Two Smiles
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers with basic Hungarian reading ability who wish to encounter original short stories
- Language learners of Hungarian who need short original texts for intensive reading practice
- Literary readers interested in early twentieth-century Central and Eastern European literature and satirical short prose
- Readers who enjoy short stories and essay-like texts and are used to fragmented reading
Not a good fit for
- Readers who know no Hungarian at all and are unwilling to use reference books or translations
- Readers expecting the plot of a full-length novel and complex character arcs
- Researchers who need a version with detailed annotations, introduction, and scholarly apparatus
Reading tips
- Read through once to get a feel for the language, then read closely paragraph by paragraph, looking up words and noting recurring expressions.
- Read alongside a Hungarian dictionary or translation tools to lower the barrier of the original text.
- Treat each piece as a standalone short text, reading one or two at a time to avoid fatigue.
- After reading, try to retell the content in two or three sentences to check comprehension and accumulate expressions.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Karinthy, Frigyes (1887–1938) was a Hungarian writer, three of whose works are held in this collection. Publicly available information is limited, so biographical details are not elaborated here; the titles at hand nonetheless show his strength in short narratives and school-themed writing. Esik a hó: Novellák is a collection of short stories whose title means “It is snowing,” drawing on small scenes from everyday life. Tanár úr kérem: Képek a középiskolából takes secondary school life as its setting, sketching classroom and coming-of-age moments through a series of picture-like fragments. Két mosoly, judging by its title, revolves around “two smiles” and carries a restrained mood and observation. Overall, his writing catches the absurd and the tender in ordinary experience, with a light, ironic touch, short forms and flexible structure, and has had some influence on later Hungarian prose and humorous literature.
