In the Footsteps of Orpheus

"In the Footsteps of Orpheus considers the life and work of Miklos Radnoti, one of Hungary's greatest twentieth-century poets. Radnoti's story evokes the experience of many great artists of Jewish origins in Central Europe. Repelled by the rise of anti-Semitism, yet tied to the poetic and national traditions of the Magyars, he was fated to confront the destruction that enveloped Europe during World War II. In response, he composed some of the most sublime poems in Hungarian literary history.". "Zsuzsanna Ozsvath traces the development of Radnoti's childhood and young adulthood, his attraction to the political Left, his sense of becoming an outsider in his own country as Fascism took hold in Hungary, and his marriage to Fanni Gyarmati, the woman who inspired much of his poetry. A concluding chapter depicts Radnoti's final journey, a forced march from the copper mines of Bor, in Serbia, to Abda, in western Hungary, where he was shot and buried in a mass grave in 1944. When his body was exhumed nearly two years later, a small book of poems, among Radnoti's most moving verse, was retrieved from his coat pocket. Ozsvath's incisive readings of Radnoti's work reveal the sources of the poet's inspiration and imagery. Her sensitive translations from the Hungarian lend poignancy to this tragic and forcefully told story."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.