Efebos

Efebos is a lost novel written by Karol Szymanowski, who is best known as a composer. During the difficult period of time around World War I and the Russian Revolution, Szymanowski's childhood home in what is now Ukraine was destroyed, and he found himself unable to compose. Instead, he explored religious and pederastic themes in this novel.

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While the entirety of Efebos has been lost, its central argument has been preserved in a 150-page Russian translation made by the author as a gift to his fifteen year old boyfriend, Boris Kochno, in 1919. It was discovered among Kochno's papers in 1981 and has been published in a German translation as Das Gastmahl: Ein Kapitel aus dem Roman Ephebos, Berlin, Verlag rosa Winkel, 1993.

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The book explores ideas which Szymanowski expressed in his music, as well. The clearest affinities are to his opera King Roger, which shares a setting in Sicily and similarly explores the "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" facets of faith. The very personal homosexual component of Efebos prompted its author to ask his friend, the writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz to keep it in his possession, and it remained unpublished.

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Although Szymanowski expressed interest in seeing Efebos published, he wanted to wait until his mother died, presumably to spare her any potential feelings of embarrassment from the contents of the book. As it turned out, he predeceased her, dying in 1937. Iwaszkiewicz kept the manuscript, but it was destroyed in a fire in Warsaw in 1939.

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Novel: A novel (from French nouvelle, "new") is an extended fictional narrative in prose. Down into the 18th century, the word referred specifically to short fictions of love and intrigue as opposed to romances—epic-length works about love and adventures. Having become one of the major literary genr...

Karol Szymanowski: Karol Maciej Szymanowski (October 6, 1882 - March 29, 1937) was a Polish composer and pianist....

Composer: A composer is a person who writes music. The term refers particularly to someone who writes music in some type of musical notation, thus allowing others to perform the music. This distinguishes the composer from a musician who improvises. However, a person may be called a composer without creating m...