Bela Hamvas

* Prešov, March 23, 1897 – † Budapest, November 7, 1968 / writer, philosopher, aesthete, librarian ; ; He came to Bratislava at the age of one, after his father, an evangelical pastor, gave up his priesthood and took a job as a Hungarian-German teacher at the Bratislava Lutheran Lyceum, where he himself graduated from high school. He had a keen interest in music from his adolescence, playing the piano and composing. In 1915 he volunteered for military service, but on the Ukrainian front he was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown and sent home for medical treatment. In 1917 he learned to make pastries from a relative in Iglón. During his prolonged convalescence he became acquainted with the works of Kant, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, but especially Nietzsche. His father refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Czechoslovak authorities, so the family was expelled from Bratislava, so they moved to Budapest. Hamvas was a student of the Hungarian-German department at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest between 1919 and 1923, also attending music theory lectures and even visiting the medical faculty. His articles were published from 1919, and from 1923 to 1926 he worked as a journalist at the Budapesti Hírlap and the Szózat newspaper. Between 1927 and 1945 he worked as a librarian, while writing short stories, novels, and philosophical essays and studies. In 1935, he and Károly Kerényi founded the Szigetkör, a group based on classical Greek traditions, which was joined by several others (e.g. László Németh, Antal Szerb, Aladár Dobrovits, musicologist Antal Molnár; and others), but the group did not prove to be long-lived. ; During World War II, he translated the works of Lao-tse, Confucius, Heraclitus and others, and in 1943–1944 he wrote the book Scientia sacra I. c. At this time, he began his work entitled The Hall of the Ancestors, on which he worked until the 1960s. After 1945, he came into conflict with György Lukács and as a result his writings could not be published. For years, he worked as a gardener, and then from 1951 he was a warehouseman in the countryside. In addition to his work, he translated, studied Sanskrit and Hebrew, and wrote the novel Carnival and several essays, which, however, were not published during his lifetime. 1963 marked a certain breakthrough, after the publication of Murasaki Shikibu; The Tale of Genji in Hamvas' translation. He was able to retire in 1964 and completed some works in the remaining years of his life (Scientia sacra II., Five Undelivered Lectures on Art, etc.). His life's work only began to be officially evaluated and gradually published in the second half of the 1980s. ; ; His main works: ; The World Crisis, 1938, ; Spirit and Existence, 1941, ; Revolution in Art. Abstraction and Surrealism in Hungary, 1947, ; The Five Geniuses – The Philosophy of Wine, 1988. ; The first series of his oeuvre was published in six volumes between 1990 and 1994, and the remaining 19 volumes were published between 1994 and 2011.