Németh, László

Born Apr. 18, 1901, in Nagybánya (present-day Baia-Mare, Rumania). Hungarian writer.

Németh was a physician by training. In the 1930’s he was one of the ideologists of the people’s—peasant’s—writers’ movement and an advocate of “socialism without Marxism.” In the realist novels Mourning (1936; Russian translation, 1971) and Sin (1936), Németh, writing with psychological insight, posed the problems of peasant life and the responsibility of the intellegentsia to the people. His novels Égetõ Eszter (1956) and Mercy (1965) portray the conflict between aspirations to freedom and the brutalizing environment. Németh spoke out against the counterrevolutionary revolt of 1956 in Hungary and has declared his support for socialism on many occasions.

Németh has written several historical dramas, including Széchenyi (1946), Jan Hus (1948), Galileo (1953), and The Death of Gandhi (1963). He is the author of a play about Pushkin, The Final Days (1967), as well as of the monograph Pushkin (1967). He has also translated A. N. Tolstoy’s Road to Calvary and Peter I and V. S. Grossman’s Stepan Kol’chugin into Hungarian. Németh received the Kossuth Prize in 1957.