Miklós Lackó
The Truths of the Soul
From the Correspondence between Lajos Fülep, Charles de Tolnay and Karl Kerényi
Fortunate the man whose enthusiastic and knowledgeable disciples will not
allow their teacher's oeuvre (even though it be fragmentary) fall into oblivion, but become loyal custodians of what he has left behind. Lajos Fülep (1885–
1970), one of the great names in 20th-century Hungarian philosophy of art and art history, was such. Two of his disciples, Dóra Csanak and Árpád Timár, have long devoted their energies to arranging Fülep's papers. The result so far are four volumes of correspondence (1904–1945), and three volumes of collected papers (1902–1930). They have worked with great care and some of the many footnotes, particularly to the correspondence, give evidence of research exemplifying a love for their teacher which comes close to awe.
Was Lajos Fülep really as great as his editors make him appear? A final answer must await the complete publication of his collected works. What has been published so far in the way of papers and correspondence suggests that Fülep was the unique and extraordinary participant in that Hungarian cultural modernization which took off early this century. When still young, he published much that was novel and gave evidence of considerable maturity. In 1906 he was among the first to show enthusiasm for Új Versek (New Verse), the first volume published by Endre Ady, who revolutionized Hungarian poetry. Even earlier, when barely twenty, he wrote on Cézanne whom, right to the end of his life, he looked on as the transcender of Impressionism and the greatest of the new painters. He was one of those militants of the alternative culture of the nascent 20th century who confronted the ruling arch-conservative spirit of the time. They included György Lukács, long before he took up Marxism, Leó Popper, who died young, and whom many today consider an early avatar of Erwin Panofsky, and the poets Mihály Babits and Dezső Kosztolányi who, with Endre Ady, renewed Hungarian poetry; Frigyes Karinthy, the father of the modern literary grotesque in Hungary, József Rippl-Rónai and József Egry, whom Fülep considered the most important Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, and that most unique and most original painter, Tivadar Csontváry-Kosztka, who actually belonged to an older generation.
What could be called the alternative counter-culture of the time were a bunch of highly diverse personalities. Most sympathized with Social Democracy and were bourgeois radicals of liberal leanings-who had not yet broken with positivism. A smaller number, however, Fülep amongst them, recognized that European culture was in crisis. They looked to the new wave of idealism, the re-awakened interest in Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, to Bergson, Simmel and to German (or Italian) neo-metaphysical idealism for a way out. In the years of the Great War they liked to call themselves ethical idealists, remaining progressives in social thought. In the more developed parts of Europe, the neo-idealists strengthened the ranks of the neo-conservatives, but in backward Hungary they stayed in the progressive camp.
Within this camp Lajos Fülep, (much like Béla Bartók and Endre Ady, and Mihály Babits and Dezső Kosztolányi in their own way) distinguished himself in ridding the national consciousness of some of its pathological offshoots, and in anxious care and admiration for the hoi polloi and ancient peasant culture.
As his works and correspondence show, Fülep's creative interests covered
a wide span up to the end of the First World War. Between 1907 and 1914
he lived in Italy, chiefly in Florence, interspersed with a longer stay in Paris
and a shorter one in London. One of the young philosophers in Florence he
studied was Benedetto Croce, for whose neo-Hegelianism he showed some
enthusiasm while maintaining his independence as a thinker. At the outbreak
of war in 1914 he returned to Hungary, as did Lukács from Heidelberg, and
Béla Balázs, the most typical of the Hungarian Art Nouveau writers from Paris. In Hungary he confronted the spiritual backwoodsmen by producing outs-
tanding papers on Dante, Saint Francis of Assisi and Petrarca. What was even more important, he enriched thinking on the theory of art history. His Magyar művészet-európai művészet (Hungarian Art-European Art), a series of papers which established the canon more or less still valid today, was written in
the war years. The aim of the work-which was only published in book
form after 1919, and which remained the magnum opus of his printed works, was to look at painting, sculpture and architecture, opposing currently dominant
views, so that the line of a worthwhile tradition could be established. Much
like Babits, Fülep was primarily interested in the relationship between national and European art. It was in this context that he elaborated his theory of the
correlation of the national and the European. According to this, works of art
inevitably show the features of the national context of their genesis, but
only have European importance if they also carry a universal (European)
message.
Fülep was never directly involved in politics but he had an interest in all that crucially affected the fate of the nation. He stood for a nation with sound social institutions, a nation with a healthy culture. As far as one can tell, he supported the 1918 bourgeois revolution, and although he was never a Marxist, he accepted an appointment to a chair in art history at the University of Budapest during the short-lived (March–July 1919) ultra-left Hungarian Soviet Republic, where his long-time colleague, György Lukács, who had converted to revolutionary Marxism, was in charge of culture. This happened even though Fülep had
studied theology during the war, publishing much of importance to Calvinist theology. A tremendous respect for the young Fülep was shared by just about everybody who took part in the alternative culture. Later, in the 1930s, when the borders between oppositional and official tended to be blurred to some degree, this respect spread to a wider palette. Fülep's personality, the moral and vital
attractiveness of his person, played as important a role in this as his works. He was a man of some stature and one and all within his radius was aware of this. Every kind of progressive or reformist trend in Hungary would have been glad of his adherence, even in a dominant position. In 1930, after much prevarication, the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pécs appointed him to a lecturership. Right up to 1940, as long as the Faculty of Arts at Pécs lasted, he gave lectures in the history and the philosophy of art. At long last the students were able to show enthusiasm for a scholar of great learning.
As a writer Fülep was not as productive between the wars as earlier. After 1919 he, as it were, went into internal exile. He qualified as a Calvinist minister and was successively elected to serve the congregations of Baja and then Zengővárkony. The emoluments were small and he lived in straitened circumstances. Things were made even more difficult by accusations of sedition in 1923 and of ideologically addling his congregation in 1929. Being a highly sensitive man, he was only able to clear his name at the cost of considerable mental anguish. As against this, the publication in book form in 1923 of earlier papers was a great joy. (Magyar művészet-Hungarian Art). Művészet és világnézet (Art and Ideology), written in 1923, somewhat under the influence of Charles de Tolnay, shows a receptivity to the Dilthey–Dvorak Geistesgeschichte (history of ideas) approach, albeit maintaining the notion of the autonomy of art.
Rural solitude made contact with a number of friends and disciples particularly important, especially contact with Károly Tolnay, or, as he is better known abroad, Charles de Tolnay, the international authority on Michaelangelo and Flemish painting (Maître de Frémalle, Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Breughel). Tolnay, who had moved to Vienna already in the summer of 1918, had been a disciple of Fülep's while still at school. He maintained his loyal respect for Fülep in Vienna, studying under Max Dvorak, or in Hamburg, where Erwin Panofsky was his teacher. In memoirs written in old age, Charles de Tolnay stressed two points about Fülep: "He was the last polyhistor," who moreover had a keen sensibility as regards interpretation, stressing the moral importance of works of art. Their correspondence-as the appended letters show-that Fülep, who was a vain man, appreciated Tolnay's loyalty, who was important as a source of information for the isolated and solitary Fülep. But the correspondence was also important to him as a lifelong debate. The principal subjects of the correspondence and of their rare meetings were Tolnay's Michaelangelo interpretation, particularly that of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Hungarian art, especially small terracotta pieces by Miklós Izsó, whom Fülep regarded as the finest embodiment of "national" art and ideas centred on the correlation of the national and the universal. Fülep's influence is documented by a paper on Cézanne which Charles de Tolnay published in Hungarian in 1924. Tolnay expressly stressed his indebtedness to Fülep's 1906 and 1907 papers. Following Fülep, Tolnay argues that Cézanne's greatness lies in the fact that his is the most adequate depiction of the fragmented world of modernity. It was this that explains Cézanne's preference for still lives. As Tolnay puts it: for Cézanne, "fragmentariness is a matter of principle, which embodies the essence of form."
Sometime late in the twenties, Fülep started on a major comprehensive work on the philosophy of art. This was his prime preoccupation to the end of his life. But this major work remained unfinished, though long fragments in manuscript bear witness to Fülep's great intellectual efforts. In the thirties there were signs of a break in his isolation. Between 1933 and 1935 he associated with a group of writers (László Németh, Gyula Illyés, et al.) with roots in the peasantry, and who stood for patriotic values and reform and published an article "National Self-centredness" in the periodical Válasz, an explanation of the idea of European universality which was in jeopardy at the time. In 1939–1940 he worked on a longish paper he called "The National in Works of Art." It was never completed but it contained many exciting ideas. Thus he argued that the value of the nation lies in the fact that it is an integration on a higher plane than the earlier and more primitive "people" and therefore a more suitable creator of values. The nation in itself is, however, only of potential value, the national character of works of art primarily derives from links with the people.
It was through his academic work that Fülep established contact and later an intellectual friendship with (Károly) Karl Kerényi, the classical scholar and student of myths. Kerényi obtained a professorship in Pécs in 1934. At the time few were aware of the high reputation which the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pécs enjoyed between 1934 and 1940, that is until its cessation, in non-academic circles, in the first place owing to the presence of Fülep and Kerényi. Kerényi was of inspiring assistance to Fülep primarily in the understanding of ancient religion and of the links between myths and art. Fülep guided Kerényi in an understanding of the real place of mythology and of the differing character of myth and art, and in the potentials of a philosophical approach as regards the history of religion. What particularly interested Fülep was that Kerényi transcended the usual approach to myths of classical scholars, pointing out their disharmonic, darker side, their "wolfish-hard" aspect. This approach shored up Fülep's thinking, which was always inclined to the dynamic and tragically dramatic. But Kerényi also repeats Fülep's concept of "reality" which took shape in the early years of their friendship. This differed from traditional philosophic thought and appeared to be inspired to some degree by the Existentialism of the times. What Kerényi and some Germans recognized as seelische Wahrheiten (truths of the soul) pointed in the same direction. These are truths which apply to everything that exists, even if it be only imagined, longed for or felt, including all the irrational aspects of life. As Fülep noted in manuscript: "The ancient anthropomorphic
approach in its mythical form is closer to reality than the later abstract concept of reality."
Fülep agreed with Kerényi that mythology was a peculiar form of human communication. It had many functions but it was a language of communication for a very long period of time, one by which ancient man and later even people of antiquity were able to articulate thoughts that they could not formulate otherwise, either because their linguistic means were as yet not adequately developed, or because myths were from the start more suitable for communicating a complex idea, than everyday speech. Fülep considered the arts to be not only autonomous and existentially necessary, but also an extraordinary means of communication. Fülep writes: "For us, art is an infinite revelation of truth-values, it enriches our life, offering not only culture, enjoyment, etc, but also providing a gate to life, the world, the universe, lending a voice for our sake to everything, to every meaning of ‘reality'. Art revives potentialities that lie dormant within us, when it draws attention to values of reality which were either unknown to us or which we did not understand, preserving the ancient idiom of the Cosmos as an addition to the idiom of science and the vernacular, a much narrower and poorer language... for the great dialogue between the Universe and man."
Kerényi's transfer, in 1940, to the University of Szeged made contact between them more difficult. After Kerényi moved to Switzerland in 1943, it was confined to correspondence. Meanwhile in 1935, he had arranged for a meeting between Kerényi and Tolnay on his last visit home before the war. An intensive intellectual friendship came into being between Kerényi and Tolnay. They wrote numerous letters to each other and-before Tolnay moved to Princeton in 1939-they went on several trips together, to which they always invited Fülep, but the solitary "old man" (54 in 1939) never set foot out of Hungary again, except for a brief journey to Rome in 1948.
Fülep wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes on the philosophy of art from which I briefly quoted. Even a partial discussion would go well beyond the scope of this article and my own competence. Fülep experienced 1945 as a liberation, more precisely as an expulsion of fascism. Temporarily, his lot improved. He obtained a teaching post at the University of Budapest and was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but he could not really fit into the conditions of an ever more rigorous dictatorship. In 1947 Lukács invited him to review books published in Hungarian after 1945. Fülep consented but found himself unable to carry out his promise. As he wrote to Tolnay, a whole book ought to be written on Lukács as an example of "sacrifizio del intelletto," and on why there were no Marxist aesthetics, and why it was good that there were none. He grew more and more despondent about his major work, but the depth and originality of his thinking continued to be in evidence in occasional work, such as a paper on Rembrandt, a so far unpublished lecture on Leonardo, which is a work of genius, and statements he made in support of the status
in the Hungarian canon of the painters Tivadar Csontváry-Kosztka and Gyula Derkovits, whom he also held in high esteem.
A final answer regarding Fülep's standing within international, and not just local Hungarian, scholarship should be given by those parts of his oeuvre that still await publication, that is, the volumes which will contain the fragments of his projected philosophy of art. I can only hope that life will grant Fülep's literary executors the strength and peace of mind to complete their work.
Charles de Tolnay-to Lajos Fülep
[Rome, 1925] 18 October
My Dear Respected Professor,
Please excuse my writing only now, but I have spent the first weeks in reviving memories1 and in looking for a room. As to the latter, I was lucky, I got a truly good room; I believe it is in the same place where that legation official used to stay of whom you talked to me (so much, at least, is certain that a member of the Hungarian legation to the Holy See lived here a few years ago): Via Sicilia 24, V.int.[erno] 18 presso Signora Cherchi. True, that two-room apartment was not for rent, but I did get a very spacious bedsitter. She also has another bedsitter, so that if you come here in January2 (which I certainly hope you will) there will be no problem as regards accommodation.
I searched for the Donato Gianotti3 in vain, both in Florence and here; it is out of print. Similarly, the short stories of Matteo Bandello4 are also not available. On the other hand, S.[an] Agostino's I libri della Fede5 has arrived, and I shall post it in a few days' time. The books by Perez and by Baratono6-I must frankly confess-I have forgotten to order: tomorrow I shall have time and shall take care of this matter.
Otherwise I am well, Rome is wonderful and even the weather is perhaps only rarely as fine as it is now. I actually only started to work7 last week (the libraries had been closed until then), but it is going slowly. There are so many things to see here that one does not really feel like sitting in a library.-As to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I still believe that one must look from the entrance towards the wall behind the altar, that Michelangelo himself imagined the composition in this manner; on the other hand, what you said is true, one can see even the last pictures upon entering. (Right now I am occupying myself mainly with the Ceiling and am collecting material for a-never-to-be-written-work8 whose subject would be how cyclical composition historically developed in Italy and what its relationship is to the whole of architecture; in other words, the chapels of Italian churches as artworks created from a unitary idea are the main substratum of this topic.-For, up to now, the individual paintings have always been described and discussed in isolation instead of-as the facts demand-understanding the composition of the individual paintings from their role in the entirety of space. The reason why this is not easy to do is that relatively few of them have remained unchanged; but in spite of all the restorations-I believe-it is still possible to obtain a clear picture of the entirety of the development, and this is what is important. For, even so, a few hitherto scarcely discussed basic features of Italian art would become apparent.
I truly hope you will let me know if you need other books (or anything else), and I trust you will come to Italy in January.
Your devoted student,
Károly Tolnay
N.B. Before my departure, while still in Vienna, I copied the bibliography of the Höllenfahrten,9 and now I don't remember whether I sent it to you or have forgotten to post it. I no longer have the receipt; if it has got lost, I can put it
together again, having brought with me that part of my dissertation.
Please convey my greetings to your wife.
Manuscript Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Ms 4590/23.
Lajos Fülep-to Charles de Tolnay
Zengővárkony, 19 January 1934, via Pécsvárad
Dear Carlo,
I was very glad of your October letter. I can tell from it that you are working and trying to create a position for yourself. You are, of course, perfectly
right in what you wrote about the German universities-but, perhaps, it would have been possible to wait somehow until the dirt drains off; sooner or later this is bound to happen. But by then it will hardly be possible for you to return.
I would gladly go to Paris,1 especially since there I could be together with you. But this is a dream which I can dream at most at night, in bed. I am scarcely able to make a living; where would I find the travel expenses? Had I received the Baumgarten2 this year, I would surely have gone-there were, indeed, a few people on the board who were fighting for me, but in vain; in this matter Babits3 and Basch4 decide in a sovereign manner, and they have left me out. And so Paris too was lost.
My state of health continues to be bad, fever every day-these days I can't even imagine that I'll ever get well and how that would feel. I would soonest run my head against a wall.
If you publish anything, please send it. I hear that a book of yours is being published in Hungarian about Noémi.5 You did well to write about her. Perhaps it will be of help to her. As I hear, she lives at Pest and in great straits.
What is the situation with your book on Michelangelo? It's time that were published. Something could be made of that in England. There they still have money for everything.
Please tell Rina not to be angry with me for still not having written to her separately-I should like to answer her in person; I trust that we can meet this year, if not in Paris, then in Várkony. I have the feeling that the two of you will come-and I am very much looking forward to this.
My wife joins me in sending warmest regards to both of you,
Fülep
P.[ost] S.[criptum] It is in vain that you write on your letter "messenger paid" and put more postage on it-it is money down the drain.
Florence, Casa Buonarroti, estate of Charles de Tolnay.
Karl Kerényi to Lajos Fülep
Ascona, 7 September 1943
Dear Lajos,
I mailed a copy of Hermes der Seelenführer to you yesterday.1 It is a lecture
I gave here last year, but it has only now been published. Other than that, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung printed (on the day that Syracuse fell) my article "Selbstbekenntnisse des Livius."2 Perhaps it will reach you. The same with the text of my lecture "Der Geist,"3 given first at the request of the Zürich students in the auditorium maximum of the university there and later, expanded in different ways, in Basle, in the Leysin, the TB sanatorium for students. The entire thing is just the nucleus and starting poing for a major work in process. The title of my lecture in Ascona this year4 was "Vater Helios"; it continues the "Hermes" line. And the "Hermes" lecture-well, you can judge for yourself how far this paper is advancing in the direction prepared by "Mythologie und Gnosis."5
I was glad to read, although with some skepticism, what you wrote in your postcard, that there was somebody else besides you at home who was enraptured by it. A talented youth, you say. If indeed talented and he really understood it, he should have said "No more, for the time being! Even this is too much for a single occasion!" Since we are talking about a youth.6 That it is too little for you, I can understand. You can rightfully expect that, in the wake of this guiding principle, grasped at long last, the entire historically given gnosis should now be unravelled. In principle, this would be possible. What is more, it would be work requiring only time and not much acumen. A good pupil (if I shall have such another) or myself, in the days of a playful old age (if I live that long), might manage it.7 But you may have noticed that what drives me is, still and increasingly, more than the claim for mere historicity (although I am not renouncing any of that, either here, if anywhere, there must be severity).
The place to which a student of Greek civilization must get and to which the understanding of a religious man facing the Absolute naked must lead, is understanding Man in all his aspects. As a science: anthropology, independently of all the sciences called anthropology up to now, must stand on the naked soil of humanity. It is at this that every truly humanist effort must achieve. And only this can be the foundation of a new, true humanism.
This is the goal toward which I can work together with psychologists. And you know me well enough to know that the telos toward which my fate is moving is not a set goal. But it is something toward which I have been driven since the beginning of my beginnings, and which is always becoming clearer only to the extent to which I am getting nearer to it. Thus my "scholarship" first met ethnology (Frobenius; in English: anthropology) and later, now, met psychology which, in the last analysis, should be anthropology (meeting Jung is only the beginning; Szondi8 is, from the aspect of anthropology, more than Jung. For the time being both of them lack a philosophical foundation, and Jung also lacks coherence of thought).
Szilasi9 really is a help to me in making me conscious of the road which I am "walking" rather than "covering." The calmed wisdom of his age makes his
philosophizing more than word-coining craftsmanship. Our being neighbours
is also a stroke of good fortune from this point of view. But, as always, duties take one better forward than does theory. In the winter, for one semester,
lectures arranged by the Zurich Institut für Angewandte Psychologie, under
the title "Seele und Griechentum. Rolle des Seelischen in einer schöpferischen Hochkultur." Further, continuing the "Geist" lectures, among others on the topic: "Geist oder Betörung? Probleme der mörderischen Ekstatik am Beispiel des Schamanismus erörtert." (Right now I am wording it approximately this way.)10
How difficult it is to write about these matters, when one cannot explain in detail and to the full extent what one thinks! You yourself know best how one cannot write in a letter, ahead of time, what one has intended to be a work: the great work or whatever form it takes (paper or lecture), to that degree of its completion which fate allows us to reach. I ask for your trust until I can show something more finished. And you know that you too are an object of my trust at home. Please write about what hopes there are as to a spiritual future? Will there still be substantia in one form or another?
We have both seen the direction and have also correctly interpreted the signs. But the macabre entanglements until the final dénouement! In Milan they named a street after Amendola11 already on the second day. But will this street still stand after the bombings? (Leonardo's Last Supper is still there-the question only is: is it possible to keep the wall up on which it was painted?)
If you write here, do so using my full embassy address (on the envelope); that way the letter will move faster and easier across the borders. We can probably stay here in the winter. I have little business in Berne (a lecture at the end of this month: "Anamnese und Sympathie," at a psychological congress). I shall hold the Zurich lectures every fortnight as a peripatetic lecturer.12 It would seem that this is my fate. Did they want to hinder Pécs–Budapest? The road through the Gotthard is, without a doubt, more beautiful!)13
The way things are suits the children: both of them-Lucia, already three, and Kornélia who is one-can continue blossoming under a southern sky. And they are doing that splendidly, indeed! And with them and together with me, Magdi, who also sends you her greetings. She is a true help who I can rely on in the new circumstances. I hardly mentioned these this time. Perhaps another time. Suffice it for now that the figs are ripening; I would gladly send you a boxful, if
I could, by way of thanks for the winter apples.
Anyway, I am expecting your answer! No news of Carlo.14 As soon as there are any, I shall let you know.
Warm regards,
Károly
Lajos Fülep to Karl Kerényi
Zengővárkony, 11 October 1943
Dear Károly,
Your letter made me very happy, everything in it. I wanted to write to you immediately and also to thank you for the Hermes-which I am doing now-but I have again been smitten by such misery that I am ashamed to talk about it; I feel as Odysseus may have felt when driven out by Aiolos as "one whom the happy gods came to hate."
So much misery in one person truly offers food for thought. I won't bore you with the details. In brief, only this much: they performed an "oral surgery operation" on me, which means that they kept hoeing away at my tonsils for 24 hours to remove a fully, indeed, overly well-developed sapiens, which had not grown in the outward direction but lay almost horizontally inside the bone. The doctors said that in the entire history of the clinic there has never been such a case; in fact they have never even heard, or read, of such a thing. This uniqueness was my lot. You can imagine, the suffering was unique too-how can one emphathize with such a thing?-and also what ensued it, for weeks, without a minute's respite, night and day the most furious pain (swallowing a huge quantity of painkillers did not help); only now do I begin to get to the point of again being able to think that I can write the first letters, and first of all this one to you.
Well, at least you are able to work at full strength. And without being disturbed. This calms and pacifies me, to some degree, otherwise I feel extremely bitter.
It interests me very much what you say about the developing "major work." May I infer from the fact that "Der Geist" is already finished that it will be purely philosophical? For that reason, I am very much looking forward to the text of this lecture-of the others too, of course, for if we can't talk to each other, then let us at least stay in touch this way. From what you ask, "Will there still be a substantia in some form?", I can guess how much you are driven by feeling the current emptiness; and where you want to get to, I think I won't guess but I am asking. But is it possible even to ask such things today? Our misery is that we see the beckoning shore, but of the way that leads to it, there's no news what-ever. You are speaking of a "new, true humanism"; but is there a true humanism without God? And where is God? We are an infinitely long way from Him and He is from us, and there is still a huge amount of suffering needed before the meeting. The present is, I believe, only the beginning. This world of today is not really standing "on the naked soil of humanity"-it stands on the humanity of the inhumanity which belongs to it. For everything to become visible we had to get to the point where we are and even farther; we are not yet at the end. At some point we have to arrive to the point of completeness-to the point of complete recognition, complete confrontation, complete reckoning.
I don't know if you are right concerning the young man; as to me, it is precisely in a young man that I can understand this eagerness. Perhaps it would not be good if such a young man were so deliberate and moderate.1 My demand is of a different nature: of a person who, in general, has already often hit that stumbling-stone which appeared, sometimes here, sometimes there, under his foot, and an eternally bothersome stone which nobody could tell what it was. Now, at last, somebody is speaking up-it is understandable that I should like to see it built into the edifice.
You mention Szondi with Jung-and I don't even know him! I have seen the name once or twice, but I know nothing of his works. I don't even know where he lives.2 Here, at home? This too is characteristic, that somebody whom you consider superior to Jung, someone like myself knows almost nothing about. This air here is an excellent heat conductor. Where and under what titles have those of his works been published which could interest me too and which are not purely medical?
Thanks for your wife's kind remembrances to me. My respectful greetings to her, and I hope the children are happily flourishing.
With warmest regards,
Lajos
Karl Kerényi to Charles de Tolnay
Tegna, 8 April 1948
My Dear Károly,
There is no lack of work or anxiety here either but since the autumn, travelling and the experiences of travel have taken up much time and have also been very informative. It was at the end of November that I travelled to Hungary with Magdi.1 After that we spent Christmas, together with the children-for whom Magdi made the journey home here alone-in Rome, where we stayed till the end of February. I saw Fülep again, at first in Budapest, at the Eötvös College,2 not in a good shape, but later again, in all the better health and rejuvenated-in Rome. We spent almost the whole of February there together, and we were both very much awaiting a letter from you. By now Fülep is already back in Budapest (XII. Nagyboldogasszony útja, Eötvös Kollégium); it would be good if you wrote to him as soon as possible.
I won't write about my experiences at the Palazzo Falconieri;3 ask him about these also, the more so since I hear you have plans to go there for the summer. I can only say this much: Fülep's two lectures on the philosophy of art which he gave there are for me just about the best of European philosophy today, speaking in general. We must make every effort that he should publish his work as soon as possible; it is the theoretical foundation both for your most important findings in art history and for a true knowledge of the Greeks. I have never been more spiritually moved facing a living man, and can say that I have met one or two who are at the very summit of European intellectual life. Now, after the event, I am only sorry that although we met daily, spending time together in the Abruzzo bar on the Piazza Farnese, where Fülep took fiendish enjoyment in the wild saltarello danced to the music of bagpipes, in the improvised recitation of stanzas by the barkeeper and customers, indeed, even in the bloody fights of the men and in hair-tearing brawls by the women-I say, I am sorry that, in spite of all this, we talked too little. As a matter of fact, it is always like that with Fülep-our many encounters have been characterized by a shared silence. It is perhaps also for this reason that I was so deeply shocked-in a positive sense-by the agreement, down to the last hair, with what I have known for a long time to be the meaning of my whole life and work.
About the situation in Hungary-concerning also my own fate-I am expecting news from Fülep right now; in the meantime, the experiences and prospects of the autumn are already out of date. Everything is in motion, and everything depends on the eastern orientation. In spite of a good reception in Hungary, I cannot guess where we shall be after six months. While waiting, I shall publish in the Alb. Vig. my recent papers under the title of Niobe.4 Chastel5 wrote and we wrote to him also-I am glad that in the autumn you too will finish your volume. Angelo Brelich's Vesta6 is finished-in Italian; we have to have it translated into German. I assume that you have received Eitrem's7 pamphlet-if not, please let me know, so that I can take the necessary steps.
Magdi and the children are in a great shape-the air, the bustle, and the life in Rome did a lot of good to the little ones. They are beaming, as if they had returned from a wonderful summer holiday.
Unfortunately I did not manage to meet Laci Németh.8 His address is, as before: Hódmezővásárhely, Kollégium. When I went to Szeged, I wrote to him to ask him to come there; he was pleased to prepare to do so and sent his daughter Gigi ahead to arrange the details of our meeting. But they had not thought of the fact that my train from Pest would only arrive in the evening, and Gigi, not finding me in Szeged at noon, believed that I was not coming at all. So we only exchanged letters, jut a few words.
In Pest I obtained for myself Gondolatok a könyvtárban,9 but I left it there for Magdi's brother, Kari, to read. Now I shall have it sent to me here, and I shall also have its price written, which I haven't committed to memory.
I kiss Ria's hand, warm greetings from Magdi to both of you, I am waiting for more recent news!
Károly
Karl Kerényi to Lajos Fülep
Ponte Brolla pr. Tegna, on March 18th, 1951
My Dear Lajos,
I actually meant to write yesterday, in any event so that you would at least
hear from us by this early Easter and, hopefully, by the beginning of spring. Indeed, I hardly ever write letters now, at the most on festive occasions, bound not even strictly to a day but, rather, to the position of my microcosm and macrocosm. Sine sole sileo, as the sundials have it. These months there was reason indeed to keep silent, although you were very much in our thoughts, especially during our time in Rome. As at the turn of 1947–48,1 Magdi again brought the children down to me, so that I should not have to lay aside the work started in December and yet we should be able to have a real Christmas. In these three years these little ones have talked to each other so much about Rome, Kornélia has drawn such exact pictures of the Capitol-the child produces surprising drawings, from life too, in the art school to which we have sent her (otherwise she is in the third year of elementary school)-that I was sure that we all would greatly enjoy it. And so it was, in spite of April weather with rain every day.
Thus there has also been an outside occasion to think of you, not only an inner one, which simply exists: who else should I speak to, within myself, about the biggest problems, in my native language? True, Carlo was here in the summer at the Eranos, but there was no serious conversation with him, he rather avoided it. And not for the whole world did he talk about a fact which came to my knowledge later, by chance but with documentary evidence, that what he inherited from his father amounts to a Nobel Prize, at least as far as the sum goes. Don't take notice of this in a way that he will catch on; but it will surely please you to hear this from me.
Nothing has changed in our life; but perhaps even that fact is something,
that this miracle, our existence based purely upon my inner productivity,
can be maintained. The house in which we are living by the above-named bridge-this is the Maggia bridge which connects Tegna and Locarno-was
built in swallow's-nest fashion above the river; it is more spacious, more
beautiful, and I found an epigraph for it in Hölderlin: Will einer wohnen/So sei
es an Treppen/ Und wo ein Häuslein hinabhängt/Am Wasser halte dich auf/
Und was du hast, ist/Atem zu holen.2 This is exactly what is here: a chance
to write the works I carry inside me. The ready accessibility of Rome is part
of things. In the summer, working 8–9 hours daily even in the fiercest heat, I finished there, in one volume, the first complete, non-Romantic but also
not classicistically idealizing, faithful exposition of the Greek mythological
tradition. The German version is being published here in Switzerland, the
Italian, French, and English translations are also ready and, in part, in the press. I am working now on the fair copy of the first volume of the explanatory companion volume, not a systematizing work, rather analytical in a scholarly manner and historically reconstructing-belonging to but indepen-dent of it.3
Only some of my old works have been published in new-in part already third and fourth-editions: Pythagoras und Orpheus and the Labyrinth-Studien-which you possibly have in your possession-and all of my papers published since 1938 on this subject in a collective Italian volume of 500 pages.4 This spring Einführung sees its fourth edition-after years when it could not be published on account of the unfortunate Kollár,5 I don't know if you have heard of his suicide.-La religione antica is the second Italian edition.6 There is no substantial change in any of these, but if I can add them to your library-all or any one of them-please let me know, and I'll be happy to do so. The title of the large Italian volume is Miti e Misteri.
I believe that I have given an account of everything important and have again acquired the right to expect at least some short news from you. To read something by you would also be a pleasure. There is little intellectual news in this world gone rigid! It is, so to speak, only the rigidification which is growing, and that at the innermost core.
I hope that we will see each other again, although, for the time being, until the works which I have intended for these years are finished, I can't even think of it.
It is a joy to me to think of the fact that you too can live for your work, and I trust that also the question of your home will be settled soon. Do not forget to let me know your new address: mine, as far as the post is concerned, is the old one.
Wishing you a Happy Easter, with warmest regards,
Károly
Lajos Fülep to Karl Kerényi
Budapest, 19 June 1951
My Dear Károly,
At last I am in a position to answer your letter, which made me very happy; not only because it had come from you but because there was so much good news-and only good!-news in it. (Although I have become used to this-and may this always be so!)
Apart from the good news about the family I am, of course, happiest about what you say concerning your work. It is very good that you have such momentum-whatever the old fogeys may say on this topic. It is you who must do the essential things, and you will, too, since you already have done most of it. I have not, of course, kept up with what has been published in classical scholarship
in these past four decades, but I do not believe that anything has been said anywhere commensurate with what you have said-this is what I feel whenever
I pick up any of your books or papers. It quite pains me, too, that I can do this with your work but you cannot with mine; your saying that you would like to read what I wrote would be especially good for me-there is nobody here to whom I can show something or with whom I can talk. I am more of a hermit here than I was at Várkony; after all, I could talk with you there, and here I cannot.
Otherwise it is only now that I am beginning to feel my way back into work-I have been very much jolted out of it. Of course, I had also become shamefully tired; the work I had to do when I moved and got settled was inhuman.
Now, since the Eötvös1 was abolished, I have been giving lectures on art history at the university; a few weeks ago I received an appointment to the department.
It is very kind of you to offer me the new editions-but how can I lay that burden on you? I do not dare to quote from them, but I shall answer your question: I don't have the Labyrinth-Studien,2 neither do I have the Einführung, but I do own the first edition of the Rel. antica about which I seem to remember your saying that it is shorter than the German text. I do not know which parts of the Miti e Misteri exist in separate editions.
I was also very glad about the good news about Carlo, but I don't know what has happened: I sent a registered postcard to his Paris address and have had no answer to this day. Didn't he get mine or I his?
I had not known about Kollár's fate, I only heard it now from you-I take it he may have had financial troubles.
I don't know if I wrote that the neighbourhood of my Hölderlinesque home with steps3 is quite beautiful (perhaps you know this area); its main advantage is that it is cool in the summer, what it will be like in winter Iddio lo sa.4 I don't stir from here unless I have to.
With warmest regards,
Lajos
Lajos Fülep to Charles de Tolnay
Budapest, 20 December 1952
Dear Carlo,
I am answering your Paris postcard of June 14 after such a long delay, which I really regret, now that I have looked at your card again and seen how much time has passed since! But time is flying, and there is still so much to do! The longer one lives, the more things to be done one sees and, of course, one believes that one alone is able to do them-in fact, that's even what others think too. Has your Leonardo lecture not been published? Somebody has seen it mentioned somewhere, but I don't know in what form. If it has been published, send it! I am thinking of writing up mine1 in a more orderly fashion and publishing it. Its gist was that Leonardo was an anima naturaliter hellenistica, his Madonnas etc. are Hellenistic Aphrodites, John the Baptist (it is not important, whether authentic or not) is the hermaphrodite, etc.; in him we find the beginnings of modern l'art pour l'art; society is like that, too (Ariosto, etc.). The actual question is whether the L. problem (his frittering away etc.) is a biographical question or not. Answer: no, or, if in anything, then not in the way in which it has been seen up to now. He could not be different or act differently. Either: artistic, like Raphael, or: a world, like Michelangelo. The L. estranged from religion and looking for a new world could honestly only be like this. The Last Supper is a tympanum, without the Parthenon. From this you can perhaps see if you are interested. If yes, I can write about it in a letter, in greater detail.
I am expecting the 4th volume of the Michelangelo; when published, don't tardy with it! I shall write about it.2
With warmest regards from Lodovico.
My greetings to Máli,
Lajos
Miklós Lackó
is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has published numerous books on 20th-century Hungarian political and
intellectual history.
