1. The Background

THERE have been few issues in Hungarian intellectual life more hotly debated than the case of the populist (népi) writers, and consequently it is difficult to make non-controversial statements about them. Their ideological heritage is still active in the capillary system of Hungarian public thinking, their ideas form a part of the Hungarian national consciousness as an alternative to present-day ‘official’ ideology – for népi writers were primarily a political movement, although their literary output is voluminous, and significant on its own. Yet népi writers have never presented a united ideological platform, or held identical political views, and were only a loosely connected group. Some of them have even changed their political affiliations during their careers, but they have remained loyal to the népi ideal, and its essential ideas.

It was Mihály Babits who, observing certain style-ideals of the new generation of poets who emerged in the inter-war period, first called them népi poets.*In a preface to Új anthológia (1932). He noticed that these poets, in a revolt against the virtuoso forms employed by the Nyugat poets, returned to the traditional Hungarian versification which had been used by Petőfi and the early poets, but was somewhat despised by Ady and the refined Nyugat authors. This neo-népies revival ignored the diluted message of the népies poetry, with its theatrical effects, which characterized the decline of that trend in the second half of the nineteenth century, and which caused the literary rebellion of the Nyugat authors. These new poets considered themselves the authentic voice of ‘the people’ (hence their epithet: népi), and thought it their duty to be uncompromising spokesmen of ‘the people’ whose voice was unheard in literature. They were committed writers, committed to the cause of the peasantry. It was symptomatic of the slow pace of social development in Hungary that the country was still largely agricultural, more than fifty per cent of the population being engaged in agriculture; thus the people represented by the népi writers were largely peasants.

There is nothing novel in being a committed writer in Eastern Europe, and there is even less novelty in considering ‘the people’ to be the embodiment of those ethnic traits of which national entities are composed. It was a common view in Hungary during the emergence of national consciousness; it was also part of the Russian national revival in the latter part of the nineteenth century, prominently represented by the narodniki. The re-emergence of the creed in the 1930s attested only to the failure of earlier efforts. Since the national policy of the ‘historical’ classes had led to the disintegration of the Hungarian state and to damaging the fabric of society, the new intelligentsia, which came from the lower stratum of society, was not prepared to identify itself with the ruling class and its ideology, but turned to its own background for a source of revival, and preached that enormous untapped reserves of national energies were to be found in the peasantry. To release these boundless energies social improvement was necessary, and the first step towards improving the lot of the class which formed the core of Hungarian society was to describe the peasants’ plight. Thus sociological inspiration in népi literature proved to be its main driving force.

The ancestral strength (őserő) of the peasantry had been hailed by earlier writers, particularly by Zsigmond Móricz, whose figure of Dani Turi is considered to be an antecedent to the népi cult of ‘ancestral strength’. This apparently romantic notion gave rise to excesses. Lajos Bibó (1890-1972), for example, owed his popularity almost exclusively to the robust peasants he depicted both in his novels and in his plays. These peasants of his native Lower Tisza region were graphically delineated and exotic figures, whose unbridled őserő owed its existence to folkloristic inspiration. In spite of his unquestionably new approach to the description of the peasantry – an approach which distinguished his attitude from the traditional attitudes of his predecessors – Bibó never considered himself a népi writer, and critics have never classified him as such, yet his message of őserő subsisted on the same fare as did that of many népi writers. After 1945 Bibó was cold-shouldered by the new regime, and died almost forgotten.

As well as the cult of őserő, the népi ideology contained other mythical features, of which the most significant was the consideration of Hungarians as a distinctly shaped ethnic entity. Because of the inconclusive evidence of scanty data, many questions relating to the origin of the Hungarian people have never been settled satisfactorily. In addition to the problems of ethnogeny, the conflict between Eastern origin and Western civilization has provided grounds for fierce debate about the ethnic identity of Hungarians ever since the Age of Reform. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when modern scholarship failed to provide definite answers to the complex question of the origin of the Hungarians, numerous conjectures were proposed to fill the gaps left by scholarship. One such conjecture was Turanism, according to which the Central Asian plateau, Turan, was the cradle of the Turanian people, whose descendants included the Hungarians. Separated from their kinsmen, and feeling isolated in Europe, the Hungarians have always been eager to search for their ancient traditions and beliefs, and Turanism, a concept containing much wishful thinking, seized the imagination of many. Originally more of a myth than a political concept about a future empire of the Turanian people, it supplied ideas to poets, of whom Árpád Zempléni (1863-1919) should be mentioned. Zempléni advocated the unity of all non-Indo-European people of the Asiatic steppes; he adapted Vogul and Ostyak*Small ethnic groups living near the Urals, linguistically closely related to Hungarians. epic poems with considerable poetic skill. Later Turanism became thoroughly discredited as being a forerunner of racialist theories.

Before surveying the political ideas of the populist writers, who were pragmatic when dealing with practical tasks, one controversial author should be presented who is commonly regarded as a precursor of the népi writers; although he was of a somewhat different mould, his ideas contributed to shaping populist ideology. This writer was Dezső Szabó (1879-1945) the son of a Transylvanian civil servant, whose colourful figure, fertile intellect, Messianic complex, and expressionistic style revealed both his limitless energy and his inability to exercise creative discipline. One of the most brilliant pupils of Eötvös College, Szabó displayed all the required scholarly talent and stamina for his chosen discipline of Finno-Ugrian linguistics, but he eventually lost interest in scholarship and turned to creative writing, first as an essayist, and later as a novelist and expert polemicist, whose enormous and aggressive vocabulary baffled his numerous opponents now with its resourceful innuendos, now with vitriolic accusations. He always managed to appear as a champion of justice and to impress the reader with his sincerity.

His most influential work was a novel, The Village That Was Swept Away (1919), in which he put forward his message with little artistic care but with imposing rhetoric, displaying the full arsenal of expressionistic fireworks. The hero of the novel, János Böjthe, comes from an impoverished gentry family; he is well educated, but a stranger in the destructive and deceptive city life. It is the village, with its simple, patriarchal life and its uncorrupted social mores, which is ‘the cradle of the Hungarian race’, and Böjthe accordingly returns to his native village, marries a peasant girl, thus accepting the burdens and responsibilities of peasant life, and helps to resurrect the village. The plot of this uneven novel often lacks verisimilitude; Böjthe is a paper-tiger, or at best a Jókaiesque super-hero. Szabó’s social criticism is mainly directed against Jews and Germans, who dupe the common people with ‘alien ideas’, capitalism and socialism. Capitalism breaks up the traditional way of life in the village, and war, which is also an evil brought about by capitalism, destroys the masses of ordinary people. Böjthe’s marriage to a peasant girl is symbolic, and serves racial purity and survival.

It is little wonder that the message of the novel found receptive ears; the intellectual panic following the upheavals after World War I made people liable to receive extremist views uncritically. Szabó, however, could never repeat the success of The Village That Was Swept Away, in spite of his thorough grounding in the theory of the novel: all his efforts proved to be failures, and eventually he abandoned writing fiction altogether. Of the rest of his fiction perhaps the novel A Miraculous Life (1921), and the powerfully written short story Resurrection at Makucska (1925), should be mentioned. A Miraculous Life was considered by its author as his best; its folk-tale-like structure is carefully conceived, but its mixed moods, in which naturalistic details and Romantic sentiments find themselves alongside vitriolic satire and naïve idealism, damage any artistic effect the novel might have made.

By the 1930s Szabó stood alone in no man’s land; he also criticized vehemently the policies of the Horthy regime and, when political alliance with the Third Reich became a reality, he spoke out with great courage against ‘aggressive German racial imperialism’. He made several attempts to create his own platform by publishing one-man-periodicals, of which Ludas Mátyás Booklets (1934-42) proved the most durable. It contained his miscellaneous writings: stories, political polemics, poems, and parts of his autobiographical recollections, on which he constantly worked until his death during the siege of Budapest in 1945. Published posthumously (My Lives, 2 vols., 1965), Szabó’s autobiography is probably his best work. His stylistic flamboyance seems to have subsided, his humour and self-irony make the book memorable reading; the nostalgic lyricism of his childhood recollections which forms its major part is sincere, and it lacks harsh colours, but abounds in graphic descriptions, which were often missing in his novels.

His political ideas can be best seen in The Entire Horizon (3 vols., 1939), in which the central notion is the preservation of the Hungarians as a separate ‘race’. This idea led him into a cult of racialism, but it also resulted in radical criticism of all political extremism, for Szabó always had the courage of his convictions. Political realities, in the shadow of the Third Reich, seemed to leave only two alternatives – either to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, or to side with the anti-fascist opposition, which, although not a mass-movement in Hungary, had at least the moral support both of the Western democracies and of Communist Russia; but Szabó sought a third way (harmadik út). To advocate a policy which disregarded the existing international political situation was unrealistic; harmadik út was, however, a tempting illusion, because it seemed to keep national self-interest in sight. It also had a valid historical analogy: seventeenth-century Transylvania had managed to maintain her precarious semi-indepedent statehood between the Turkish and the Austrian Empires.

It was this ‘third alternative’ that exercised the greatest influence on the népi writers and other young intellectuals of the 1930s. On the one hand, it helped to awaken social and moral consciousness in the intelligentsia by discrediting the idolization of things German, a fashion which plagued Hungarian public life; on the other, it provided a rallying point for those intellectuals who would oppose the Germanization of Hungary, but would not on any account enter into an alliance with an opposition which contained socialists or communists.

While the concept of harmadik út had its origin in wishful thinking, the reformist ideas of the populist writers were pragmatic, and showed their understanding of the consequences of the conditions in which the peasantry lived. Hungarian agriculture was fettered by the big landed estates; the communists in 1919 paid little attention to the plight of the landless peasants, and did not distribute the land. By the 1930s, under the impact of the world economic crisis, the pauperization of the countryside had reached its peak; the landless peasantry and their families now numbered one in every three inhabitants of the country, and Hungary became known as ‘the land of three million beggars’.

The populist writers, who had come ‘from the people’, now turned homeward in anger, and their immediate purpose was to probe the ills of the peasantry, to expose the effects of their landless existence and the deformation of life that was brought about by despair. Earnest young writers tramped along the dusty roads of the Lowlands and of other remote districts, their purpose was to discover how the peasantry lived. This approaching of reality with a blank sheet produced many horrifying pictures, pictures of a life no one had ever imagined. The village explorers (falukutatók), the most radical of the populists, wrote sociological works based on field-work; the fact that these works outdid fiction was not their fault. The populists prescribed many kinds of remedies for the social disease of Hungary; the one on which all of them were agreed was the urgent need for the partitioning of the big estates.