to death there in January 1945, at the age of 43. He was survived by his wife, Klára Bálint, who died in 1992. Work Szerb is best known for his academic works on literature. In the ten years before the Second World War, he wrote two monumental works of literary criticism, characterized by a brilliant and ironic style intended for an educated reader rather than an academic public. In addition, Szerb wrote novellas and novels that still attract the attention of the reading public. The Pendragon Legend, Journey by Moonlight and The Queen's Necklace, for instance, fuse within the plot the aims of the literary critic with the aims of the novel writer. The author gives importance to the exotic in these novels, with a meta-literary outlook. In these three novels, the stage of the narrative action is always a Western European country: leaving quotidian Hungary allows the writer to transfigure the actions of his characters. The Pendragon Legend In his first novel, The Pendragon Legend, Szerb offers to his readers a representation of the United Kingdom and its inhabitants. England and, in particular, London, hosted Szerb for a year and not only suggested to him new and interesting directions for his research, but also offered him the background for his first novel. The Pendragon Legend is a detective story that begins in the British Museum and finishes in a Welsh castle. The author provides a non-native's look at the country, in a way that is consistent with the parody genre. In The Quest for the Miraculous: Survey and Problematic in the Modern Novel, Szerb claims that among the literary genres he prefers the fantasy novel. It fuses the quotidian details of everyday life with the fantastic feats that he calls “the miracle”. In the case of The Pendragon Legend, this allows the reader a cathartic experience through the adventures of the Hungarian philologist who serves as the protagonist of the novel. Journey by Moonlight (literally, "Traveler and Moonlight"), published in 1937, focuses on the development of the main character, Mihály - a bright and romantic, albeit conflicted, young man who sets off for a honeymoon in Italy with his new wife, Erzsi. Mihály quickly reveals his bizarre childhood experiences to her over a bottle of wine, alluding to a set of seemingly unresolved longings for eroticism and death which Erzsi seems to only vaguely comprehend. The plainspoken disharmony between