Dezső Kosztolányi, Scarabocchi

Abstract

Between 1905 and 1936 Dezső Kosztolányi wrote continuously for Hungarian newspapers and weeklies: fiction columns, chronicles, short stories, poems, translations, reviews, brief notes on aesthetics, linguistics, and literature. Journalism must be understood in a completely original sense, inevitably since most of Kosztolányi’s famous novels were also published as serial novels in magazines and newspapers. The short stories are in keeping with Kosztolányi’s aesthetic belief that reality is more unlikely than fiction: “Life is unlikely. Life is bold”. In the few lines of the newspaper columns, the language is necessarily clear, the rhythm calculated, the conception resolute. Outside Hungary a little anthology in French was published in the early 2000s, but thousands of these superb short “tales” are available only in Hungarian. Italian readers will find in this paper five pieces translated for the first time into Italian.