{"id":1623,"date":"2018-08-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-06T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.newyorkcafe.hu\/kaffka-margit-a-sajat-hangjara-talalt-irono\/"},"modified":"2026-11-06T13:41:21","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T12:41:21","slug":"margit-kaffka-the-writer-who-found-her-own-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/kaffka-margit-a-sajat-hangjara-talalt-irono\/","title":{"rendered":"Margit Kaffka \u2013 a writer who has found her own voice"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"abstract\">\n\n<strong>During her short life, she was one of the rising stars of a new generation in Hungarian literature; according to her contemporaries, she was exactly that: a WOMAN with a capital W. She created her works using simple, unpretentious words and phrases, yet produced true art. \u201eMy Margit, she is such a great talent that she no longer even counts as a woman,\u201d said Endre Ady, who was himself a great admirer of the writer and poet\u2019s vision and style of expression.<\/strong>\n\nShe was born on 10 June 1880 in Nagyk\u00e1roly. Although her father was a chief prosecutor, he died young, and so her family lived in modest circumstances. Her mother sent her daughter to study at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Szatm\u00e1r. There she obtained a teaching qualification, after which she continued her studies in Budapest and, in 1902, obtained a qualification to teach at secondary schools from the Erzs\u00e9bet Girls\u201e School. She moved to Miskolc, where she taught literature and economics at the girls\u201d secondary school; her pupils adored her. It was here that her first writings \u2013 poems and short stories \u2013 were published, and it was around this time that she also became a regular contributor to *Nyugat*. During this period, thanks to Ern\u0151 Osv\u00e1t\u2019s ability to recognise talent and his consistency, numerous young authors were given the opportunity to be published alongside the established writers. The first generation included Ady, Babits, Kosztol\u00e1nyi, \u00c1rp\u00e1d T\u00f3th, Karinthy, M\u00f3ricz, G\u00e9za Cs\u00e1th and Margit Kaffka.\n\nOn 5 January 1905, she married Br\u00fan\u00f3 Fr\u00f6hlich, a forestry engineer. Their son, L\u00e1szl\u00f3, was born the following year. In 1907, her husband was posted to the Ministry of Agriculture, so Kaffka was finally able to leave Miskolc, a place she had never particularly liked; and after they moved back to Pest and her marriage fell apart, she divorced her husband.\n\nShe was also close friends with Kosztol\u00e1nyi, Babits, Dezs\u0151 Szab\u00f3 and B\u00e9la Bal\u00e1zs. Her poetic world, her way of thinking and her views on literary policy were close to those of Ady, and over time this intellectual connection developed into a deep friendship. He gradually became involved in the internal affairs of *Nyugat*, in literature and literary life, and got to know the editors and fellow writers personally. She was a frequent figure on the literary scene; apart from editorial offices, her favourite haunts were the caf\u00e9s. She also took part in the great nocturnal wanderings \u2013 mostly in the company of Dezs\u0151 Szab\u00f3, Ters\u00e1nszky or Ady.\n\nJ\u00f3zsi Ters\u00e1nszky writes of her as follows: \u201cBut one cannot imagine a more feminine woman, or a woman possessing more strangely feminine qualities, than Kaffka was. Vanity as the dominant trait, capriciousness and changeability \u2013 qualities that lend the fair sex an inscrutable character \u2013 were, in Kaffka\u2019s case, somehow displayed in a shop window, ready-made and perfectly articulated. Kaffka immediately put even her most fleeting feelings into words. She justified and applied her sudden mood swings or retracted statements with the tightrope walk of the most exquisite sophistry, adapting them from situation to situation\u2026 so that she dazzled everyone with her intellectual sleight of hand.\u201d\n\nIt was then that she became involved in a romantic relationship with Ern\u0151 Osv\u00e1t, about whom she wrote in *Stations*: \u201cIt began as a beautiful, grand, true love; it degenerated into a commonplace, fleeting affair.\u201d It was during this turbulent period that her two most significant novels, *Colours and Years* and *M\u00e1ria\u2019s Years*, were written. She worked as a teacher in the capital between 1910 and 1915; meanwhile, in 1914, she remarried in Szeged, this time to Ervin Bauer, a theoretical biologist and brother of B\u00e9la Bal\u00e1zs. At the outbreak of the First World War, she gave up teaching and devoted herself entirely to fiction. The war horrified her; she gave voice to her feelings in poems that were initially pacifist but became increasingly revolutionary. In 1915, her husband was posted to a hospital in Timi\u0219oara; from then on, Kaffka commuted between Budapest and Timi\u0219oara. Meanwhile, she wrote another novel, *Hangyaboly* (*Anthill*), in which she recounted her childhood years spent in a convent.\n\nIn the final period of her life, her work as a journalist also came into its own, with most of her writings being published in the *Pesti Napl\u00f3*. In 1918, several of her volumes were published, and she was admitted as a member of the V\u00f6r\u00f6smarty Academy. At the end of November, Kaffka and her son both fell ill with the Spanish flu, which was sweeping across Europe. She was taken to hospital, where she died on 1 December 1918; her son survived her by just one day.\n\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>During her short life, she was one of the rising stars of a new generation in Hungarian literature; according to her contemporaries, she was exactly that: a WOMAN with a capital W. She created her works using simple, unpretentious words and phrases, yet produced true art. \u201eMy Margit, she is such a great talent that she no longer even counts as a woman,\u201d said Endre Ady, who was himself a great admirer of the writer and poet\u2019s vision and style of expression.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-muveszek"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3917,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623\/revisions\/3917"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}