Шандор Петефи: поэт и революционер Венгрии

Hungarian poet and liberal revolutionary

Sándor Petőfi ( []; né Petrovics; ; His birth certificate, in Latin, gives his name as "Alexander Petrovics", or Slovak immigrant to the Great Hungarian Plain. Mária Hrúz, Petőfi's mother, was a servant and laundress before her marriage. She was of Slovak descent and spoke Hungarian with something of an accent. Petőfi's parents first met in Maglód, married in Aszód and moved to Kiskőrös a year before the birth of the poet. however, Petőfi felt influenced by his editor, Imre Vahot, to continue writing folklore style poems, while he wanted to use his Western oriented education and write about growing revolutionary passions. (The government's censorship would have made such works difficult to publish.)

In 1846, he met Júlia Szendrey in Transylvania. They married the next year, despite the opposition of her father, and spent their honeymoon at the castle of Count Teleki Sándor (honvédtiszt)), the only aristocrat among Petőfi's friends. Their only son Zoltán was born on 15 December 1848.

Petőfi became more possessed by thoughts of a global revolution. He and Júlia moved to Pest, where he joined a group of like minded students and intellectuals who regularly met at Pilvax. They worked on promoting Hungarian as the language of literature and theatre, formerly based on German. The first permanent Hungarian theatre (Pesti Magyar Színház), which later became the National Theater, was opened in that time (1837).

Among the various young leaders of the revolution, called Márciusi Ifjak (Youths of March), Petőfi was the key in starting the revolution in Pest. He was co author and author, respectively, of the two most important written documents: the 12 Pont (12 Points, demands to the Habsburg Governor General) and the "Nemzeti Dal", his revolutionary poem. When the news of the revolution in Vienna reached them on the 14th, Petőfi and his friends decided to change the date of the "National Assembly" (a rally in which a petition to the Hungarian noblemen's assembly would be approved by the people) from 19 March to the 15 March. On the morning of the 15th, Petőfi and the revolutionaries began to march around the city of Pest, reading his poem and the "12 Points" to the growing crowd, which attracted thousands. Visiting printers, they declared an end to censorship and printed the poem and "12 Points". Crowds forced the mayor to sign the "12 Points" and later held a mass demonstration in front of the newly built National Museum, then crossed to Buda on the other bank of the Danube. When the crowd rallied in front of the Imperial governing council, the representatives of Emperor Ferdinand felt they had to sign the "12 Points". As one of the points was freedom for political prisoners, the crowd moved to greet the newly freed revolutionary poet Mihály Táncsics. Petőfi's popularity waned as the memory of the glorious day faded, and the revolution went the way of high politics to the leadership of the nobles. Those in the noblemen's Assembly in Pozsony, (today Bratislava) had been pushing for slower reforms at the same time, which they delivered to the Emperor on the 13th, but events had overtaken them briefly. Petőfi disagreed with the Assembly and criticised their view of the goals and methods of the Revolution. (His colleague Táncsics was imprisoned again by the new government.) In the general election, Petőfi ran in his native area but did not win a seat. At this time, he wrote his most serious poem, Az Apostol (The Apostle). It was an epic about a fictional revolutionary who, after much suffering, attempts to assassinate a fictitious king. Petőfi joined the Hungarian Revolutionary Army and fought under the Polish Liberal General Józef Bem, in the Transylvanian army. The army was initially successful against Habsburg troops, but after Tsar Nicholas I of Russia intervened to support the Habsburgs, it was defeated. Petőfi was last seen alive in the Battle of Segesvár on 31 July 1849, he was (probably, but we don't know,)stabbed in the back by a jousting Russian soldier.

Petőfi is believed to have been killed in action during the battle of Segesvár by the Imperial Russian Army. A Russian military doctor recorded an account of Petőfi's death in his diary. As his body was never officially found, rumours of Petőfi's survival persisted. In his autobiographical roman a clef Political Fashions (Politikai divatok, 1862), Mór Jókai imagined his late friend's "resurrection". In the novel Petőfi (the character named Pusztafi) returns ten years later as a shabby, déclassé figure who has lost his faith in everything, including poetry. Although for many years his death at Segesvár had been assumed, in the late 1980s Soviet investigators found archives that revealed that after the battle about 1,800 Hungarian prisoners of war were marched to Siberia. Alternative theories suggest that he was one of them and died of tuberculosis in 1856. In 1990, an expedition was organised to Barguzin, Buryatia, Siberia, where archaeologists claimed to have unearthed Petőfi's skeleton. Furthermore, in Hungary they have a saying after him: "Eltűnt, mint Petőfi a ködben" (Disappeared, like Petőfi in the fog).

Petőfi started his career as a poet with "popular situation songs", a genre to which his first published poem, A borozó ("The Wine Drinker", 1842), belongs. It is the song of a drinker praising the healing power of wine to drive away all troubles. This kind of pseudo folk song was not unusual in Hungarian poetry of the 1840s, but Petőfi soon developed an original and fresh voice which made him stand out. He wrote many folk song like poems on the subjects of wine, love, romantic robbers etc. Many of these early poems have become classics, for example the love poem A virágnak megtiltani nem lehet ("You Cannot Forbid the Flower", 1843), or Befordultam a konyhára ("I Turned into the Kitchen", 1843) which uses the ancient metaphor of love and fire in a playful and somewhat provocative way. The influence of folk poetry and 19th century populism is very significant in Petőfi's work, but other influences are also present: Petőfi drew on sources such as topoi of contemporary almanac poetry in an inventive way, and was familiar with the works of major literary figures of his day, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Pierre Jean de Béranger and Heinrich Heine. Petőfi's early poetry was often interpreted as some kind of role playing, due to the broad range of situations and voices he created and used. Recent interpretations however call attention to the fact that in some sense all lyrical poetry can be understood as role playing, which makes the category of "role poems" (coined especially for Petőfi) superfluous. While using a variety of voices, Petőfi created a well formed persona for himself: a jaunty, stubborn loner who loves wine, hates all kinds of limits and boundaries and is passionate in all he feels. In poems such as Jövendölés ("Prophecy", 1843) he imagines himself as someone who will die young after doing great things. This motif recurs in the revolutionary poetry of his later years. The influence of contemporary almanac poetry can be best seen in the poem cycle Cipruslombok Etelke sírjára ("Branches of Cypress for Etelke's Tomb", 1845). These sentimental poems, which are about death, grief, love, memory and loneliness were written after a love interest of Petőfi's, Etelke Csapó, died. In the years 1844–1845, Petőfi's poetry became increasingly subtle and mature. New subjects appeared, such as landscape. His most influential landscape poem is Az Alföld ("The Plains"), in which he says that his homeland, the Hungarian plains are more beautiful and much dearer than the Carpathian mountains; it was to become the foundation of a long lived fashion: that of the plains as the typical Hungarian landscape. Petőfi's poetic skills solidified and broadened. He became a master of using different kinds of voices, for example his poem A régi, jó Gvadányi ("The Good Old Gvadányi") imitates the style of Gvadányi József, a Hungarian poet who lived at the end of the 18th century. Petőfi maintained a lifelong friendship with János Arany, another significant poet of the time. Arany was the godfather of Petőfi's son lt=Zoltán.

Since 29 June 2021, Petőfi has appeared as a recurring historical character living in modern day England in The Family Histories Podcast series. He is voiced by the Hungarian children's author and illustrator, John Spike. His presence is explained by the host Andrew Martin as due to a "simple miscalculated accident with his kitchen" – a reference to Petőfi's 1843 poem "Befordultam a konyhára" (I turned into the kitchen), and the time machine used at the end of each podcast episode.