JOSEPH ROTH
The triumph of beauty
transl.: Maria Angelidou – Angelos Angelidis
ed. Agra, page 120

He wrote from the bottom of his heart. He proudly wrote about the defeat.

We live in dangerous times. The danger of the time is not only connected with everything that is happening around us: the rise of neo-fascism in Italy, the war in Ukraine, women in Iran, energy and other things that we will certainly find ahead, the danger lies in the fact that what is happening outside is the result internal movement, to which we most often do not listen. It is difficult, moreover, to see that the thought and feeling of a person, his inner life, are directed, for various reasons, some of which are quite understandable, to the search for good in addition to evil and to the rejection of the past, especially when they are condemned as responsible for our present troubles. And so history repeats itself. In this #MeToo state of women’s struggles for their important and undeniable rights, sensitivity to suffering and multi-genderness, how are we going to enjoy a Joseph Roth novel?

Last summer, Agra released a book with a beautiful female face on the cover. The author of the two included stories is Josef Roth, who is familiar with European history firsthand, saw how it was changing with desperation, and experienced the fall of Austria-Hungary as a personal trauma. The Jewish coffeehouse dweller Joseph Roth, who inspired his fictional world along with the necessary journalism course, lived more nights than days, yearning rather than hoping.

Today I do not know in what position a writer of the stature of Roth would have found himself, who endured life in the chaos of the century without guarding his back at all, who became one with his time, who was exiled to write, fearing that his precious books, his thoughts were already ideas on the verge of fire. But even at that time he defied totalitarian howls and wrote freely. He wrote from the bottom of his heart. He proudly wrote about the defeat. Either this is the defeat of male domination, or this is the defeat of the Motherland as a natural space that has given way to the construction of nation states.

These are two novels published together under the titles “The Triumph of Beauty” and “The Bust of the Emperor”, translated by Maria and Angelos Angelidis from the fine editions of Agra. “Triumph” was painted in September 1934, and “Bust” in December of the same year. Both novellas were originally published in French, and when Roth began publishing again in the 1950s, The Triumph of Beauty, which is the subject of this note, had to be translated back into German from Blanche Guidon’s translation. works in French at the end of 1934

I don’t know if Roth was aware of the work of Freud and Breuer on hysteria. First published in 1893 and revised in 1895, the famous book that paved the way for psychoanalysis was called Studies in Hysteria. There, the young neurologist Sigmund Freud, along with his inspirational friend Dr. Josef Breuer, study five cases of women who need a different treatment than usual. Diagnosis: hysteria.

Roth, who has much in common with the two doctors, writes a novel on the verge of irony, bitterness and self-mocking. The heroes are two friends, Dr. Skovronen, a gynecologist at hot resorts, and his storyteller friend, who instructs him to heal his beautiful, modest and unsullied, but cold wife. The hot bath treatment for the cold of a young woman favors the absence of her husband. The doctor can do little, other men do more with her. They warm her with their flesh. This, of course, becomes a subject of discussion between the two men, who are trying in vain to control the insatiable nature of the cold woman.

The ending hides a lot of self-awareness of the life and nature of the two sexes. The “weaker” sex has strong powers hidden deep in its flesh, while the “strong” one leaves the treadmill of life, previously defeated. The only hope for Roth, who feels powerless before the coldness of a woman, is to wish her to wrinkle with old age. Text embroidery that seeks to isolate itself from political correctness in order to satisfy the pleasure of reading the great master with the consciousness of lost homelands and destinies.