The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1973 (14. évfolyam, 51. szám)
Sándor Lukácsy: Petőfi's Prose
PETŐFI'S PROSE WRITINGS by SÁNDOR LUKÁCSY I n May of 1848, arguing with the Hungarian revolutionary government, whose measures in defence of freedom he considered inadequate, Petőfi compared the government to a team of horses, and himself to a coachman: “When the coachman cracks his whip, he does not expect his horses to complain of tiredness, but to move more swiftly.” Even he seems to have considered these words strong because, before continuing his line of thought, he stopped for a moment and reflected on the severity of the expression: “The comparison is hardly poetic. . . ”—yet he did not strike out, nor could he modify, these words born of anger and despair, but with a defiant shrug, accepted responsibility for them: . .hardly poetic, but perhaps not so very bad.” All Petőfi’s individuality, his entire ars poetica, are contained in this sequence of thought. And if one may use the expression, his entire political ars poetica as well. The man who wrote that rude metaphor was a son of the people, a man who in politics, in private life and in poetry acknowledged no greater majesty than theirs; a man who said, “what is true is natural, what is natural is good, and to my mind, beautiful”; and who felt it an obligation of conscience to speak truthfully and naturally at all times, no matter with or against whom. The essence of Petőfi’s individuality, the chief characteristic of his historical role, is opposition. It was his unfailing tendency to oppose and his audacity which made him a revolutionary, in politics as in literature. One knows of revolutionaries who have had conservative literary tastes, and of innovating poets who in politics espoused conservative views. Petőfi’s revolutionism, it may be said, is complete: the impulses which led him to oppose the antiquated institutions of society were the same as those which led him to oppose an antiquated literary taste. On March 15, 1848 he stood at the forefront of a political revolution, at a time when, in his work, he had already carried out one of the greatest revolutions in Hungarian literature. He is one of Hungarian literature’s great stylistic innovators, both in prose and in verse; although the brilliance of his poetry, like a curtain of light before a stage, almost conceals his prose. True, Petőfi was a poet above all else, a poet entire, to whom poetry was as natural a manifestation of life as breathing; but his oeuvre also contains nearly all the prose forms. Had he not died so young, at the age of twenty-six, it is possible that in his more mature years he would have turned his many-sided talent more and more often toward prose. He wrote novels, short stories, dramas, travel accounts, political articles, political appeals, and letters which have the value of works of art. Not all his prose works attain the level of his poetry, although one might add that a goodly number of his poems fall below the level of his best prose writings. This much is certain: the bulk of his prose is not merely the