A collection of Szerb's essays was published in Hungary as Gondolatok a könyvtárban in 1946, shortly after his death. Later expanded editions appeared in the seventies, and there are various translations which all seem to have picked different subsets of essays, presumably those most likely to appeal to readers in that market. The German edition I read contains the following essays:
- Stefan George (1926)
- Der Hofmann (Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano) (1927)
- Ibsen (1928)
- William Blake (1928)
- Präromantik (only the section about Jean-Jacques Rousseau) (1929)
- Dulcinea (Cervantes) (1936)
- Gogol (1944)

The first two essays between them take up more than half the book, and are very theoretical in their approach, with little detailed reference to the actual texts they are meant to be talking about — they show an amazing confidence, maturity and breadth of knowledge for a writer who was still only in his mid-twenties, and they expect the same sort of intellectual agility from the reader. Szerb sets out some big ideas about political and philosophical history, taking as his starting point the idea that European civilisation was at its best and brightest in the organically catholic and Catholic society of the early renaissance, before that nasty Martin Luther came along and infected us all with self-consciousness and individual responsibility. Which is fine if you see humans as a sophisticated form of social insects, but a bit hard to get your head around otherwise...

The remainder of the book is a little more down-to-earth. All the books he is talking about are clearly ones that he cares about very deeply: even with Rousseau, a thinker it's easy to blame for all kinds of evils in his own life and in his influence over others, Szerb's starting point is the enormous pleasure he got from reading the first volume of the Confessions. He also, only half-frivolously, credits Rousseau with demolishing the (malign) predominance of French culture in Europe — and with starting the Swiss tourist industry.

The Blake piece is much the most detailed, as Szerb is writing for Hungarian readers who are unlikely to have much idea who Blake was or why he matters. By the time they've read this, they'll be writing off for copies of the prophetic books. In between a compact biography and a description of his emotional response to Blake's writings, Szerb sneaks in a swift Freudian analysis of the origins of the prophetic writings as well.

The Cervantes essay is probably the most enjoyable. On the surface it's a study of a character (Dulcinea) who doesn't actually appear in the book (as far as we know...), but in reality it is there to show us just how deeply Cervantes upset conventional ideas of how narrative works and thoroughly deserves to be thought of as the inventor of the novel. And every line is full of Szerb's love of the book. ( )