András Veres
György Petri
(1943-2000)
When you think about it, he was a lucky man. A born sceptic and pessimist, he could easily vindicate his disposition in history. In 1968 he abandoned for ever any youthful illusions of reforming Marxism. In the 1980s he was one of the most prominent members of the democratic opposition. The political changes of 1989 momentarily threatened with the realization of what he feared most: "One day we'll wake up having forgiven everything, / finding no hatred in our hearts to keep us alive." The performance of the first democratically elected government soon put his mind to rest: "there was no change of system, only the personnel were replaced." Yet, politics was not central to his poetry; it constituted only one (albeit crucial) point of reference. It was no coincidence that he regarded the poet Endre Ady's life as paradigmatic: he was a poet for whom his political fate became a personal problem. What really interested Petri was life's metaphysical significance; this was how the, otherwise quite banal, conflicts of love and friendship came to assume extraordinary dimensions in his poems. When he juxtaposed the Marxist creed with the idyll of banality, the latter assumed an a priori metaphysical quality as a consequence: "in our end-of-culture, pre-culture times / it would be so nice to chase you / up and down the lawns of a sunlit swimming pool."
He was also lucky in another regard: he never compromised his integrity in making the "great" decisions of life. His talents were acclaimed early on in his career. In addition to literary prizes, his poetry earned him two monographs and a collection of interviews, all published in his own lifetime. Mind you, he was often misunderstood. His first fully mature poems were published in 1969 in the anthology Költők egymást közt (Poets among Themselves). His alleged "pessimism" was mentioned in it by István Vas, the poet who introduced him.
His elder peer above all else regarded "Ismeretlen kelet-európai költő verse 1955-ből" (An Unknown Eastern-European Lyricist's Poem from 1955) an insolence. How dare Petri claim to represent an era which he witnessed as a twelve-year-old? It was almost as if Petri tried to rob Vas of the disillusionment and responsibility that was his generation's due. He failed to notice that Petri's direct experience of the "facts of life" included the perspectives of history and philosophy of history also. Therefore, identification meant something completely different to Petri: for one thing, he was much more attached to the left, and later the liberal, intellectuals, than to his generation of poets. As to his "pessimism", this was (at least in part) an attitude he had found ready-made, which he approached with the same scepticism as he did the world of "imperial giddiness."
Some of Petri's other statements met with similar misunderstanding: once he declared that the lyrical tradition of Attila József could not be continued, thus renouncing subjectivity in line with T. S. Eliot. In fact, he abandoned neither Attila József (whose lines are frequently echoed in Petri's poems) nor subjectivity. Only the poetic self that he had created was of a meditative nature, one that considered first and foremost his reflections. In this regard, too, Petri's poetry is in a state of permanent change and renewal. In his first volume, Magyarázatok M. számára (Explanations for M., 1971), he attempted to re-define the intelligentsia's position in the light of 1968, and included in this redefinition was the rejection of the old/new role of the prophet. The deliberately anti-poetical, self-degrading and private tone of the poems is both a consequence and an expression of the impossibility of the traditional poetic task.
The next book, Körülírt zuhanás (Circumscribed Fall, 1974),
shows a major shift of emphasis: in sharp contrast with his earlier works,
which were dominated by lengthy (self) explanations, his later works abound
in brief descriptions of his state of mind. Petri's new direction is even
more pronounced in Örökhétfő (Eternal Monday, 1981), a book published
in samizdat. Here the majority of his works are "casual" poems of direct political
inspiration. The startling novelty of these poems is the provocatively base
and vulgar usage-the poet wished to demonstrate the imperative need for speaking
one's mind, for calling things by their names.
The best pieces in the books he published in the 1990s (Valahol
megvan-It Exists Somewhere, 1989; Valami ismeretlen-Something Unknown, 1990;
Sár- Mud, 1993) partly bring to mind the fragmented reports of the tense and
dramatic events of the first volume, and partly provide ironic commentaries
on the "historic situation".
By contrast, the last volume, Amíg lehet (While There is Time, 1999) is essentially a final reckoning in the grip of terminal illness. His late poetry has the surprising feature that it completely lacks self-pity. He wanted to clutch at the straws of neither culture nor any other thing suspicious of transcendence. Perhaps that was the time when he really let go of Attila József's hands: "It is hard to imagine the world without me / But who said that / I had to imagine it at all?" There is something deeply personal in this ironic / self-ironic question, along with something deeply trans-personal.
András Veres
is a literary historian and author of several books. His fields of research
are the sociology of literature and 19th- and 20th-century
Hungarian literature.
