Rodion Markovits (; or Markovitz, born Markovits Jakab ; 1888 – August 27, 1948) was an Austro-Hungarian-born writer, journalist and lawyer, one of the early modernist contributors to Magyar literary culture in Transylvania and Banat regions. He achieved international fame with the extended reportage Szibériai garnizon ("Siberian Garrison", 1927–8), which chronicles his own exotic experiences in World War I and the Russian Civil War. Locally, he is also known for his lifelong contribution to the political and cultural press of Transylvania. A Romanian national after 1920, Markovits divided himself between the Hungarian Romanian and Jewish communities, and was marginally affiliated with both the Ma art group and the Erdélyi Helikon writers.
Rodion Markovitz was seen by his contemporaries as an eccentric, and some of his colleagues believed him a minor and incidental writer. He was also noted for his leftist inclinations, cemented during his personal encounter with Bolshevism but toned down during the final decades of his life. Although he continued to publish short stories until the 1940s, and wrote the sequel novel Aranyvonat ("Gold Train"), his work never again matched the success of Szibériai garnizon. His final home was the Banat city of Timișoara, where he worked for the Romanian and Hungarian press, and eventually became a grassroots activist of the Hungarian People's Union.
Biography
Early life and World War I
Culturally and ethnically, Markovits was of Hungarian-Jewish extraction, and socially belonged to the lower classes. His background may have been Jewish assimilationist, and he regarded himself as ethnically Hungarian, but his interest in maintaining links with secular Jewish culture put distance between him and the more committed assimilationists. Historian Attila Gidó nevertheless includes Markovits among the most prominent Jews who helped promote, from within, the Hungarian urban culture of Transylvania.
The writer's home village was Kisgérce (today Gherţa Mică, Romania), in the ethnographic region of Avasság (Țara Oașului). He spent part of his childhood in Szatmárnémeti (today Satu Mare, Romania), the local urban center, where he attended Catholic school and then the Kölcsey Calvinist College. Young Markovits went on to study Law at the Faculty of Law of the Budapest (Eötvös Loránd) University, but mainly focused on his budding career as writer and cultural journalist, publishing with left-leaning or satirical periodicals such as Fidibusz, Népszava, Független, Ifjú Erők, Korbács, Szatmár és Vidéke and Márton Lovászy's Magyarország. Upon graduation, he also worked as a lawyer.
Romanian literary historian Cornel Ungureanu refers to World War I as Markovits' "first great journalistic adventure". Markovits was mobilized into the Austro-Hungarian Army a few months into the conflict. In early 1915, he was sent with the 12th Royal Hungarian Army infantry regiment to the Eastern Front, and was captured by the Russian military during summer 1916. His account places this event at the peak of Russia's Brusilov Offensive. Also according to Markovits, the column of Hungarian captives (including much of the 12th) was ordered to the transit camp of Darnytsia (Kiev), then his contingent was carried by train to Kineshma and by boat to Makaryevo. Their rest was interrupted by news that they were to be moved into Siberia, and eventually they were relocated to the banks of the Usuri River, on Russia's nominal border with the Republic of China.
Revolutionary politics
Markovits spent the next seven years of his life in Siberia and the Russian Far East—first as a prisoner of war, then as a drifter. He was notably held in Krasnaya Rechka prison camp, where he founded a newspaper for Hungarian captives, Szibériai Újság. Here, the Austro-Hungarian captives were reached by news of the February Revolution, and began organizing themselves into political or national factions even before the October Revolution sparked chaos in their captors' ranks. Nominally free, the prisoners were left to fend for themselves: after the Russian Civil War began, they purchased a train and, with it, made as far west as Samara, passing by Bolshevik units and Czechoslovak Legions, and being then pushed back into Siberia by the war tide; some Hungarians left the convoy to join the Bolsheviks' Red Guards.