The Door

Born in 1917 in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city, Magda Szabó was raised in a Calvinist household. She studied at the University of Debrecen, where she earned degrees in Latin and Hungarian in 1940, beginning her career as a teacher. Her early academic background in classical philology and Hungarian literary tradition provided her with a grounding in both European and national culture, which informed her later engagement with history, myth, and identity in her fiction.

Szabó’s literary career began with poetry. After the publication of her first volumes of verse in the 1940s, her promise as a writer was quickly recognized, and in 1949 she was awarded the Baumgarten Prize, one of Hungary’s most prestigious literary honors. However, in the same year, politics interrupted her rising trajectory. The newly consolidated Communist regime, increasingly intolerant of independent voices, stripped her of the prize and banned her from publishing. For years thereafter, she worked in obscurity as a teacher in an elementary school, continuing to write but denied a public audience. Echoing her situation, The Door portrays how the government has forced the narrator into silence, banning her from publishing her work for a long time.

Szabó returned to the literary scene in the mid-1950s, marking the beginning of her mature career.