The Cloak of Dreams: Béla Balázs (review)

Béla Balázs (Herbert Bauer, 1884–1949) was a Hungarian writer and scholar, perhaps best known today for his fairy-tale-inspired collaborations with Béla Bartók, including the opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) and the ballet The Wooden Prince (1916), and for a critical text written in his later years, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (1949). Jack Zipes’s recent translated collection reveals that Balázs also penned sixteen “Chinese” styled fairy tales inspired by the illustrations of Mariette Lydis (1887–1970). The Cloak of Dreams was first published in 1922 in German as Der Mantel der Träume: Chinesische Novellen, and it was subsequently translated into Hungarian as Csodálatosságok (The Book of Marvels, 1949). One presumes that Zipes, professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, translated from the original German-language publication. The book forms part of Zipes’s Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series, which previously translated the Merz fairy tales of Hannover’s Dada assemblage artist and writer Kurt Schwitters (2009). Balázs’s notable participation in avant-garde circles of the time thus makes his work fitting for inclusion in this series. A member of Georg Lukács’s Thalia Society and a loyal comrade thereafter, Balázs appears to have been at the heart of the Hungarian intelligentsia. The translation of this collection will endow English-language scholarship with a more thorough understanding of the inner workings, interests, and historical implications of such circles.

Zipes’s accessible introductory essay, “Béla Balázs, the Homeless Wanderer, or, The Man Who Sought to Become at One with the World,” serves as an indispensable guide to Balázs’s oeuvre. It offers an unapologetic biographical approach, charting important acquaintances and tracing how such a literary commission came about. As with all effective scholarship, Zipes’s essay prompts the reader to explore further. One might ponder the reception of these fairy tales and the political and cultural views of China in Hungary in the early 1920s. The East had certainly provided inspiration for generations of artists, writers, and Orientalists in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but by the first decades of the twentieth century French and German avant-gardists had fallen under the influence of Africa. Does Balázs’s collection indicate a Hungarian return to China, and if so, is this racially problematic or justifiable as a leftist alignment? The historical link between Asian folk culture and the Soviet government is an exchange that Balázs touches on in his Theory of the Film (1970, 273), and in these earlier fairy tales one can observe a sympathy for revolutionary Taoism over the aristocratic Confucian school of thought. Balázs’s socialist stance is documented in Zipes’s essay and reflected in the critique of social hierarchies that runs throughout Balázs’s fairy tales. One might further question Hungary’s craft traditions and whether the oral folk tale, which Walter Benjamin so famously mourned the loss of in modernity (Illuminations, 1968), is perhaps still partly at work here. Zipes does make reference to the tradition of the literary Kunstmärchen, which influenced Balázs as a young boy who used to stay home and read many French and German fairy tales (5).

The Cloak of Dreams is presented as an appealing aesthetic object in its own right with a decorative cover design by Dimitri Karetnikov. The fairy tale that lends its name to the title of the collection, “The Cloak of Dreams,” was aptly chosen in 1922 both for its thematic plural and its suggestion of a “Chinese” guise. Here the Emperor is wrapped in his wife’s dreams as Balázs’s readers will become wrapped up in the enchantment of his stories, richly embroidered through Zipes’s critical spells. The sixteen fairy tales move between simple narratives, such as “The Victor,” with the traditional theme of the choice of three...