Those who would explain this—a contemporaneous critique of the existing socialism—as “pessimism”, “self-centered modernism”, or even “rootlessness” (!) are a far cry from getting at Petri’s intention; just as those who, like the right-wing Hungarian voices of the 90’s, identify Petri’s intentions with “national and religious abuse” are barking up the wrong tree. There is a deeper reason as to why György Petri—if not eternally, then at least enduringly—muddied up Hungarian poetry. And that reason is the poetics of the “unturned gaze.” A gaze which does not turn languidly toward the empty sky. He does not seek to drape reality in iambs. Rather, he wants to observe, to let the world pass through itself with the deceitful cruelty of objectivity. As the poet himself writes: “My eyes are dry. I want to look with them.”
And there is no gratitude in what he sees. Though nor is there anything grandiosely tragic. Just the slow, dive bar-scented collapse of the constructed world.
György Petri was born in Budapest in 1943. His parents came from the area which is today Vajdaság (Voivodina), and so it is that we find among his ancestors Hungarians, Serbs, Croatians, and Jews. In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—the poet often professed a certain distance from any sort of well-defined, national identity. He spent his childhood in the capital. He enrolled in the Hungarian and philosophy program at ELTE, where he attended lectures on the history of philosophy held by members of György Lukács’ Budapest School, mainly György Márkus, but never graduated. He later supported himself with so-called “intellectual labor” (e.g. library filing, work as a film extra, sociological polling). From 1974 onward he worked as a freelance writer. In 1975 he was banned from publishing, so his third volume, Örökhétfő (Eternal Monday), was published as a samizdat. From 1981 to 1989 he was the editor of the samizdat periodical Beszélő (The Speaker), and he was an important figure in the Hungarian democratic opposition which would play a large role in the eventual regime change. From 1989 until his death, he was a member of the editorial board of Holmi (Things), a defining journal of the time.
Petri’s first volume, Magyarázatok M. számára (Explanations for M.), was published in 1971 and flew to the forefront of the history of Hungarian poetry. As the title indicates, the volume’s primary configuration is that of the explanation, the circumlocution, the final attempt at expressing, fully and once and for all, the Totality, with full knowledge of the inevitable failure. When examining the volume, it is important to note that György Petri belonged to a small—but not unusual—group of Hungarian poets with a systematic philosophical education. As such, Petri’s early works were largely influenced by German Romanticism—Hölderlin, Schiller, and most of all Kleist—and the idealistic philosophy intrinsically linked to it—that of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. This influence is found not only in the poems’ sense of tradition, which (following in the footsteps of Schiller’s sentimentalism) sets the Romantic poet’s exalted, lofty manner—“Well can I not speak of your beautiful eyes?”—and its poetic topos and possible roles—“Why couldn’t I have been an old poet? (…) Our love is a program, it would not have been a problem.” (A szerelmi költészet nehézségeiről)—as an ideal above the bare prosaic reality which can only be treated with irony, but also in the core of his worldview. It is not mere happenstance that I mentioned the decisive role of German idealism. For the concept of the Absolute occupies a prominent place in the philosophy of the first half of the 19th century. As such, it is no accident that German Romanticism is interwoven with the German philosophy of the time. In reality, Romanticism is nothing more than a heroic attempt to re-forge the Whole which the systematic critique of the previous century’s Enlightenment had cut to ribbons with its merciless scalpel of reason. While philosophy was trying to reorient the world in the Self or the Spirit, art and literature were trying to do so in the unassailable spontaneity of emotion, passion, vision, intuition—so ultimately, in the Self. These endeavors were unsuccessful, though most proponents are sure to have known they would be from the beginning. If we accept the definition that Antal Szerb—with whom Petri shares a strong affinity in his re-ironization of Romanticism—borrowed from Egon Friedel, according to which Romanticism is “a masquerade ball of extreme rationalists in irrationalism”, then we also run the risk that Petri, like Géza Fodor, was a Romantic poet, one who spoke of the slow collapse of his own “Romantic movement”.
The lost Absolute of Romanticism was still religion. For György Petri and his generation—the so-called ’68-ers—it was Marxism. A Marxism that was the last principled, unified, and universal “grand narrative” in world history. For the Hungarian intelligentsia of the time, it was the Explanation of the World—religion, if we like. (For more on the close kinship of the Marxist utopia and the Christian salvation story, see Karl Löwith’s classic.[2]) The very nature of the aforementioned explanation in Petri’s first volume is explained by the fact that in it there is a consciousness, shaken in its principles, which is speaking, a consciousness which can only piece together fragile explanations of the impressions, shattered into facts, of the World. Petri goes “further” than the Romantics in that his desire for the Absolute has perished, giving way to resignation and an anger bred of despair: “I gave up / my wistful longing for unity: / What further shame can come?” (Belső beszéd) It is this resignation, anger, and elegiac mood which will slowly ooze out of the poetry of his later years, leaving nothing behind but a few resigned scoffs, disgust, and an indifference—if not cheerful, then at least ironic—toward the things of the world: “The path of human life / is two-thirds – minimum – tread / I find it ever more difficult to ascribe too much / significance to / whether or not / thing are as they should be.” (Őszi nagytakarítás)
From his very first volume, Petri has been a cult figure in intellectual circles with radical roots that are critical of the system. Rumors of official criticism from the outset only reinforced this position, as did the poet’s later being forced into silence. I do not want to minimize the fact that the formation of the Petri mythos in the secondary public sphere was largely influenced by his intentional, boundary-pushing slandering: starting with his third volume, his samizdat poetry openly put into verse such banned topics as the 1956 Hungarian revolution or the 1968 Prague Spring; he mocked political leaders of the day such as Brezhnev or even János Kádár himself. This all must have had a liberating effect on the intelligentsia that moved about in the shadows, all too accustomed to being silenced and labeled taboo. I, however, believe that Petri’s domestic cult—and I would add, the historical significance of his literature, mentality, and politics—is founded on the aforementioned generational history of failure with which many can identify. Petri was able to give a voice to the democratic opposition’s sense of existence, devoid of hope or stability, which was pushing the Hungarian intelligentsia ever more toward postmodern uncertainty. That elementary experience which the philosopher and aesthete Sándor Radnóti—contemporary, friend, and one of the poet’s greatest acquaintances—formulated as “the loss of self-evident truths”. A loss on such a level that for Petri—and especially in that time, for Dezső Tandori—resulted not only in a critique of ideology, but in a critique of language as well: it is not only because of its complexity that we can no longer speak the Truth, but because our language has already determined what we are able to recognize as truth, and even who we are as subjects who want to say something about the World.
So Petri represented the intellectual journey of the Hungarian intelligentsia—in large part at least—by relating his own loss of intellectual ground. And this is, paradoxically, still true even if he was far from holding any representative poetic role. In fact, one element, among many, of his literary historical significance was that he gradually dismantled the authoritative representativeness which had thus far served as a traditional model for Hungarian poetry. While in Explanations… he still spoke as a representative figure of the left-wing intelligentsia, by the time he gets to Eternal Monday, he is emphatically “just a man”. In this area, his later works do nothing more than strip the poet of the Romantic myth that elevates him above the common man. This is why his poetry, even in his earlier volumes, turns more forcefully to the ironic, understylized, and often obscene, seeking to avoid even the appearance of poeticism – not a single text, in imitation of live speech, for example, (deliberately) wanders astray halfway through the poem to run off in an entirely different direction than what was promised at the outset. So the poems all become increasingly more formless – after all, why lie about form in a world in which form has been forever lost?
His later work, beginning primarily with the volume Sár (Mud), is characterized by a retreat into ever tighter circles, or as he puts it, a “shrinking” (Elégia és értekezés). The poetic subject is becoming increasingly stuck within itself: he has lost all faith that he can make any kind of statement about the world beyond his own fleeting and particular life – he no longer wants anything more than to look on his remaining days with objectivity from an ironic distance. Of these days, he was not given much.
In 1998, the poet was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx.
György Petri’s “old-age” poetry is a poetry both great and tragic, in spite of the fact that Petri consistently tries to distance himself from all the tragic pathos and existential gravity that characterizes his old-age poetry. The moral of the story is that there is no moral. Just lives doomed to loneliness, communicating to one another with far-off smoke signals – and without giving rise to any great, cosmic-scale tragedy. It does not develop – it is merely plaintive, “gray laughter” (Hamvasztás). According to Sándor Radnóti’s funerary words: “he did not want to—could not—generalize the singularity of his poetry, not even to the minimum of wanting to share something of the common man and drawing or providing consolation from this, but equally strong was his desire to not turn his unique eventuality into a cult.”[3]
But what makes this old-age poetry tragic is that—while its character is increasingly reduced to its own subjectivity, and all in the name of rationality—it cannot give up the long-established and self-reproachful ethic of solidarity with the fallen and downtrodden: “We created here freedom and squalor.” (Szókoszorú Solt Ottilia sírjára). In the meantime, Petri was dismantling all rational and universal explanations of the world—as he himself writes: “I have no philosophy, no / defined image of man. / There is man. / For this I am sometimes happy, sometimes not” (Antropozófia)—which could have been used to pluck this visceral, naïve, and therefore true outrage from ephemerality. That it might again be great. As philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás expressed this tragedy of world historical significance: “In Hungarian literature, György Petri’s work was a renunciation—final and absolute—of delusions of grandeur. The only thing which is synonymous with a life without teleology is death, and Petri dumps this on us, uncompromising, like a tub of bathwater.”[4]
There are, however, two things which, although the irony is constantly tearing off the veil of illusions of grandeur, the poet still appears to (temporarily) value. And these two things—remaining loyal to Romantic heritage till the end of his days—are nothing more than Poetry and Love. Of course, poetry is no longer a creation of the world, but only of himself: “Beyond the poem I have no life: / I am the poem. / And so I am quite rare, / quite scant and diminished, this existence: smoking, guzzling, loving, sometimes cooking – that last ever more rarely.” (Vagyok, mit érdekelne)
Love is no longer Love; at most it is love; or even more so: happiness; a radiant smile of soft-hearted irony; caring; closeness. Palm-on-palm warmth. The resignation, the tamed desires, and most of all the secret, sweet, never-to-return, quiet joy of those hours before parting: “I want to walk along / the path of all bodies (P. Gy. boulevard), / but before that / I would cook / a nice saucy beef stew, / eat up a bit of fat and gristle, / and before that the things for the stew / (shank, and perhaps: heartroot, oxtail) / things that need be purchased / to walk in this (perhaps final) / spring with you, with you, with you.” (Elégia és értekezés)
György Petri died in Budapest on July 16th, 2000. Pursuant to his last will and testament, he was laid to rest beside his muse and third wife, Mária (Maya) Nagy, in the cemetery in Dunaalmás. A prize for emerging poets bears his name, and soon too will a public square in Budapest.
This essay, written for HLO, was translated from the Hungarian by Austin Wagner.
[1] Tibor Keresztury, György Petri, Magvető, Bp., 2015, 5.
[2] Karl Löwith, World History and the Salvation Story, tr. Gábor Boros, Miklós Tamás, Bp., Atlantisz, 1996, 73-95
[3] Radnóti Sándor, Az embernél nincs félelmetesebb: Petri György halálára, Népszabadság, július 17., 9. Idézi Keresztury, i. m., 236.
[4] Tamás Gáspár Miklós, „Mi teremtettünk itt szabadságot és nyomort”, Élet és Irodalom, XLIV. évfolyam, 29. szám, 2000. július 21.
András Gerevich: Two Poems
