István Nemere, Hungarian & bilingual Esperantist writers

Review: Febroj by NEMERE István. Budapeŝto: Hungara Esperanto-Asocio, 1984. 131p. reviewed by Don HARLOW, ELNA Newsletter, Jan-Feb 1986.

Here is an old review, in English, of Febroj [fevers], a novel in Esperanto by István Nemere, one of those few Esperanto writers who has an established literary reputation in both his native language and Esperanto. (See also Nemere's own web site: Nemere István honlapja.) I call your attention to this because reviews in English of Esperanto literary works are not plentiful or conspicuously attainable, but mostly because of the larger framework of the review set in the first two paragraphs:

  It's rare -- writes Eva Tofalvi in "The Role of the Personal Factor in Esperanto Literature" (Fonto, Dec. 1981, pp. 29-34) -- to find a group of Esperantist authors living in the same place and encouraging each other in their work; the only example she can give is the so-called "Budapest School" of poetry, which flourished around the magazine Literatura Mondo in the late twenties and thirties. Similarly rare is the individual author who is known both through Esperanto and his native language; Marjorie Boulton in England and Sandor Szathmari in Hungary are the two examples who come to mind (another example, recently brought to my attention, is Yeh Jun-jian in China -- who, however, wrote his earliest works in Esperanto but later abandoned it in favor of Chinese, English and other languages).  

It appears from the evidence -- and I beg pardon of those folks in Hungary if I am wrong about this -- that what we have today is a new "Budapest School" of Esperanto literature, this time of prose. [ . . . . ]