Bela Balazs

Balázs, Béla 

Born Aug. 4, 1884, in Szeged; died May 17, 1949, in Budapest. Hungarian writer and motion picture theorist. A Communist; a doctor of philosophy.

In 1908, Balázs appeared in print as a symbolist poet. He worked in the People’s Commissariat of Education of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919; after the defeat of the republic, he emigrated and lived in the USSR from 1931 to 1945. During this time Balázs became a realist writer; he wrote the novel The Impossible People (German, 1930; Russian translation, 1930; Hungarian, 1965), the play Mozart (1941), and the collection of poems Fly, My Word (1944). He also wrote books on the art of the motion picture: The Visible Man (German, 1924; Russian translation, 1925; Hungarian, 1958), The Spirit of Film (German, 1930; Russian translation, 1935), The Art of the Motion Picture (1945), the autobiographical novel A Dreamer’s Youth (1948), scripts, and fairy tales. He also published the collection of poems My Path (1945; Kossuth Prize, 1949).

WORKS

In Russian translation:
[“Stikhi.”] In Vengerskaia revoliutsionnaia poeziia. Moscow-Leningrad, 1925.
[“Stikhi.”] In Antologiia vengerskoi poezii. Moscow, 1952.

REFERENCES

Burov, S. “Bela Balash—teoretik i kritik kino.” Iskusstvo kino,1947, no. 1.
Eisenstein, S. Bela zabyvaet nozhnitsy: Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. 2. Moscow, 1964.
A magyar irodalom tö rténete,6th ed. Budapest, 1966.