Fraternity-Testvériség, 1956 (34. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1956-11-01 / 11. szám
12 FRATERNITY Somogy, in 1836. His family background was that of the landed gentry. In 1798 he married his relative, Zsuzsánna Dukai Takács; the marriage was a happy one, blessed with several children. As a student at the Sopron gymnasium he showed interest in Latin culture, mainly in the poetry of Horace; his first versifying ventures are traceable to this teenage interest in the classics. His “discoverers” were János Kis, a minor poet, and Ferenc Kazinczy, the eminent critic, linguist and reformer, to whom he dedicated two poems as well as one to Kazinczy’s wife. With the publication of his poems in 1813 and of a second edition in 1816, he established his reputation, but unfortunately the poet Ferenc Kölcsey wrote a damning criticism of Berzsenyi’s work1 which distressed him deeply; in fact he took it as an insult. He was also disturbed by Kazinczy’s approval of Kölcsey’s objections regarding certain shortcomings. The case is somewhat similar to the acrimonious attacks of the “Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine” and “The Quarterly Review” on Keats in 1818, except that there was no planned malice in Kölcsey’s appraisal. Although he was acclaimed by his contemporaries, Berzsenyi’s real recognition came after his death. A first complete edition of his works appeared in 1842, published by Gábor Döbrentei; his correspondence with Ferenc Kazinczy was published in 1860. There are five more editions of his poetic works. It is sadly paradoxical that Kölcsey (a poet of integrity himself, although mistaken in his first view of Berzsenyi, notwithstanding some valid objections to Berzsenyi’s turgid or artificial idiom, which did not harmonize with his classical versification) paid him tribute at his funeral declaring: “Spirit of the departed, I utter above thy tomb the propitiatory words. The man has left us, but the poet is ours forever.” Since his death, Berzsenyi has commanded attention among discerning as well as conventional readers. II Berzsenyi’s works represent the transition from classicism to romanticism. His language is unmistakably romantic, but his form is antique. Had he been an English poet, we should be inclined to say that he combined in one person the attributes of the poets of the- Augustan Age, such as Pope (to whom he referred occasionally), with the characteristics of the early romanticists, such as Gray and Thomson. The literary historian Dezső Keresztury recognizes the philosophical, but artistically expressed temperament of Berzsenyi. Two 20th-century Hungarian writers, Dezső Szabó and László Németh, claim for some of his reflective poems a superiority even in comparison with similar poems of Sándor Petőfi, the most outstanding Hungarian lyric poet, especially for Berzsenyi’s ode, “A közelitő tél” (Approach of Winter), which these critics compare with Petőfi’s “Szeptember végén” (End of September), one of the truly beautiful Hungarian poems. Berzsenyi’s romantic sensibility is at times sentimental, which, perhaps, explains his uncritical affection for the German romanticist Friedrich i Marcell Benedek (ed.), “Irodalmi lexikon”, Budapest, 1927, p. 121.
