Mátyás Domokos

A Few Words About a Single Sentence

The Story Behind an Illyés Poem

[...]

However, for thirty years, the arts commissars of the Kádár regime adamantly insinuated that he had antedated the poem and that he had actually written it in the feverish autumn days of 1956, inspired by the experience, and illusion, of overthrowing the communist dictatorship. At the same time, and perhaps because of this, the "non-existent" censorship of "existing socialism" made it impossible for the poem to be republished, whether in a newspaper or a review, or in Illyés's own books, including various editions of "collected" poems. Indeed, anyone purveying the poem in any form or through any channel could expect the police to take action against them, especially in the aftermath of the revolution. In the meantime, the poem acquired a historic patina and a place in the public mind on a par with Sándor Petôfi's "National Song", a poem that had played an inflammatory role in the 1848 Hungarian revolution and subsequent war of independence. It was copied in different versions and passed from hand to hand in secret.

[...]

Two years after the poet's death, on 31 October 1985, in the small village of Ozora, where he had spent part of his childhood, a newly built school was named after him. The school was opened with an address given by György Aczél, a member of the Political Committee of the HSWP, and the Party's cultural overlord. It was in this address that, for the first time, someone representing the official political line claimed in public that the poem was in fact about "the indisputable historical calling of socialism—the fight for the totality of freedom and against all kinds of dictatorship" and it was not up to Illyés, nor the poem, that in 1956 it "had become a weapon in the hands of those triggering and inciting violent emotions and of harbingers of hopelessness."

This strange story, with its morbid and grotesque turns and spanning thirty years, is nothing else than that of a show trial that had been initiated against a poem. The suspicion of antedating the poem was probably for the purpose of distracting attention from what the chief cultural commissar tried to "rehabilitate" the poem with in Ozora in 1985—instead of bringing the totality of freedom in fulfilling its historic mission,"existing socialism" had brought into history the totality of oppression.

[...]


Mátyás Domokos

is an essayist and literary critic, author of several collections of essays on contemporary Hungarian literature. He is one of the editors of the literary monthly Holmi.


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The Hungarian Quarterly, Volume XXXVI No. 139 Autumn 1995 - Some Highlights


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