Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
historicism and meant to promote a sense of national pride appeared. It was in that vein that he wrote The Meeting in Arad, a work whose story, describing the severe punishment of traitors, is set at the time of King (Blind) Béla II. Only fragments survive of his planned-for Hunyadi-epic. The Hunyadis appear in his ballads, too, as in The Fineót Song, a piece paying tribute to King Matthias. He wrote idylls, legends, fables conveying a universal message as well as containing critical remarks interpretable in the context of contemporary literature, and he composed epigrams of a political drift. His works published under the title The Poetic Worki oh Czuczor in 1836 were banned because of the inclusion of popular songs of an amorous nature and the unseemly conduct of the author who had been seen in Pest where he attended the theatre and the casino. Czuczor was now publishing under a nom de plume. In 1837 he was ordered to return to Pannonhalma. Later he taught in the secondary school of Győr, a position that he was subsequently recalled from. In 1842 he was given permission to hold a public position. His popular songs were set to music and sung to well-known tunes. Published in 1834, his "collection of songs sentimental and cheerful" included two of his verses set to music. In i860, a competition for the musical- isation of two more poems of his was invited by the National Institute of Music. The inscription on the plaque on Múzeum körűt is a stanza from his poem "Before the Tribunal": "Me my home to cease to like / Its usurper not to strike / On this earth shall make no might!” To achieve that was certainly beyond the might of the court, but to sentence Czuczor to six years' imprisonment in a fortress for his poem "Alarm” published in Kossuth’s Hírlap (Courier) on 21 December 1848 was certainly within its power. The charge brought against him was "incitement to armed rebellion". And indeed, the poem urged the reader in these words: "Our sacred rights trod in the ground / In sacred fight to save we’re bound / Against the sceptred fiend". A member of the Academy and a Benedictine monk working on the dictionary of the Hungarian language, Czuczor was arrested on 18 January 1949 to be imprisoned first in the New Building and then in the notorious prison fortress of Kufstein. Pressured by mounting public sentiment, the authorities released Czuczor in May of 1851. Czuczor returned to his work with renewed vigour, and in 1852 he already held a lecture at the Academy entitled "The Interpretation and Analysis of the Hungarian Vocabulary". However, the compilation of a Hungarian dictionary was left to be completed by János Fogarasi as Czuczor died of cholera in 1866.
