Fraternity-Testvériség, 1952 (30. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1952-11-01 / 11. szám
16 TESTVÉRISÉG his material. It is evident that his early years left a deep imprint on him, and even in his mixed emotions regarding his childhood and adolescence, one senses that he nurtured a profound love for his early environment. Perhaps the Swiss critic was right who stated that Petőfi reached his creative self through folksongs and fables.9 If beauty is ‘“symbolic sympathy”,10 one could say that Petőfi’s poetic fondness for his early environment was an instinctual gratitude for the folk-songs and fables he heard from his parents and their friends. Like Pushkin, who never ceased to praise his nurse for the fairy-tales she told him, Petőfi seemed to have felt that the imagination of the Magyar people and the immense vista of the Lowland lay a claim on him which he could not ignore, nor forget. His spirit remained in tune with his past when in later years he almost starved, and when there was no indication that he was destined to become the greatest lyric poet of nineteenth century Hungary. It never left him, even when he faced the seeming hopelessness of his future; and it remained faithful to him when he was at last recognized. Petőfi maintained that without roots there was no reliable creative rhythm. In order to render an appropriate critical ajfpraisal of his work, this postulate of his poetry must be considered in the right perspective. The first half of the nineteenth century is one of the most successful epochs of Hungarian culture. In a relatively short time, notwithstanding political, social and economic obstacles, the nation enriched the world with the works of unusually talented writers and poets. Ferenc Kazinczy, Dániel Berzsenyi, József Katona, the two Kisfaludy brothers, Ferenc Kölcsey, Baron József Eötvös, Mór Jókai, Mihály Tompa, Mihály Vörösmarty, János Arany, and others, while playing on various strings of the creative spirit, they added breadth and diversity to Hungarian culture as poets, writers, critics and translators. In the realm of public life evolutionary and radical reforms hastened the nation’s path away from feudalism. Petőfi’s lyricism, courageous optimism, valiant and defiant confidence in the nation’s future, seemed to justify and clarify this striving for a better, nobler, happier Hungary and mankind. No wonder that Gyula Illyés, the twentieth century Hungarian poet, wrote this in the introduction to his biography of Petőfi: “I rejoice in 9 Schweitzer Lexikon. “Als ein Genie lyrischer Ursprünglichkeit gelante er durch Volkslied und Märchen zu seinem eigensten schöpferischen Wesen.” Zürich. Vol. V. 1948. pp. 1511. 10 Raymond Bayer, “Method in Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. VII, Number 4, 1949. pp. 308. 11 Gyula Illyés: Petőfi. Budapest. 1936. pp. 9. being able to write about him.”11 Petőfi’s life and work reveal the ethos of a much misunderstood and maligned nation, the character and sentiment of a people, and the genius of an individual. There is no chip-on-the-shoulder resentment, no inferiority complex in his work, because he was writing in a language unknows outside the borders of Hungary; there is unity in his life and his creative attainment. In a shock- hardened and disastrous world—certainly in need of spiritual and social sanitation like ours of today—this Hungarian poet, who lived and wrote with consistent honesty, whose many poems became folk-songs, in whom there was nothing insipid or aggravatingly plebeian, whose “common sense” made sense, provides inspiration, stimulation and consolation for those whose dormant belief in human values requires the magic of an awakening spirit. Neither the Pickwickian characters of a petty bourgeois “good will”, nor the demagogical or autocratic expansionists of “social justice” will find in Petőfi’s works real satisfaction, but those who are awake to the need of a full and just life and who are unwilling to be duped by high sounding phrases or flippant slogans, should look upon this poet, who rose above the deplorable pettiness of a mere existence, as an inspirational expression of man’s strength in his battle with fate for the sake of human faith. Besides his “écrasez l’infáme” attitude which was that of one who served progress in a truly enlightened fashion, there was Petőfi, the pure poet, the singer of love and nature, family ties and other homely subjects of great poets. As to the basic nature of his poetry it is imperative to see him primarily in the light of his creative spirit. It was this creative spirit which enabled him to be a realist with a romantic temperament, to be universal within the frame of Hungarian life, to be what he essentially was—a brave human being who upheld as a man and as a poet the principle of free speech, an artist of the word, an intuitively sagacious person, a tribute to the social and imaginative resourcefulness of his own nation, the personification of integrity which neither flattery nor persecution could stay in the pursuit of its goal. III. Sándor Petőfi was born on January first, 1823, in Kiskőrös, a rural community of the Hungarian Lowland. His father, István Petrovics (Petrovitz?), was an innkeeper and butcher whose ancestors lived in County Nyitra, in norwestern Hungary; his mother, Mária Hruz, the descendant of artisans and peasants, an unschooled, warm-hearted woman, was born and reared in
