Mátyás Domokos

East or West?

Illyés's Dilemma

 

Illyés was a son of the Transdanubian puszta, that is of latifundia and the primitive living conditions provided for those who worked it. The experiences of his boyhood and youth, his native sense of justice and what he recognised as the truth marked him for life. The turmoil and dissolution of the 1918 and 1919 revolutions, and the years (1919 to 1926) spent in exile in Paris, turned him into a conscious revolutionary. In his mind at the time even the term "Magyar" referred to the "people" subjected by the "nation", "the step - children of history", thus, in the first place, it was a synonym for the peasantry. As he repeatedly stated in the
poems of this, his first, period, he self - evidently presumed this people to be a race of eastern, Asian origins. For a thousand years theirs has been a feeling of being strangers and temporary sojourners. "As if they had only / arrived last night / considering already / to move on the next day; / what they built was slipshod / so as not to feel / the loss when it all collapsed" (Prose translation). This poem, "Magyarok" (Hungarians), published by the journal Nyugat in 1933, powerfully expresses the uneasiness of this feeling of transience. "For a thousand years / it has been waiting here, / for a thousand years in a strange environment, / rough handled by winds, at night / this village, this country / the whole of this Hungary." (Prose translation.) At the same time, it allows to surface a nostalgia carried in the genes which makes the ancient home a painful memory. "The sweepwell in the yard / restlessly turns its neck, / sniffing and sniffing into space / as if readying to jump / to vault back with sinews taut / to its home, the ancestral plain." Because: "Beyond the village right around / a mysterious new world is spread out, / as alien as once upon a time / the western sky on the banks of the Don, / powerful and also forbidding, / you are lost even if you are made welcome." This harrowing nostalgia is finally summed up: "Like ill - tidings, a pause for mourning / the clouds flutter away, / They float and float eastwards / breaking their hearts." (Prose translation.)
It is not an unwarranted generalisation to state that, in Illyés's first period, those of his poems which speak of man as a zoon politikon, that is of him as a social being, always look to the East, to Russia and Asia, as the direction of hoped for redemption. Right from his 1924 Lenin poem ("Éjjelben győzni" - To Be Victorious At Night) which was written in Paris, and "Újra föl" (Up Once Again) published in 1927 by Dokumentum, the ephemeral but radiant periodical of Hungarian surrealism, to "Istennők költözése" (Goddesses on the Move, see on p. 4 of this issue) which appeared in Nyugat in 1935, that is for a good ten years, this kind of work puts its trust in an imagined East made colourful by the poet's hopes. He did this with the heightened enthusiasm of a revolutionary
and a poet who felt that even ties of genetic kinship existed between him, his family, his people and this imagined world. The daily Az Est published his "ősapa" (Ancestor, see on pp. 6 - 7 of this issue) in 1937 in which all his kith and kin appeared in a single vision as if "They could have gone about dispensing / wine and good cheer in the Courtyard of a Khan, / where all the guests would've been my relatives...". The surmise of this ancient kinship was repeated a few years later in Hídi vásár (Fair at the Bridge): "Where's the fair, there's the fair, / at its centre a shaman chants / ... The noise at its centre, / as if it had come from Asia / ... Here it winds into wheels, / here Emese's dream purls / ... Look, a Kabar with an Ugrian, / an Onogur with a Vogul. / Ancient Karakorum, this is the kind of forum / you very likely were, with such people." (Prose translation.) (Magyar Csillag, 1943). The same sentiment gave rise to "Philológia", which Illyés suggested should apear "On the blank page of a grammar of the Vogul language".
To give it special emphasis, Illyés italicised the question with which he started the second part of the two - part poem. "It is this land that you long for, lad? tired of the wild throbbing West / and its skies covered in clouds / of smoke." (Prose translation.) The answer again is italicised: "It's his land I long for or even further on / I'd have a horse I'd throw my horse's reins on my horse's soft neck, / far from the roar of Europe I would make it step alone, / to the ancient home that can never be reached; I would boldly follow the way of my desire / towards my secret ancient mother, whose image is unforgettably / alive in my heart, around whose womb the warm country of tales quivers." (Prose translation.)
The emotions may have been of a different hue, but Illyés's road, cantering towards the longed for primeval mother nevertheless, essentially, ran parallel with the conviction of those first avant - garde artists who saw close links between revolutionary art and social revolution as a self - evident principle governing their art and life. It was their company in the Paris of the twenties, which was Illyés's intellectual and artistic finishing school. The notion, expressed in "Goddesses on the Move," that Freedom, Progress and Knowledge, the goddesses of the Enlightenment that gave birth to modern Europe, the goddesses played false by a faithless West, would seek refuge in revolutionary Russia, would have been accepted as their own by Aragon and Breton, and by everyone else too, from Auden to Richard Hughes and Koestler to Silone who, before the Spanish Civil War had sobered them up, shared the belief that "The ragged Chinese and the fierce Mongol hunter - / Voltaire's old love would fold them in her arms." It may be pure chance but it is certainly symbolic that the volume Rend a romokban (Order in the Ruins, 1937) places these poems next to "9, rue Budé" (see on pp. 5 - 6) which looks back to young days in Paris with magic irony as in a daydream; it concludes with the four - part great "Óda Európához" (Ode to Europe), which is based on the conviction that Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, is one and indivisible. The confession bursting out of the poet as the conclusion of the poem is a prayer addressed to this real and yet virtual Europe. "Masculine in spirit, who, roaming, / enticed virgin nations, / in your coarse voice, ancient eyes, between your wrinkles / I could still detect / who you once were. [...] "Loud and clear I proclaim / myself your son, though even now you cannot understand / my speech and loudly I call / all the people you begat, / my brothers. // Rise above us, our Father! / As Zeus in hundreds and hundreds of shapes / appear once again! Tell us that / you are nevertheless one and unchanging." (Prose translation.)
In the light of the oeuvre it becomes clear that Illyés's conviction lasted until he really met Russia, the new home of the goddesses played false by Europe, when in 1934 he was confronted by Soviet reality, what became the metaphor
of his travel book, Oroszország (Russia, 1934), a member of a track gang dozing head down and feet up on a railway embankment, a phenomenon which permeates every moment of daily existence. In other words, while looking for the socialist dream in Russia he keeps on experiencing that, as against Marx's prophecy, this was not a world placed back on its feet but an upended world. Upended more russico, of course.
This is obviously the reason why Rend a romokban, according to Gábor Halász, a critic of that time, a portent of a "new Illyés", not only marks the moment of change in the mode of poetic expression but also indicates the metamorphosis from youthful hope to manly disillusion. Towards the end of the volume, in "Kőasztal, madárka, este" (Stone Table, Birdie, Evening), a declaration occurs: "with this I finished the easy song. It lasted for ten years." The volume concludes with one of the key summarizing poems in Illyés's oeuvre: "Avar" (Leaf - mould) at a turning point in his life. In this, the poet, hearing a savage sound, closes a door behind him. And what was shut out by the closed door? "Images, blinding words", when I still "recited with tipsy lips: man can change for the better". (Prose translation.)
In Illyés's verse the wound inflicted by youthful hope deceived was never healed. In 1960, almost a quarter of a century later, after the many shattering events that had taken place, his "Ifjúság" (Youth), first published in the journal Kortárs, then in his volume Új versek (New Poems) still bleeds from the same wound: "Oh, my youth! What did we expect? A miracle, / nothing less, no, one that should / realise what our dream had drawn on the landscape below, / the paradise of youthful faith, // who, I wonder? Man? Faith? Or an ideal?" (Prose translation.) This illustrates the naturally systematic way in which Illyés's complex identity is manifest in his verse.

The above is merely an indication of the precedents in Illyés's oeuvre on which "Árpád" also touches. It should help a proper interpretation of the change in Illyés's views which this poem stands for. True, the literal meaning of the poem requires no explanation, but it must be said that although the well - known and well - worn topoi concerning the historical fate of the Hungarians, all the way from Kölcsey to Vörösmarty and on to Ady resound in Prince Árpád's hesitations, and the poet completely identifies with the decision of Árpád the leader, who shepherds his flock; the justification of the decision contains an essentially new answer to an old question that crops up again and again at moments of crisis: where is our place in the world? Is there a place for us in Europe at all, and have we a need of a place in this (ever quarrelsome) family of European nations, and is that worth all the sacrifices we had to make in these thousand years?
The novelty of the answer given by "Árpád" appears on the symbolic, moral and extrasensory plane of the poem, that is if we consider the poetic motivation of Árpád's decision in the light of Illyés's oeuvre, which wrestled with such questions over many decades. The change is not an about - face, but the constraint imposed by temporal and historical changes, a dramatic apprehension of that commonplace that old questions are reformulated from time to time, that at times of crisis they indeed placed whole peoples or nations, with their poets, up against a wall. This happened in 1945 when this people of eastern origins was metaphorically and literally overtaken by the East in the guise of the Red Army.

Mátyás Domokos
is an essayist and literary critic, author of several collections of essays on contemporary Hungarian literature, among them two on Gyula Illyés.