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The Wanderings of the Little Blue Butterfly in Fairyland
Anna Lesznai
1912
Illustration from the children’s book The Wanderings of the Little Blue Butterfly in Fairyland, first published in Budapest, Hungary, in 1912.
Illustration from the children’s book The Wanderings of the Little Blue Butterfly in Fairyland, first published in Budapest, Hungary, in 1912.
Amalia Moscovitz was born in Budapest and raised primarily on the estate of her affluent, assimilated family in Alsókörtvélyes (today Hrušov, Slovakia). Anna Lesznai—her artistic pseudonym—became active in Budapest’s avant-garde salons as a teenager. She wove her many different media—painting, poetry, illustration, scholarship, folktales, and Hungarian embroidery (himzés)—into a coherent artistic-intellectual modernist aesthetic. In 1939, Lesznai fled Hungary for America, with her soon-to-be (third) husband, Tibor Gergely. There she taught pedagogical and applied arts at Wellesley College and elsewhere.
“We are alive. We are human, with good and bad in us. That’s all we know for sure. We can’t create a new species or a new world. That’s been done. Now we have to live within those boundaries. What are…