine drunk the night before when he spies someone walking towards him with “some haste.” It’s through this man, the bathing attendant, that Béla receives the startling news that war has been declared and that a list giving “call-updates by year of birth” has been posted to the bathing station wall. The news comes so quickly and so jarringly rips apart Béla’s holiday, that we are almost as shocked as he is, and while the manner in which the news is conveyed may be simple, this is a moment that Béla, and anyone else who survived the war, will clearly never forget.
I stared at the poster as if I had just suffered a stroke, reading it over and over, until I realized that I was just looking at words rather than taking in the meaning.
Although Béla has a few precious days before he must report for duty, he can no longer enjoy his holiday. A page has been turned, and life which previously seemed carefree, can no longer be enjoyed. But Béla isn’t the only one altered by the news. The rhetoric, drama, and nationalism of war has invaded even lunch at the hotel dining room:
The dining room had changed. All the usual convivial noise, larking about and tittering had ceased. The guests had gathered at separate tables according to their nationalities. Groups which had previously spread themselves around now clustered together. Sereghy and his wife had come over to join us. Czechs, Serbs, Croats. Germans–all sat apart. People leaned in together over table and discussed events with animated gestures and low voices.
[..]
Everyone spoke in their mother tongue as is encyphering what they had to say.
The nationalistic segregation spreads, and it’s worse by dinner time. Hungarians who had not previously spoken to Béla join his table, the area no longer feels safe, everyone wants to return home.
There was something almost ostentatious now about the separation of nationalities. The Slavs huddles together. The Germans looked the least concerned: a huge country with a fearsome army.
These unique observations which show the narrator’s world changing with the speed of a natural disaster underscore the idea that the carefree holiday has turned into something completely different–the holidaymakers may be potential enemies. Béla grasps immediately, the flash of the bigger picture, that while some people speculate that the war will be over before it really begins, it may not be so simple:
This war may just be the first act of a global tragedy. It’s as if someone were struggling against an angry sea, while behind his back towers an immense wall of ice, ready to collapse onto him at any moment. This is the socialist revolution which will, one day, fall with full force on nations weakened by war. The war could be the least of our problems. Socialism has been agitating and organizing for the last hundred years. It’s just waiting for the opportunity to take power. Maybe it would be better if it did: one of its basic principles is to put an end to wars of conquest. Maybe it’ll be they who stop this war, if political theory and practice coincide for once.
Given what happened to the Austro-Hungarian empire, this is an interesting comment made by a man “caught up in the maelstrom [of] the fateful year when everything fell apart.”
Béla returns home to Budapest, says his farewells to his family and his favoured locations. Initially, he wears a “mask” of normality and “confident gaiety” which finally drops. Béla joins the Thirty-First regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army as an ensign and since he’s there early, he witnesses the “torrent of men streaming” in from all over the region. The idiocy begins immediately when the regiment is ordered to make a seventy-five kilometer march, which as it turns out, is right into the Russian lines at Rava Ruska. The mouth to hell opens there in the wood as Béla encounters piles of abandoned rifles, clothing, and the corpses of dead Hungarians. Initially forbidden to dig foxholes “as this ‘leads to cowardice and undermines discipline’” Béla ignores that order after the officer who gave it is blown to shreds, and Béla digs in using a tin lid, while other men use their hands.
The term cannon fodder leaps to mind in the sheer insanity of shoving exhausted, inexperienced men right into the line of fire. The sense of chaos reigns, and Béla’s first encounter, almost surreal in its rapid, blinding intensity, is over almost before it begins. Always there’s Béla’s unused sword, part of his natty uniform getting in the way; it’s an incongruous, antiquated and as it turns out inconvenient accessory.
There’s a sense of privilege to Béla’s miraculous tale. Had he not been an officer with a “Slovak lad called Jóska” as a burly batman it seems doubtful he would have survived. As an officer, he fares better–better food, better billets, and throughout it all Jóska acts as Béla’s personal bodyguard ensuring that he gets home, gets food, acting as his feet, arms and legs when Béla is too weak to fend for himself. It’s in Béla’s attitude to Jóska, that the sense of privilege grates. The patronizing divide between classes gapes wide. To Béla, Jóska is a peasant, a “man-child”:
I owed a debt of gratitude to this healthy resourceful lad: though I knew that this personal service had been an opportunity for a bit of bunking-off on his part.
And:
My mother received Jóska without much enthusiasm; she seemed anxious. “Where shall we put him?”
“All he needs is a straw mattress at night, which can be put away somewhere during the day. He’s a good decent lad, and I’ve got a lot to thank him for. Let him rest here for a week as well. Then he’ll go back to the regiment.”
Jóska bathes and attends Béla and on the third day, Béla tells Jóska to return to the regiment.
The Burning of the World, as a memoir, is a much more personal document than Chevallier’s fictionalized account of his WWI experiences. Whereas Fear is openly anti-war, The Burning of the World is not. Béla shows the chaos, lack of preparation and stupidity of those in command, but his complaints about“armchair generals” are directed towards ineptitude, archaic attitudes and methods of fighting, but he never bitterly questions the hierarchy of the society in which he lives. Whereas Chevallier’s narrator Jean notes “those who wanted all this” make public appearances on “palace balconies,” and for Jean, this was the moment when “the first–and last–machine gun should have done its work, emptied its belt of bullets on to that emperor and his advisors.” Similarly he notes, “in the revolution, they sent incompetent generals to the guillotine, an excellent measure.”
The Burning of the World covers a period of about eight months. At 184 pages, we are left wishing for more, but the introduction explains what happened to Béla for the rest of the war and beyond. The book includes some maps, a painting from Béla, and a wonderful photograph of a large group of people on holiday at Novi Vinodolski–“three days before Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia and the start of the first World War. ” It’s peculiar how some people can dominate a photograph, and in this photo, Béla, a man of his time and his class, stands out.
The manuscript for The Burning of the World was found in 2013 “locked away among family papers,” and what a wonderful find this is. Translated and with an introduction by the author’s grandson Peter Zombory-Moldován who notes that “by the end of the war, Austro-Hungarian casualties were almost seven million out of a population (in 1914) of fifty-one million.”
Béla, a twenty-nine-year-old artist, and a member of a privileged Austro-Hungarian gentry family, is enjoying himself on holiday on an Adriatic beach, taking a solitary swim and trying to shake off the effects of the wine drunk the night before when he spies someone walking towards him with “some haste.” It’s through this man, the bathing attendant, that Béla receives the startling news that war has been declared and that a list giving “call-updates by year of birth” has been posted to the bathing station wall. The news comes so quickly and so jarringly rips apart Béla’s holiday, that we are almost as shocked as he is, and while the manner in which the news is conveyed may be simple, this is a moment that Béla, and anyone else who survived the war, will clearly never forget.
I stared at the poster as if I had just suffered a stroke, reading it over and over, until I realized that I was just looking at words rather than taking in the meaning.
Although Béla has a few precious days before he must report for duty, he can no longer enjoy his holiday. A page has been turned, and life which previously seemed carefree, can no longer be enjoyed. But Béla isn’t the only one altered by the news. The rhetoric, drama, and nationalism of war has invaded even lunch at the hotel dining room:
The dining room had changed. All the usual convivial noise, larking about and tittering had ceased. The guests had gathered at separate tables according to their nationalities. Groups which had previously spread themselves around now clustered together. Sereghy and his wife had come over to join us. Czechs, Serbs, Croats. Germans–all sat apart. People leaned in together over table and discussed events with animated gestures and low voices.
[..]
Everyone spoke in their mother tongue as is encyphering what they had to say.
The nationalistic segregation spreads, and it’s worse by dinner time. Hungarians who had not previously spoken to Béla join his table, the area no longer feels safe, everyone wants to return home.
There was something almost ostentatious now about the separation of nationalities. The Slavs huddles together. The Germans looked the least concerned: a huge country with a fearsome army.
These unique observations which show the narrator’s world changing with the speed of a natural disaster underscore the idea that the carefree holiday has turned into something completely different–the holidaymakers may be potential enemies. Béla grasps immediately, the flash of the bigger picture, that while some people speculate that the war will be over before it really begins, it may not be so simple:
This war may just be the first act of a global tragedy. It’s as if someone were struggling against an angry sea, while behind his back towers an immense wall of ice, ready to collapse onto him at any moment. This is the socialist revolution which will, one day, fall with full force on nations weakened by war. The war could be the least of our problems. Socialism has been agitating and organizing for the last hundred years. It’s just waiting for the opportunity to take power. Maybe it would be better if it did: one of its basic principles is to put an end to wars of conquest. Maybe it’ll be they who stop this war, if political theory and practice coincide for once.
Given what happened to the Austro-Hungarian empire, this is an interesting comment made by a man “caught up in the maelstrom [of] the fateful year when everything fell apart.”
Béla returns home to Budapest, says his farewells to his family and his favoured locations. Initially, he wears a “mask” of normality and “confident gaiety” which finally drops. Béla joins the Thirty-First regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army as an ensign and since he’s there early, he witnesses the “torrent of men streaming” in from all over the region. The idiocy begins immediately when the regiment is ordered to make a seventy-five kilometer march, which as it turns out, is right into the Russian lines at Rava Ruska. The mouth to hell opens there in the wood as Béla encounters piles of abandoned rifles, clothing, and the corpses of dead Hungarians. Initially forbidden to dig foxholes “as this ‘leads to cowardice and undermines discipline’” Béla ignores that order after the officer who gave it is blown to shreds, and Béla digs in using a tin lid, while other men use their hands.
The term cannon fodder leaps to mind in the sheer insanity of shoving exhausted, inexperienced men right into the line of fire. The sense of chaos reigns, and Béla’s first encounter, almost surreal in its rapid, blinding intensity, is over almost before it begins. Always there’s Béla’s unused sword, part of his natty uniform getting in the way; it’s an incongruous, antiquated and as it turns out inconvenient accessory.
There’s a sense of privilege to Béla’s miraculous tale. Had he not been an officer with a “Slovak lad called Jóska” as a burly batman it seems doubtful he would have survived. As an officer, he fares better–better food, better billets, and throughout it all Jóska acts as Béla’s personal bodyguard ensuring that he gets home, gets food, acting as his feet, arms and legs when Béla is too weak to fend for himself. It’s in Béla’s attitude to Jóska, that the sense of privilege grates. The patronizing divide between classes gapes wide. To Béla, Jóska is a peasant, a “man-child”:
I owed a debt of gratitude to this healthy resourceful lad: though I knew that this personal service had been an opportunity for a bit of bunking-off on his part.
And:
My mother received Jóska without much enthusiasm; she seemed anxious. “Where shall we put him?”
“All he needs is a straw mattress at night, which can be put away somewhere during the day. He’s a good decent lad, and I’ve got a lot to thank him for. Let him rest here for a week as well. Then he’ll go back to the regiment.”
Jóska bathes and attends Béla and on the third day, Béla tells Jóska to return to the regiment.
The Burning of the World, as a memoir, is a much more personal document than Chevallier’s fictionalized account of his WWI experiences. Whereas Fear is openly anti-war, The Burning of the World is not. Béla shows the chaos, lack of preparation and stupidity of those in command, but his complaints about“armchair generals” are directed towards ineptitude, archaic attitudes and methods of fighting, but he never bitterly questions the hierarchy of the society in which he lives. Whereas Chevallier’s narrator Jean notes “those who wanted all this” make public appearances on “palace balconies,” and for Jean, this was the moment when “the first–and last–machine gun should have done its work, emptied its belt of bullets on to that emperor and his advisors.” Similarly he notes, “in the revolution, they sent incompetent generals to the guillotine, an excellent measure.”
The Burning of the World covers a period of about eight months. At 184 pages, we are left wishing for more, but the introduction explains what happened to Béla for the rest of the war and beyond. The book includes some maps, a painting from Béla, and a wonderful photograph of a large group of people on holiday at Novi Vinodolski–“three days before Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia and the start of the first World War. ” It’s peculiar how some people can dominate a photograph, and in this photo, Béla, a man of his time and his class, stands out.
The manuscript for The Burning of the World was found in 2013 “locked away among family papers,” and what a wonderful find this is. Translated and with an introduction by the author’s grandson Peter Zombory-Moldován who notes that “by the end of the war, Austro-Hungarian casualties were almost seven million out of a population (in 1914) of fifty-one million.”
December 29, 2014
This is a short memoir of an artist at war. Béla Zombora-Mondován was 29 in the summer of 1914 when he was conscripted. He had been leading a happy, carefree, upper-class, leisurely, worry-free life and was building a reputation as a visual and portrait artist in Hungary, the vastly different and larger Hungary, with access to the Adriatic unlike today, that formed part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, that was decimated as a result of WWI. He was an only child and deeply loved by his father and step-mother, his mother having died during his childhood. This is his personal account, only discovered in 2012 amongst his papers, translated as a contribution to the historical record by his grandson, Peter, of eight pivotal months in 1914. The translation loses none of the vivid descriptions penned by Moldován.
He describes his fear and the trauma that his involvement on the Eastern front had on him. He also describes the dichotomy in views between those at home and those serving in the Army. The Eastern Front is little written about and was theatre of war quite different from the Western Front, with which we associate trench warfare that eventually stagnated into stalemate. The fighting on the Eastern Front was on wide open landscape, quite vicious and the casualties horrendous. In the first two weeks of fighting, the Empire's casualties numbered 400,000 killed, wounded or captured, rising to 850,000 by the end of 1914. By war's end, casualties were 7 million out of a population, in 1914, of 51 million. Britain had casualties of 2.5 million out of a population of 46 million, by comparison. An average of more than 4,500 Austro-Hungarian soldiers were killed, wounded or captured on every single day of the Great War.
The war defined this young man, never leaving him with the nightmares remaining with him for the rest of his life - on his deathbed, he was shouting "get down, get down! They're shooting from there!". There is an excellent introduction which proves valuable to the reader, by Peter written in May 2014, that sets the historical context for the ensuing memoir, as well as giving some background description of the life that his grandfather led both before and after the War.
The sights and sounds of the war shocked him. He does, by surviving with his life intact, escape the carnage, but, his wounds, both mental and physical, result in him being sent home. Like the vast majority of men who served in any army on any front of this was, he is emotionally, if not physically, damaged. Today, he would have been diagnosed with PTSD. He was not sent back to the Front, but, served the rest of the War in non-combatant roles. This memoir, a great and valuable discovery by his family, adds to the rich cannon of literature on World War I. It is written, perhaps in a different mode, since Zombory-Moldován was an artist and it is his eye for detail that sets this memoir apart.
What attracted me to this book was, firstly, it's describing the almost forgotten Eastern Front, and secondly, the nature of it having been hidden away by the writer for so many years and it only recently having been discovered. What came across to me was that Moldován was witnessing the beginning of the end of a way of life, the beginning of the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and with it the diminution of Hungary in terms of size and power into a land-locked state, with it's rich culture and racial diversity (including the genocide of the Jewish population) to be subsequently destroyed by post-WWI internal Nazism and external Communist forces for much of the 20th Century.
I would recommend this book as an additional memoir of the First World War, but, told from a different point of view and context - that of the Eastern Front.
It is a short book and a relatively easy read, but, will add to one's knowledge of the Great War and reaffirm my belief, having read a number of books in 2014 during the centenary of WWI, that the ordinary people of Europe on both sides were the principle casualties of this human carnage and that the historical landscape of Europe was changed utterly.
He describes his fear and the trauma that his involvement on the Eastern front had on him. He also describes the dichotomy in views between those at home and those serving in the Army. The Eastern Front is little written about and was theatre of war quite different from the Western Front, with which we associate trench warfare that eventually stagnated into stalemate. The fighting on the Eastern Front was on wide open landscape, quite vicious and the casualties horrendous. In the first two weeks of fighting, the Empire's casualties numbered 400,000 killed, wounded or captured, rising to 850,000 by the end of 1914. By war's end, casualties were 7 million out of a population, in 1914, of 51 million. Britain had casualties of 2.5 million out of a population of 46 million, by comparison. An average of more than 4,500 Austro-Hungarian soldiers were killed, wounded or captured on every single day of the Great War.
The war defined this young man, never leaving him with the nightmares remaining with him for the rest of his life - on his deathbed, he was shouting "get down, get down! They're shooting from there!". There is an excellent introduction which proves valuable to the reader, by Peter written in May 2014, that sets the historical context for the ensuing memoir, as well as giving some background description of the life that his grandfather led both before and after the War.
The sights and sounds of the war shocked him. He does, by surviving with his life intact, escape the carnage, but, his wounds, both mental and physical, result in him being sent home. Like the vast majority of men who served in any army on any front of this was, he is emotionally, if not physically, damaged. Today, he would have been diagnosed with PTSD. He was not sent back to the Front, but, served the rest of the War in non-combatant roles. This memoir, a great and valuable discovery by his family, adds to the rich cannon of literature on World War I. It is written, perhaps in a different mode, since Zombory-Moldován was an artist and it is his eye for detail that sets this memoir apart.
What attracted me to this book was, firstly, it's describing the almost forgotten Eastern Front, and secondly, the nature of it having been hidden away by the writer for so many years and it only recently having been discovered. What came across to me was that Moldován was witnessing the beginning of the end of a way of life, the beginning of the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and with it the diminution of Hungary in terms of size and power into a land-locked state, with it's rich culture and racial diversity (including the genocide of the Jewish population) to be subsequently destroyed by post-WWI internal Nazism and external Communist forces for much of the 20th Century.
I would recommend this book as an additional memoir of the First World War, but, told from a different point of view and context - that of the Eastern Front.
It is a short book and a relatively easy read, but, will add to one's knowledge of the Great War and reaffirm my belief, having read a number of books in 2014 during the centenary of WWI, that the ordinary people of Europe on both sides were the principle casualties of this human carnage and that the historical landscape of Europe was changed utterly.
October 6, 2014
Bela Zombory-Moldovan was a Hungarian artist called to service as a junior officer in the Austro-Hungarian 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 Zombory-Moldovan'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 Zombory-Moldovan 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 in 1967 the 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 Review of Books edition is the first publication of the work.
Only the first half of the book, the account of Zombory-Moldovan'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 Zombory-Moldovan 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.
After the war Zombory-Moldovan 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 in 1967 the 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 Review of Books edition is the first publication of the work.
Only the first half of the book, the account of Zombory-Moldovan'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 Zombory-Moldovan 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.
June 2, 2022
Very readable memoir of the beginning of World War 1 in Austria-Hungary. The structure & pace of the narrative lends this book to a movie adaptation. It reminded me a bit of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (Moldovan was a figure somewhere between the drill instructor & Joker). I can also imagine reading this book for Kagan’s Central European History class at UC Davis (so many years ago now), in which we did read Jakob Walter’s “Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Solder”. Walter’s memoir has many similarities to Moldovan’s: They are both some of the only memoirs by foot soldiers from these conflicts (in Moldovan’s case, the 1914 Galician campaign); they were both written later in their authors’ lives; & they were both only discovered and published decades after they were written. The Burning of the World is full of the author’s perspectives (implicitly & explicitly told) on the late Austro-Hungarian Empire’s class structure, ethnic politics, & cultural life, in addition to his recollections & thoughts on his army service. Moldovan’s part in the battle of Rawa Ruska seemed to be part of an attempt by the Austro-Hungarians to maintain a defensive line in an area the Russians were bombarding. Bela noted abandoned and obliterated Austro-Hungarian positions & soldiers (living & dead) as he and his troops took up their positions, which were in turn themselves obliterated &/or abandoned hours later. It was interesting how it was kind of expected for officers to have personal servants, or to treat the soldiers as personal servants, even in the middle of a battle. Bela also displays the attitudes of urbanite Hungarian polite society towards ethnic minorities, & the lower classes, including the odd collection of ideas surrounding the figure of “the peasant” (e.g. “closer to the earth”) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The introduction by the translator/editor/grandson of the author is worth reading, providing the story of how this book came together along with historical & biographical background. The endnotes are also very worth flipping to.
Read
May 22, 2018Since I read The War to End All Wars by Russell Freedman I have had interest in World War I. This being a memoir of 1914-1915 it reveals not just some of what it was like to go to war on the Eastern Front, but also the social, political aspects of the people not fighting in the war. Overall I liked BZM's memoir because it reveals a time, a place and person(s) in history that I might otherwise not know about, which was translated and edited by his grandson, Peter Zombory-Moldovan. I was surprised to learn that this book was first published in 2014, a century after the start of the Great War. (This reminded me a bit of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, though this book is on the Eastern Front.)
October 2, 2014
Young Hungarian artist Bela Zombory-Moldovan was on holiday at the seaside in 1914 when news arrived that Austro-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. Immediately called-up into the Hungarian army and thrown into to the turmoil of war on the Eastern Front, he was wounded, and after his recovery served behind the lines. This wonderfully evocative memoir covers just 8 months, from July 1914 to March 1915 when he returns to duty in Budapest. Published now for the first time in any language, the memoir was only recently discovered amongst the family papers, and Zombory-Moldovan’s grandson Peter decided to publish it. The manuscript is incomplete and it’s possible that the author intended to write a longer account of his life, but even as it stands it’s a unique and compelling account, both haunting and intense, of what happened to one cultured and intelligent man caught up in the horror of the First World War. Peter Zombory-Moldovan has added a comprehensive introduction, which puts the memoir in context and gives invaluable historical and political background information and goes on to tell what happened to his grandfather during the rest of his life.
This is a real little gem and deserves a wide readership. Eloquent, clear-sighted and perceptive, Zombory-Moldovan’s memoir is an invaluable historical and personal document.
This is a real little gem and deserves a wide readership. Eloquent, clear-sighted and perceptive, Zombory-Moldovan’s memoir is an invaluable historical and personal document.
October 20, 2014
A very interesting memoir about his experiences in WW I, or more precisely, this covers his first eight months or so. It covers the time frame from when he first learned of his conscription into the Royal Hungarian Army in late July 1914 until he completes his recuperation from injury in the spring of 1915. It appears that he wrote this memoir while in his mid-60’s, after basically being exiled to western Hungary after the Communists took power after WW II. The two chapters that I thought were particularly interesting 1) Into The Fire, in which he describes his battalion’s hellish experience in battling the Russians on the eastern front and 2) Leave. This is when he is in Budapest to recuperate from injury. He feels that he becomes a changed man at this point due to the poor manner in which injured soldiers are received in Budapest, the romantic notion of war that he finds there, and the many people who are clamoring to not be called up into that war, which is accomplished by being designated as “essential” to the ongoing functioning of the city. The memoir is also interesting because of its many geographical references to places in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary. The memoir was translated and edited by his grandson Peter. Peter Zombory-Moldovan, through his footnotes, also provides a lot of additional information about people and places during this time frame.
February 4, 2021
This book is not really a memoir of the First World War, as the part that describes the fighting is rather short. Instead, it is a memoir of loss and recovery. If you are looking for a book that provides insight into the early events on the Russo-Hungarian front in Galicia, this is not the right book for you. However, it is a touching book about a young artist's trauma suffered at the font, his sense of loss of himself and of the world he had known and of his attempts to recover. As literature, it is not a masterpiece, but overall I liked the book, because it is very personal and the storyteller is a person one can relate to and he really does give an impression how the outbreak of the war and the experiences of his generation felt like a total break-down of the pre-war European order.
June 6, 2025
An excellent recounting of one man’s experience in the Royal Hungarian Army during the opening phase of First World War. After he is wounded by the Russians in the Battle of Rava Russka, Bela Zombory-Moldovan is sent home for three months of recuperation. His love of the sea and painting help him to come to terms with a changed world. Lovingly translated by his grandson Peter.
October 6, 2017
This was pretty good, but there are a LOT of great WWI memoirs. If you are going to read 1 or 2, this is not one to pick.
February 1, 2017
I guess its interesting as a historical document
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