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BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 36-7-164
TITLE:             The Hungarian Poet Gyula Illyes Turns Eighty
BY:                H. S.
DATE:              1982-10-26
COUNTRY:           Hungary
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  RAD Background Report/226
THEMATIC SUBJECTS: Hungary--1976-1989, Hungary--Literature, Personalities

--- Begin ---

RFERL

RADIO FREE EUROPE Research

RAD Background Report/226
(Hungary)
26 October 1982

THE HUNGARIAN POET GYULA ILLYES TURNS EIGHTY

by the Hungarian Section

Summary: On 2 November 1982 Gyula Illyes, "the
grand old man" of Hungarian literature, at least
in the official Hungarian view, will be 80 years
old. The following report presents a brief summary
of some of the most important facts of his life.
It describes how he went from being the son of
a farm worker, to a student in Paris, and a poet,
essayist, and writer, respected and much honored
during the last 30 years of his life.

This material was prepared for the use of the staff of Radio Free/Radio Liberty.

[page 2]

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The Hungarian Poet Gyula Illyes Turns Eighty

On 2 November 1982 Gyula Illyes, the "grand old man"
of Hungarian literature, will be 80 years old. New state
and literary prizes will be added to the long list of his
honors. He will be lauded in Hungary's literary periodicals
and in the national and provincial dailies. There will be
radio and TV specials, and even "official birthday celebrations."
There will also be other honors and evaluations of his work
and life in periodicals serving the Hungarian minorities in
Hungary's neighboring states and in émigré publications
that appear in Western Europe and North and South America.
Some of the latter may not be as eager to bestow their
praise as others, but few will ignore the event altogether.

Early Life and Youth

Gyula Illyes was born into a family of farm workers on
one of the large estates of a wealthy aristocrat. The name
of the hamlet where he spent the first years of his life was
Racegrespuszta. The last part of the name "puszta" means
something different from the open plains that most Hungarians
usually associate with that word. It denoted the settlement
where the estate servants lived -- those who took care of the
field work and the animals, for a minimal income in the form
of crops and livestock. They lived in modest servants' houses
provided by their employer. Illyes's father was a blacksmith
and a mechanic, and as such, enjoyed a somewhat privileged
position among the workers. His mother came from a more
educated family than his father, whose ancestors were shepherds.
Illyes inherited a certain rebellious desire for freedom from
his father's side of the family, while from his mother's he
learned to value knowledge and education. His ambition to
leave the closed society of the farm was nourished by his
maternal grandmother, a woman who spoke some French and whose
educational level was unusual in that turn-of-the-century
environment. Illyes went to study at a Catholic high school
in one of the small towns not far from the trans-Danubian
village of this unusual grandmother.

Under the influence of his teachers and to a certain
extent his childhood environment, Illyes became involved in
the political events of 1918. Associated with Socialists, he
joined the newly founded Red Army, which fought for. the
preservation of Hungary's territories against the country's new
neighbors, and eventually against those elements in Hungary's
political life that wanted to topple the Hungarian Soviet
Republic.

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The times were politically so confusing and complicated
that it would take many pages to clarify Illyes's role in
these events. [1] Suffice it to say that he had to escape
political reprisals after the defeat of the Soviet Republic,
although as a relatively minor participant, he had less to
fear than some of his mentors. Illyes provides a detailed
and imaginative, although avowedly personal account of these
experiences in a recent autobiographical novel. [2] In 1920,
he went into voluntary exile through Austria, at first to
Berlin, and then soon thereafter to Paris. Since he had learned
some French and had heard and read enough about France to excite
his imagination, his arrival in that famous city was the
achievement of one of his greatest ambitions.

At first he worked as a miner, then as a bookbinder,
and finally as a teacher. He attended the Sorbonne, where
he studied literature and psychology. His earliest poetry
appeared in Hungarian émigré periodicals during those years
and he made the acquaintance of many young French poets, some
of whom later became famous as the surrealists. Although his
relationship to these poets has never been thoroughly studied,
it is a fact that he has nurtured the contacts he made then
with people such as Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. In 194 9
the latter visited him in Hungary and wrote a poem about Lake
Balaton. Illyes has described his acquaintance with these
French writers and poets in some of his essays and in certain
sections of his earlier autobiographical novel, Hunok Parizsban
(Huns in Paris). [3] These fragments, though subjective and
embellished by the poet's imagination, give an indication
of the extent to which he came under the influence of the
literary and artistic ideas of a group of people whose experiments
led to what we have since come to know as modern art and as
avant-garde literature.

------------------------------
(1) For a thorough treatment of his youth until his emigration
to Paris, see Ilona Fodor, Szembesites, Illyes Gyula Eletutja
Parizsig (Confrontation, The Life of Gyula Illyes Until
His Arrival in Paris) (Budapest: Magveto, 1975).

(2) Gyula Illyes, Beatrice Aprodjai (Budapest: Szepirodalmi,
1981) .

(3) For essays, see Gyula Illyes, Ingyen Iakoma (A Feast for
Nothing) (Budapest: Szepirodalmi, 1964) 2 vols; Gyula Illyes,
Iranytuvel (With a Compass) (Budapest: Szepirodalmi, 1975),
2 vols.; Gyula Illyes, Hunok Parizsban (Huns in Paris)
(Budapest: Revai, 19461

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Return to Budapest and Literary Beginnings

The political atmosphere in Hungary had in the meantime
become somewhat more tolerant and certainly less dangerous
than immediately after the defeat of the Soviet Republic.
So in 1926 Illyes, with the help of his mother's family,
returned to Hungary and the village where his parents then
lived. Soon thereafter, his mother left his father and went
to work in Budapest. Illyes joined her and found a job as
a civil servant. At first he re-established his contacts
with some of the intellectuals whom he had known before he
left for Paris. He joined the circle connected with the
short-lived avant-garde periodical called Dokumentum. These
writers, poets, and artists were in some ways akin to the
surrealists and the other young artists whom Illyes had come
to know in Paris. Their absolute rejection of older forms
and their dogmatic belief in everything new and different
proved to be too extreme for Illyes's taste. Most probably,
he had learned from his earlier confrontations with authority
that a more compromising and tolerant stand toward what was
established and toward those who were in power might lead to
greater success. Thus, he began to approach traditional
literary forums with his work.

His first poems caught the eye of Mihaly Babits, the
senior editor of the literary periodical Nyugat (West), and
in a short time Illyes became a regular contributor to that
established and respected journal of Hungary's Westward-looking
writers. Nyugat represented the highest standards of literature
and literary and art criticism even from the perspective of
what was being written in Paris, London, and New York. Even
though it had been started around the turn of the century, in
order to provide opportunities for writers to challenge the
stale, tradition-bound, and derivative literature that was
being written by Hungary's "most respected writers," and even
though Endre Ady, the best known literary rebel of pre-World
War I Hungary, had been associated with the periodical in its
early years, by the time Illyes's work began to be published
there, Nyugat had become well established. It preserved
its "opposition stance" by being critical of the predominantly
conservative policies of the government and emphasizing its
orientation toward the French sources of European culture,
often to the detriment of the German, which have had so much
influence in Hungary since the 18th century.

Illyes became a close friend of Babits and accepted him
as a mentor. More and more of his poems appeared, both in
Nyugat and elsewhere, and were collected into his first book
Nehez Fold (Hard Earth) in 1928. His career as a poet and
writer was now well on its way. Between 1931 and 1936 he

[page 5]

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received the Baumgarten Literary Prize, a grant distributed
by Babits, four times. Along with a job that he had obtained
at the Hungarian National Bank, those grants assured him of
a comfortable living and gave him the time to write. In 1937,
at the time that Babits was found to have cancer, Illyes
became one of the editors of Nyugat. In effect, he took
over most of the daily, routine tasks of the editorship and
ran the periodical until Babits's death in 1941. Then he
became editor-in-chief for a short time, but soon changed
the name of the publication to Magyar Csillag (Hungarian
Star). According to his account of the circumstances under
which that periodical finally ceased to appear, this change
of name was necessitated by the strong rightward turn in
Hungarian politics, but the contributors and the editors all
knew that there had been no change in policy or staff.[4]

Besides his association with this "opposition periodical,"
Illyes also took part in more dangerous political activities.
He was convicted of helping to produce leaflets demanding the
release of two Communists sentenced to death for their
anti-state activities in 1932. For a short time he was under
arrest, held in connection with this affair, but he was soon
released. A more decisive political commitment brought Illyes
into the loose "organization" of populist intellectuals.

In 1939 he joined with them in trying to work out
political alternatives to the conservative programs and policies of
Hungary's post-World War I governments. He became one of the
contributors to the populist publication Valasz (Answer) and
joined them in their efforts to establish a political party.
Although many of their ideas were similar to those of the
Socialists, these journalists and writers rejected any
association with the Communists before World War II. Because
of the emphasis that some of them placed on the country's
peasant heritage, they were viewed, especially by the
Communists, as "reactionary." Post-war encyclopedists writing about
Illyes have even accused him of having been confused by the
"social reform demagogy of the (right-wing) Gombos government,
along with his fellow populists," saying that even when they
"recognized their mistake," they were never able to renew
their strong ties to the "revolutionary workers' movement." [5]

------------------------------
(4) See Gyula Illyes, "A Nyugat .Vege, " op. cit.

(5) See Marcell Benedek, Editor-in-Chief, Magyar Irodalmi
Lexikon (Hungarian Literary Lexicon) (Budapest: Akademia,
1963), p. 497.

[page 6]

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Among the activities that have earned him more praise
than reprobation from the communist cultural authorities was
his acceptance of an invitation to visit the Moscow Writers'
Congress in 1934. About the travel diary Oroszorszag (Russia),
which he wrote to describe his experiences and which was
published that same year, the above-quoted reviewer wrote
that it was "the best and most significant work to appear at
the time in Hungary about the Soviet Union." [6]

Another book, which became much more popular and received
international recognition over the years, was Pusztak Nepe (The
People of the Puszta), [7] Illyes's documentary account of the
life of the farm workers among whom he had spent his early
years. Translated into English, French, German, and other
languages, it gives a realistic, personal account of the
hardships and the injustices that those people had to face.
Published in Hungary in 1936 at a time when the attention
of many intellectuals was directed toward improving the lot
of the "rural proletariat" and the farmers, who had only
tiny plots of land, it became a "standard work." Its
naturalistic description of rural poverty was treated by leftist
intellectuals not only as the incontrovertible truth, but
also as one of many justifications for radical reform, and
even revolution. Aside from its political implications, the
book has been praised for its literary style and its
sensitivity to the problems and the everyday cares of its subjects.
It is a highly personal account that is hard to classify as
either literature or sociological description, although the
latter term has been used almost exclusively by those who
want to emphasize its political character. In contrast to
much of Illyes's early poetry, this book is less influenced
by his nostalgia for the open plains and the natural beauty
of his childhood environment.

After the German occupation of Hungary, on 19 March 1944,
Illyes had to go into hiding. Nyugat, already known as Magyar
Csillag, ceased publication and its editor went to live with
friends in the countryside. When a more moderate government
was appointed by the Regent, Admiral Horthy, Illyes went back
to Budapest and intermittently visited his wife and their small
daughter, but in effect remained in hiding until the end of
the war.

During the Coalition Years After World War II

During the short period of coalition government immediately
after the Second World War, Illyes became one of the founding
members of the National Peasant Party. Made up mainly of left-

------------------------------
(6) Ibid.
(7) Gyula Illyes, Pusztak Nepe (People of the Puszta) (Budapest:
Nyugat, 1936), reprinted and republished in at least 19
different years thereafter, according to the latest edition
of Hungary's Who's Who.

[page 7]

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of-center populist intellectuals and writers, the party had
a relatively small following, but IIlyes and his friends
revived their monthly Valasz and published many controversial
articles about the political development and direction of
postwar Hungary. One of the most original political writers
of the time, Istvan Bibo, who was to play such an important
role during and especially after the revolution of 1956, wrote
some of his best known essays for this periodical, one of
whose editors was Illyes.

Using his influence and his reputation of having helped
the victims of Nazi and Arrow Cross brutality, Illyes managed
to clear the names of some of his well-known populist friends.
They were often threatened with prison or worse for some of
their writings, which were alleged to have been anti-Semitic
and anticommunist. Since such accusations often could not
be proved and were merely a matter of interpretation, Illyes,
as well as many other intellectuals of his type, felt that such
"investigations could easily turn into witch hunts." In
proceeding as he did, Illyes acted in a spirit of reconciliation
and thus committed himself to a political road which, rather
than trying to right the wrongs of the past by using methods
that could have resulted in new injustices, emphasized working
together to rebuild the country, not only physically, but also
morally and spiritually. He and populists like Bibo did much
to achieve this goal. It was not their fault that others,
who succeeded in usurping political power, proceeded according
to a set of principles diametrically opposed to theirs.

Years of Stalinism

When Illyes saw that the country was sinking to the same
kind of political nadir it had known during the last year of
the war, with the Communists, instead of the Arrow Cross,
assiduously rounding up their real and imagined enemies and
persecuting people on the basis of "political principles,"
he tried to withdraw as much as possible into his literary
world, but according to his friends and supporters, he could
not avoid some public political activity. It is said that
without paying lip service to the Rakosi regime he could not
have done as much as he did to save writers and fellow
intellectuals from persecution and abuse. One part of his life,
however, from late 1948 to 1953, that is, the years of Rakosi's
Stalinist dictatorship, is buried in silence. Until more
thorough studies are brought to light and some of the facts
are better documented, no final judgment can be made about
his role during that time.

[page 8]

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The Revolution of 1956

His role in the revolution of 1956 and the events that
led up to it also lacks documentation, especially since in
the 26 years that have elapsed no one has been able to
write the authoritative, complete history of those times.
More than any of his political writings or public
pronouncements, it was one of his poems that had a role in those events.
"Egy Mondat a Zsarnoksagrol" (A Sentence About Tyranny)[8]
has for many people become the political poem about tyranny
written by a Hungarian poet, even though others have written
poems about the subject and some critics argue that this is
not technically, or in terms of literary quality, the best
of them. Probably Illyes's prominence in Hungarian letters
has contributed more than anything else to the poem's becoming
so well known, especially inside Hungary today, where it is
duplicated and distributed in samizdat publications.

The Defeat of the Revolution and the Years Under Radar's Regime

Although Illyes helped re-establish the National Peasant
Party, under the new name of the Petofi Party, his political
activity during the revolution was limited. It was mainly
in the aftermath of the Soviet suppression that he used his
prestige to influence the Kadar regime's cultural policies.
At first, he withheld his recognition of it by not contributing
to the new literary periodicals and then later he often
intervened personally to influence it to be more moderate in its
treatment of the. country's intellectuals. In 1960, upon the
release of his friend Tibor Dery and others, Illyes lifted
his embargo. To underscore his commitment to Dery, he
provided this fellow writer with a small room at his villa
on Lake Balaton, so that Dery could recuperate from his
sufferings and privations in prison.

An anecdote that Illyes once recounted to an interviewer
gives some indication of how he felt about political resistance
by the time he was in his 70s. [9] He told the story
of Janos Arany, Hungary's great classical poet, who outlived
the revolution of 1848 by 34 years, and who shaved his
mustache when a law was passed that traditional Hungarian
mustaches could not be worn. Then Illyes asked rhetorically:
"What was more important, Arany's mustache, or his pen? How
did he resist better, by giving up his mustache, or by not
giving up his pen?"

------------------------------
(8) See attached translation. The poem, written in 1950, was
published in the literary weekly Irodalmi Ujsag, during
the days of the October 1956 revolution.

(9) Nepszabadsag, 17 November 1974.

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Activity on Behalf of Hungarian Minorities

Ever since the late 1970s, Illyes has been the most
prominent spokesman in Hungary of the Magyar minorities who
live in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and other countries bordering
on Hungary. These groups had been ceded, along with Hungary's
territories, to the states where they now live in the peace
settlement signed at the Grand Trianon Palace after the First
World War. Ever since then, the subject of their cultural
heritage and the protection of their language and their customs
have been a major issue between Hungary and its neighbors.
In recent years, especially in Romania, these Magyar minorities,
along with some of the German ones, have accused the Romanian
state of suppressing their cultural life and trying to destroy
their ethnic identity. Illyes has used his influence
to intervene on behalf of those groups. He has written a
number of articles on the topic [10] and has even submitted
a book for publication to one of Hungary's major publishers.
The latter, although completely set and ready to be released,
has not been published in Hungary. It was smuggled to the
West, where it has appeared in a facsimile of the planned
Hungarian version. [11]

In his articles, most of which are collected in the book,
Illyes argues that one of the greatest injustices committed
in the name of internationalism has been the denial of the
right of large groups of human beings to live according to
their ancient customs, to use the language of their ancestors,
and to teach their heritage to their descendants. He pleads
for an understanding of the problem of almost 3,000,000 ethnic
Hungarians, or Magyars, who live in the Carpathian basin outside
Hungary, [12] and asks that the Hungarian government
represent their interests along with those of the country's citizens.
His efforts have had varied success. The Hungarian government
has conducted negotiations on behalf of the minority in Romania,
and there have been some modest agreements about the expansion
of consular representation for Hungary in those areas of
Romania most heavily populated by Magyars. In the most
crucial fields, such as education, there has been no meeting
of minds.

------------------------------
(10) Two of the best known of these were published in Magyar
Nemzet on 25 December 1977 and 1 January 1978.

(11) Gyula Illyes, Szellem es Eroszak (Spirit and Violence)
(Budapest: Magveto, 1978). Despite the reference
to Magveto and Budapest, the book was not legally published
in Hungary.

(12) According to a recent article, the number of Magyars in
the Carpathian basin is 2,941,000; see Hungarian Situation
Report/13, Radio Free Europe Research, 7 September 1982,
Item 9.

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At the end of such a short overview of the life of a
productive, if not prolific, writer and poet, it is important
to point out the large areas in his biography about which
there is a minimum of information and which could not,
therefore, be given proper treatment. There are various
explanations for the existence of these gaps. Sometimes they have
to do with politics, others are the result of the
careful modesty of a man and his family who, because they
have lived a large part of their lives "in public," try to
retain at least some degree of privacy.

Unfortunately, the political situation in Hungary, not
just literary politics, but also the country's general
politics, does not allow the publication of a definitive
biography, because along with the questions about Illyes's
life, some questions about recent Hungarian history would
have to be discussed openly, without the distortions of
ideology and everyday politics. It is exactly that kind of
book that cannot be published in Hungary, and it is even
impossible for an outsider to be able to gather the
information necessary for writing one. Even when more information
becomes available about Illyes's life and some of its more
personal aspects, however, only time and perspective alone
will reveal the true value of his achievements.

[page 11]

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APPENDIX

A SENTENCE ABOUT TYRANNY[*]

By Gyula IIlyes

Tyranny is where
there is tyranny;
not only in the barrel of a gun,.
not only in a prison cell,

not only where they interrogate you,
not only in the middle of the night
and in the shout of the guard;
there is tyranny

not only in the prosecutor's
dark, flaming, wild accusations,
in the confessions of the accused,
in signals tapped on prison walls,

not only in the decision
that you are guilty;
there is tyranny
not only in military

drum rolls, a voice shouting
"attention, fire,"
and the corpse
shoved into a grave,

not only in news
whispered through half-opened
doors by frightened
voices,

not only in an index-finger
pressed to the lips, calling for silence;
there is tyranny
not only in the expression

nailed to your face like iron grating
and the scream trapped
behind its bars,
not only in the flood
of tears that silence
the silent
and swell their eyes;

------------------------------
(*) Written in 1950. Translated by Steven Polgar.

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there is tyranny, not only
in the shouts of long live, hurrah
and the songs roared
by people jumping to their feet;

tyranny is where
there is tyranny,
not only in hands
that don't stop clapping,

in horns, in the opera,
proclaiming lies
through stone statues,
in colors, in galleries,

in every picture, every frame,
every paint brush;
not only in the sound
of an auto speeding through the night

and stopping
in front of your house;

tyranny is
there in everything
in a way even god never was;

tyranny is there
in the day-care centers,
in a father's advice,
in a mother's smile,

in the way a child
answers a stranger,

not only in the barbed wire,
not only in books,
in slogans that dull your mind
more than barbed wire;

it is there in
a good-by kiss,
in your wife asking you
when you are coming home;

it is there on the street
in the mechanical how-are-yous,
in handshakes
that suddenly grow softer;

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it is there in the way
your lover's face turns pale
when you tell her
you'll meet her;

it is there in the interrogation
and in the confession,
in oozing, sweet words
like a fly in your wine;

even in your dreams
you're never alone,
it is in your marital bed
and in your desire before that;

you see beauty only in
the things tyranny has possessed,
you lie with it
and fall in love;

in your plate and in your cup,
in your nose and in your mouth,
in the cold and in the mist,
in the house and in the field,

it's as if an open window
let the smell of death pour in,
it's as if there was
a gas leak in the house;

when you talk to yourself
you answer tyranny's questions;
your imagination
is tyranny's slave;

the milky way is mined,
it's a search-light scanned
no man's land;
its stars are

the big tent of the sky, crowded
and noisy, is now a labor camp;
tyranny rings the bells,
speaks when you are delirious,

hears your confession,
delivers the sermon;
the church, the parliament, the rack
are all theaters for this hack;

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open or close your eyes
it looks at you,
like sickness, like memory
it stays with you

listen to the train-wheels clatter
you're a prisoner, prisoner;
on the mountain, by the sea,
in each breath of precious air,

in a flash of lightning,
in every sudden noise,
ray of light,
skipped heartbeat;

it is in your leisure,
in your captive's ennui,
in the sky-high grating
clamped around you by the rain,

in the snowfall wrapped around you
like gray, dreary prison walls;
tyranny is looking at you
through your watchdog's faithful eyes,

since it's there in every purpose
it'll be there in your tomorrows,
in your thoughts
and in your movements;

you fill, follow, and create it
the way a river fills its bed;
you try to look outside this circle
but his image stares back at you;

he can see you, don't try to run,
you're the inmate and the jailer,
in your tobacco it's moisture,
in your clothes, you call it texture;

it drinks and eats
into your bones;
you want to live more consciously
and you're conscious of tyranny;

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you want to look, but only see
the magic tricks of tyranny;
a forest's in flames around you;

it was a match
you didn't step on;
it watches in the factory,
it watches in the field and home;

you don't know what it is to live,
what's meat and bread
what's love, what's passion,
what it means to open your arms:

a slave makes his own chains this way,
this is how he learns to wear them;
when you eat, you make it fatter,
those are its children that you father;

tyranny is where everyone
is a piece of the chain;
tyranny makes you stink
tyranny makes you the tyrant;

we walk in the darkness
like groundhogs in the sun,
we are nervous in our cage
the desert of our bondage;

tyranny is where
everything's useless,
no matter what you create,
no matter how accurate;

tyranny stands
at your grave,
decides who you were, what you were,
your dust begins to serve it there.

end

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