Dezső Szabó (born June 10, 1879 in Kolozsvár, Austria-Hungary (present-day Cluj-Napoca, Romania), died January 5, 1945 in Budapest) was a Hungarian linguist, writer, noted mainly for his three-volume novel "Az elsodort falu" ("The Eroded Village") and his pamphlets. Szabó's oeuvre is contradictory, some consider it as the peak of Hungarian expressionist prose, others call it one of the first "pioneers of Magyar populist literature". He was a Nobel Prize nominee in 1935. He is also known for his anti-semitic views. Szabó came to live in Budapest in 1918 and started publishing short essays in the literary revue Nyugat which was the leading newspaper of Hungary's intellectuals. He had a great success with his pamphlet criticizing István Tisza, the liberal-conservative prime minister of Hungary. Due to this writing he became one of the leading figures of Hungarian progressive intellectuals. Initially he supported the Hungarian Revolution of 1918. Arthur Koestler, at the time a high school pupil in Budapest, recalls Szabó as one of the new teachers brought to his school by the revolutionary regime – "A shy, soft spoken, somewhat absent-minded man, he told us of a subject more faraway than the Moon: the daily life of hired agricultural workers in the countryside" Support for the revolution was, however, a brief interlude in Szabó's life, and he soon developed into an outspoken and vehement opponent of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic proclaimed by Béla Kun. He proclaimed to attack not the revolution itself, which was according to him unnecessary, but the "corruption of the revolution". He was quick to become a well-known and highly influential and energetic writer, gaining fame for his 1919 "Az elsodort falu" ("The Eroded Village"), an expressionist work espousing the idea that hope for a Hungarian renaissance lay in the peasant class, as opposed to the middle class which Szabó believed was "corrupted by the mentalities of the assimilated Germans and Jews". Though he published many later books, this was considered as the peak of his literary achievements. Although the views of the novel is considered later unrealistic, stylistically it is still remarkable. He was not only the opponent of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, but later became one of the greatest critic of the conservative Horthy-era. He called the system "polecat-course", and his critic included democratic, antisemitic, progressive and conservative reasoning as well according to his contradictious personality. Historian Joseph Varga wrote: "Szabo passionately represented the idea