Gyula Illyés
"Every good literature is a conspiracy against the age"
Family, childhood, schools, peers
Gyula Illyés, born on 2 November 1902, is "the son of the puszta" in the public eye, but the family emerges from this environment due to the expertise and income of the manor mechanic father. The child Illyés is sent to French language lessons and enrolled in high school.
During the First World War, in 1916 he moved to Budapest with his mother and continued his studies at a commercial secondary school. In 1918–19 he expected from the revolutions following the collapse of the war the renewal of the social system, social justice and the organization of the nation's legitimate self-defense against the victors who divided the historical Hungarian state in the Versailles Treaties of 1919-20.
In 1919, during the last days of the Communists, who were temporarily in power at the time, he went to the provinces to give a cultural lecture, and he came face-to-face with the red soldiers returning from the collapsing front. The poem born from the experience of this encounter became the basis of the legend that he himself was one of them.
After the revolutions: emigration to Paris, homecoming
In the fall of 1919 he takes part in helping the families of persecuted communists. After his high-school graduation he becomes a member of an organization related to the socialist movement at the Faculty of Humanities, and escaping from arrest he goes to live in Paris from 1921 to 1926.
He enrolls at the Sorbonne, writes surrealist poems in Hungarian and French, makes friends with leading artists of the avant-garde (Tzara, Cocteau, Aragon, Éluard) and translates their works into Hungarian. An unmissable part of his oeuvre is two thick volumes of literary translations.
In Paris the young poet not only gets to know the latest literary trends, but due to the experience of meeting the West, he sees the contradictions of Hungary's system and its external vulnerability more precisely than before. His conviction that the truth of the people and the nation are inseparable is strengthened.
From the avant-garde to neo-populism and neo-classicism
After a general amnesty, he returns home.
First he publishes in avant-garde journals. The editors of leading periodicals working in the spirit of classical modernity also noticed his talent. This is how he gets into the circle of the famous periodical entitled Nyugat (West), where he is accepted into the close circle of friends by the editor-in-chief, the great poet, Mihály Babits, who later becomes his master. To ensure his livelihood and independence as a writer he takes on clerical work.
In the second half of the twenties Illyés depicted the experience of the homeland (the peasant world), which was considered outdated in poetry, in a way that was affected by surrealism, but also preserved traditional forms. The literary world quickly noticed the novelty of his poetic realism.
At a very young age, in his twenties he became one of the leading figures of the new generation of poets, and at the same time assumed an increasingly important role in public life. He took part in the editing of Nyugat, which represented classical modernity, and after the death of the editor-in-chief, Mihály Babits in 1941, he became the editor-in-chief of Magyar Csillag (Hungarian Star), which continued in its footsteps. Its operation was characterized by a respect for values that rose above the infightings of literature and ideology.
Patriotism and a sense of social mission
Upon returning home, he finds that after the revolutions of 1918–1919 the Establishment suspects the return of communism in all social demands, while the former revolutionary left, following the idea of class struggle, is indifferent or hostile to the protection of the interests of the nation.
Illyés rejected the cult of violence, the inhumane, anti-democratic dogmatism of Communism, but he preserved his more and more conscious social commitment brought from childhood.
After the rise of Hitler's power, from June 1933 Illyés raised a storm in public life by drawing attention in influential articles to the danger of German predominance emerging in some regions of Hungary, born out of Nazi ideas and the ethnic expansionist aspirations of Nazi Germany.
In this national debate an influential „populist" group of leading writers emerged, adhering to "third-way" ideas which aimed at the cultural liberation of the peasantry, their empowerment in the area of civic and democratic rights , and their endowment with farmland by dividing the large estates.
Public matters: personal matters
The conservative government could not accept the political and social radicalism of this wide intellectual alliance, while the pro-communist left attacked it because its adherence to a national politics and national culture conflicted with the world revolutionary ideas of the Moscow line.
Illyés's militant public life enhanced his role. His old Communist sympathizer acquaintances got him invited to the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934: they expected him to sympathise with their cause without reservation. The opposite followed: seeing the fanaticism of the cruel Stalinist system, his journey turned Illyés away from Communism for good.
His book about his journey was the first comprehensive Hungarian account of Stalin's Communist world, and among the first in Europe. In it Illyés acknowledged some results of Soviet modernization, but didn't fall prey to Communist propaganda. In an understated but clear manner he noted the revulsive features of the system, such as Stalin's deliberately induced famine in the Ukraine, the plight of the hordes of orphaned children in cities, and the persecution of religion.
His travelogue, owing to its balance and restraint, escaped censorship by the conservative establishment, but due to the social sharpness of his other writings he was summoned to court several times. In his poems and then in his prose he articulates his sympathy with the disenfranchised day labourers, and all the vulnerables and miserables of society, in indictments against the crimes of the existing order.
Balance of poetry and prose
Illyés regarded himself primarily as a poet, but in the 1930s he realized that his prose works had a greater social impact. Therefore, his essays, monographs and works of fiction played an increasingly important role in his life's work.
One of the guiding principles of his book about his model in poetry, the revolutionary 19th century genius Sándor Petőfi states that the main condition for national freedom is the freedom of the people, the underclass. This can only be achieved with an in-depth knowledge of reality. One of his best-known works, People of the Puszta (i.e. the immense land estates of the aristocracy), a genre-creating classic of Hungarian literary sociography was born in the spirit of this idea. In it he draws attention to the unknown fate, vulnerability and misery of the three million landless labourers.
At this time Illyés saw the essay, too, as a decisive form. With his collection of shorter prose pieces entitled Magyars (Hungarians) he compiled a masterpiece of commentary and meditations, establishing his due place among the best essayists of his generation.
The years of public struggles
Illyés, who is considered left-wing in terms of his social commitment, found his mission in the 1930s. His broad knowledge of the world and the arts, his innate political and network-building skills turned him from a key member in the writers' movement into a key figure of a comprehensive intellectual and then social reform movement. This community was convinced that solving the crises of the countryside, which plays a decisive role in the life of Hungary, and improving the fate of millions of peasants is a task whose significance can only be compared to healing the wounds of the dismemberment of the country by the Peace Dictates of Trianon (Versailles).
They called for comprehensive land reform as the first step of their program, but they wanted more. They saw that the future of the nation is uncertain without democracy, the full social integration and equal rights to property and education for those stuck outside of society. Their efforts found more and more supporters, but the budding reform efforts were overshadowed by the increasing threat of war in Europe and the acute political divisions in East Central Europe.
In 1939 he married his second wife, his lifelong companion Flóra Kozmutza, a psychologist and professor of special education. Their daughter, Mária Illyés was soon born, to become an art historian and then the custodian of her father's heritage.
Shattered hopes
Hungary lost its remaining sovereignty with the German occupation, and Illyés, who had helped the persecuted, became persecuted himself. The country became one of the biggest losers of the Second World War. After the loss of millions of lives, the unprecedented destruction of the cities and villages that became battlefields, the loss of the territories that were briefly returned to Hungary, and the genocide that hit the Hungarians who found themselves outside the national borders again as an ethnic minority, the hopes for a fair and just peace in 1947 in Paris quickly came to naught.
During the short-lived pseudo-democracy Illyés stood up for the unjustly persecuted and executed, political actors and fellow writers, and as a representative of the Peasant Party he participated in the distribution of land. Seeing the aspirations of the Communists who relied on the weapons of the occupiers and aspired to exclusive power, he distanced himself from politics from 1946 and (apart from the days of the Revolution of 1956) no longer assumed a role in public life comparable to that between the two wars.
Illyés was the greatest living Hungarian poet in the eyes of the Communist leaders who returned home from Moscow and sought to build a totalitarian state. However, his position became tense and fragile, because, despite the pressure on him during the open dictatorship, he was not willing to become a writer-propagandist of the system.
The revolution and what followed
The year 1956 was also an exceptional stage in the development of Illyés's life. After 1947 this was the first time that a volume of his verse, containing the masterpieces of his new intellectual poetry, entitled Handshakes, was published.
At the outbreak of the revolution in Miskolc, he wrote down the classic poem of world renown he had written and hidden years earlier, but kept in his memory, entitled: A Sentence on Tyranny.
Back in Budapest during the days of the revolution, he took part in the activities of a successor peasant party that began to operate under the name Petőfi Party in the multi-party democracy that lasted only for a few days.
The ideologues of the Communist regime, which was helped back to power with Soviet weapons, classified the writers among those responsible for the revolution, but after the first, bloody stage of the restoration they tried to win them over. The only means of writerly opposition was a refusal to publish, but this couldn't last forever. Illyés was one of the last to give up internal exile after fellow writer Tibor Déry's release in 1961. (He had intervened unsuccessfully with the authorities at the time of his trial on Déry's behalf.)
His volumes published after years of silence weren't allowed to contain public references, at a time when Kádár's party state prohibited mere evocations of the revolution. No wonder the system again waited in vain for Illyés to make a declaration of loyalty to it, but he too had to resign himself to the situation: a dictatorship without terror.
Development of his poetry
In Illyés's poems, even after leaving behind the poetry of objectivity of the thirties and forties, the frequent theme remains the landscape, a nature-inspired thought, and alongside the images of passing away the hope of rebirth also emerges. During the war, the years of communist terror and his internal exile after the fallen revolution this tendency becomes stronger. His new poems evoke the cultural and philosophical heritage of Europe, and at his best he attains to the highest peaks of world literature.
From the 1960s his tone became more and more gloomy. He continues with his modernity, in which an objective tone is interwoven with a wealth of associations, and his intellectual poetry bravely breaks forms, expressing tensions in a dramatic, tragic tone. Apocalyptic visions are associated with recent tragic experience, speaking in apparently fragmented and loose forms, as well as multi-voiced metaphysical contemplations that unite present and past. He also returns to writing prose poems.
The theme of his lifelong alliance with his wife regularly returns in his poetry - most of his love poems were published only after his death.
Dramas, essays
Illyés, turning his back on public life in the 1960's, became involved with writing for the stage. The dramas present the conflicts of freedom and national independence, through evocations of the defining events and figures of Hungarian history, tragic heroes and moments, the moral victories of lost battles, truths for a better future. He also experiments with easy pieces and comedies, where
his innate sense of irony and humour dominate.
He dedicates a classic volume, In Charon's Boat, to the inevitable humiliations and triumphs of aging.
In defense of the rights of Hungarians
Illyés created standards of authenticity and excellence in whatever he touched. He assumed the unsought responsibility issuing from his public authority and a difficult dialogue with the Establishment. Whether these relationships were formal or cordial depended on the good intentions and abilities of the politicians who sought to meet him.
The Communist leadership that assumed power after the crushing of the Revolution of 1956 was terrified of even the most innocent forms of patriotism, while the neighboring communist regimes incorporated even the crudest nationalism into their ideology. This was also expressed in the assimilation policy against the Hungarians in their territories since the First World War. Thus, the Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries suffered from the disenfranchisement and discrimination resulting not only from the Communist system, but also from ethnic identity, and this was tacitly accepted by the Hungarian communist leadership. Illyés couldn't change this either, but he did everything on the international scene to call attention to this absurd enormity. Thus he wrote the foreword to a book printed in the West describing the loss of property and civic rights that befell Hungarians, as well as their persecution, in Czechoslovakia between 1945–1948. Illyés also maintained a network of friendly relations with the Hungarian writers and poets of the Carpathian Basin and the Western diaspora, and without him a spiritual and intellectual unification of Hungarians wouldn't have been achieved from the 1970's on.
Illyés was officially considered a living classic, but in his most important aspirations (his patriotism and his defense of democratic rights) the Establishment constantly hindered him. A two part essay that he published on Christmas 1977 and New Year 1978, „Answer to Herder and Ady", treated with an unprecedented openness the oppression of Hungarians by the neighboring Communist regimes, causing shock waves at home and in the international press, and taking the Establishment by surprise. As a result, the government banned the publication of his „troublesome" collection, Spirit and Violence, which included this article. The book couldn't be published until 1989, on the threshold of the system change, but was printed as a samizdat and circulated in a Western European edition.
The last years
The poetry and poetic language of Illyés was again reborn in the struggle with aging and illness, - it became more abstract and condensed. In his last, completed prose work he re-visited his youth and recalled his efforts to find his intellectual bearings, giving a unique summary of the most important issues of Hungarian history and society in the early 20th century.
After his death in 1983 it became more obvious than ever what Illyés meant to Hungarian intellectual life: he was a monarch in the republic of literature. No one could play a similar role anymore: the era of shaping a national sense of mission into a literary and public role seems to have passed. His death closed an era: with his departure, a great artist of the 20th century left us, who was able to integrate the intellectual and public life with the most comprehensive thought.
At his burial many thousands of his admirers gathered at Farkasrét Cemetery, so that it, added to the memorable funeral addresses, amounted to an anti-Establishment demonstration.
The exhibition material was edited and the text was written by: Gáspár Gróh, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts
The English text was proofread by Gyula Kodolányi
Graphic Design: Afrodite Alajbeg
Photos ©: Mária Illyés, Zoltán Móser, Fortepan
Printer: DUALPRINT Kft.
Published by: Hungarian Academy of Arts, 2023
The fence exhibition on the life and work of Gyula Illyés was commissioned by the Hungarian Academy of Arts
Family, childhood, schools, peers
Gyula Illyés, born on 2 November 1902, is "the son of the puszta" in the public eye, but the family emerges from this environment due to the expertise and income of the manor mechanic father. The child Illyés is sent to French language lessons and enrolled in high school.During the First World War, in 1916 he moved to Budapest with his mother and continued his studies at a commercial secondary school. In 1918–19 he expected from the revolutions following the collapse of the war the renewal of the social system, social justice and the organization of the nation's legitimate self-defense against the victors who divided the historical Hungarian state in the Versailles Treaties of 1919-20.
In 1919, during the last days of the Communists, who were temporarily in power at the time, he went to the provinces to give a cultural lecture, and he came face-to-face with the red soldiers returning from the collapsing front. The poem born from the experience of this encounter became the basis of the legend that he himself was one of them.
After the revolutions: emigration to Paris, homecoming
In the fall of 1919 he takes part in helping the families of persecuted communists. After his high-school graduation he becomes a member of an organization related to the socialist movement at the Faculty of Humanities, and escaping from arrest he goes to live in Paris from 1921 to 1926.He enrolls at the Sorbonne, writes surrealist poems in Hungarian and French, makes friends with leading artists of the avant-garde (Tzara, Cocteau, Aragon, Éluard) and translates their works into Hungarian. An unmissable part of his oeuvre is two thick volumes of literary translations.
In Paris the young poet not only gets to know the latest literary trends, but due to the experience of meeting the West, he sees the contradictions of Hungary's system and its external vulnerability more precisely than before. His conviction that the truth of the people and the nation are inseparable is strengthened.
From the avant-garde to neo-populism and neo-classicism
After a general amnesty, he returns home.First he publishes in avant-garde journals. The editors of leading periodicals working in the spirit of classical modernity also noticed his talent. This is how he gets into the circle of the famous periodical entitled Nyugat (West), where he is accepted into the close circle of friends by the editor-in-chief, the great poet, Mihály Babits, who later becomes his master. To ensure his livelihood and independence as a writer he takes on clerical work.
In the second half of the twenties Illyés depicted the experience of the homeland (the peasant world), which was considered outdated in poetry, in a way that was affected by surrealism, but also preserved traditional forms. The literary world quickly noticed the novelty of his poetic realism.
At a very young age, in his twenties he became one of the leading figures of the new generation of poets, and at the same time assumed an increasingly important role in public life. He took part in the editing of Nyugat, which represented classical modernity, and after the death of the editor-in-chief, Mihály Babits in 1941, he became the editor-in-chief of Magyar Csillag (Hungarian Star), which continued in its footsteps. Its operation was characterized by a respect for values that rose above the infightings of literature and ideology.
Patriotism and a sense of social mission
Upon returning home, he finds that after the revolutions of 1918–1919 the Establishment suspects the return of communism in all social demands, while the former revolutionary left, following the idea of class struggle, is indifferent or hostile to the protection of the interests of the nation.Illyés rejected the cult of violence, the inhumane, anti-democratic dogmatism of Communism, but he preserved his more and more conscious social commitment brought from childhood.
After the rise of Hitler's power, from June 1933 Illyés raised a storm in public life by drawing attention in influential articles to the danger of German predominance emerging in some regions of Hungary, born out of Nazi ideas and the ethnic expansionist aspirations of Nazi Germany.
In this national debate an influential „populist" group of leading writers emerged, adhering to "third-way" ideas which aimed at the cultural liberation of the peasantry, their empowerment in the area of civic and democratic rights , and their endowment with farmland by dividing the large estates.
Public matters: personal matters
The conservative government could not accept the political and social radicalism of this wide intellectual alliance, while the pro-communist left attacked it because its adherence to a national politics and national culture conflicted with the world revolutionary ideas of the Moscow line.Illyés's militant public life enhanced his role. His old Communist sympathizer acquaintances got him invited to the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934: they expected him to sympathise with their cause without reservation. The opposite followed: seeing the fanaticism of the cruel Stalinist system, his journey turned Illyés away from Communism for good.
His book about his journey was the first comprehensive Hungarian account of Stalin's Communist world, and among the first in Europe. In it Illyés acknowledged some results of Soviet modernization, but didn't fall prey to Communist propaganda. In an understated but clear manner he noted the revulsive features of the system, such as Stalin's deliberately induced famine in the Ukraine, the plight of the hordes of orphaned children in cities, and the persecution of religion.
His travelogue, owing to its balance and restraint, escaped censorship by the conservative establishment, but due to the social sharpness of his other writings he was summoned to court several times. In his poems and then in his prose he articulates his sympathy with the disenfranchised day labourers, and all the vulnerables and miserables of society, in indictments against the crimes of the existing order.
Balance of poetry and prose
Illyés regarded himself primarily as a poet, but in the 1930s he realized that his prose works had a greater social impact. Therefore, his essays, monographs and works of fiction played an increasingly important role in his life's work.One of the guiding principles of his book about his model in poetry, the revolutionary 19th century genius Sándor Petőfi states that the main condition for national freedom is the freedom of the people, the underclass. This can only be achieved with an in-depth knowledge of reality. One of his best-known works, People of the Puszta (i.e. the immense land estates of the aristocracy), a genre-creating classic of Hungarian literary sociography was born in the spirit of this idea. In it he draws attention to the unknown fate, vulnerability and misery of the three million landless labourers.
At this time Illyés saw the essay, too, as a decisive form. With his collection of shorter prose pieces entitled Magyars (Hungarians) he compiled a masterpiece of commentary and meditations, establishing his due place among the best essayists of his generation.
The years of public struggles
Illyés, who is considered left-wing in terms of his social commitment, found his mission in the 1930s. His broad knowledge of the world and the arts, his innate political and network-building skills turned him from a key member in the writers' movement into a key figure of a comprehensive intellectual and then social reform movement. This community was convinced that solving the crises of the countryside, which plays a decisive role in the life of Hungary, and improving the fate of millions of peasants is a task whose significance can only be compared to healing the wounds of the dismemberment of the country by the Peace Dictates of Trianon (Versailles).They called for comprehensive land reform as the first step of their program, but they wanted more. They saw that the future of the nation is uncertain without democracy, the full social integration and equal rights to property and education for those stuck outside of society. Their efforts found more and more supporters, but the budding reform efforts were overshadowed by the increasing threat of war in Europe and the acute political divisions in East Central Europe.
In 1939 he married his second wife, his lifelong companion Flóra Kozmutza, a psychologist and professor of special education. Their daughter, Mária Illyés was soon born, to become an art historian and then the custodian of her father's heritage.
Shattered hopes
Hungary lost its remaining sovereignty with the German occupation, and Illyés, who had helped the persecuted, became persecuted himself. The country became one of the biggest losers of the Second World War. After the loss of millions of lives, the unprecedented destruction of the cities and villages that became battlefields, the loss of the territories that were briefly returned to Hungary, and the genocide that hit the Hungarians who found themselves outside the national borders again as an ethnic minority, the hopes for a fair and just peace in 1947 in Paris quickly came to naught.During the short-lived pseudo-democracy Illyés stood up for the unjustly persecuted and executed, political actors and fellow writers, and as a representative of the Peasant Party he participated in the distribution of land. Seeing the aspirations of the Communists who relied on the weapons of the occupiers and aspired to exclusive power, he distanced himself from politics from 1946 and (apart from the days of the Revolution of 1956) no longer assumed a role in public life comparable to that between the two wars.
Illyés was the greatest living Hungarian poet in the eyes of the Communist leaders who returned home from Moscow and sought to build a totalitarian state. However, his position became tense and fragile, because, despite the pressure on him during the open dictatorship, he was not willing to become a writer-propagandist of the system.
The year 1956 was also an exceptional stage in the development of Illyés's life. After 1947 this was the first time that a volume of his verse, containing the masterpieces of his new intellectual poetry, entitled Handshakes, was published.At the outbreak of the revolution in Miskolc, he wrote down the classic poem of world renown he had written and hidden years earlier, but kept in his memory, entitled: A Sentence on Tyranny.
Back in Budapest during the days of the revolution, he took part in the activities of a successor peasant party that began to operate under the name Petőfi Party in the multi-party democracy that lasted only for a few days.
The ideologues of the Communist regime, which was helped back to power with Soviet weapons, classified the writers among those responsible for the revolution, but after the first, bloody stage of the restoration they tried to win them over. The only means of writerly opposition was a refusal to publish, but this couldn't last forever. Illyés was one of the last to give up internal exile after fellow writer Tibor Déry's release in 1961. (He had intervened unsuccessfully with the authorities at the time of his trial on Déry's behalf.)
His volumes published after years of silence weren't allowed to contain public references, at a time when Kádár's party state prohibited mere evocations of the revolution. No wonder the system again waited in vain for Illyés to make a declaration of loyalty to it, but he too had to resign himself to the situation: a dictatorship without terror.
Development of his poetry
In Illyés's poems, even after leaving behind the poetry of objectivity of the thirties and forties, the frequent theme remains the landscape, a nature-inspired thought, and alongside the images of passing away the hope of rebirth also emerges. During the war, the years of communist terror and his internal exile after the fallen revolution this tendency becomes stronger. His new poems evoke the cultural and philosophical heritage of Europe, and at his best he attains to the highest peaks of world literature.From the 1960s his tone became more and more gloomy. He continues with his modernity, in which an objective tone is interwoven with a wealth of associations, and his intellectual poetry bravely breaks forms, expressing tensions in a dramatic, tragic tone. Apocalyptic visions are associated with recent tragic experience, speaking in apparently fragmented and loose forms, as well as multi-voiced metaphysical contemplations that unite present and past. He also returns to writing prose poems.
The theme of his lifelong alliance with his wife regularly returns in his poetry - most of his love poems were published only after his death.
Dramas, essays
Illyés, turning his back on public life in the 1960's, became involved with writing for the stage. The dramas present the conflicts of freedom and national independence, through evocations of the defining events and figures of Hungarian history, tragic heroes and moments, the moral victories of lost battles, truths for a better future. He also experiments with easy pieces and comedies, wherehis innate sense of irony and humour dominate.
He dedicates a classic volume, In Charon's Boat, to the inevitable humiliations and triumphs of aging.
In defense of the rights of Hungarians
Illyés created standards of authenticity and excellence in whatever he touched. He assumed the unsought responsibility issuing from his public authority and a difficult dialogue with the Establishment. Whether these relationships were formal or cordial depended on the good intentions and abilities of the politicians who sought to meet him.The Communist leadership that assumed power after the crushing of the Revolution of 1956 was terrified of even the most innocent forms of patriotism, while the neighboring communist regimes incorporated even the crudest nationalism into their ideology. This was also expressed in the assimilation policy against the Hungarians in their territories since the First World War. Thus, the Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries suffered from the disenfranchisement and discrimination resulting not only from the Communist system, but also from ethnic identity, and this was tacitly accepted by the Hungarian communist leadership. Illyés couldn't change this either, but he did everything on the international scene to call attention to this absurd enormity. Thus he wrote the foreword to a book printed in the West describing the loss of property and civic rights that befell Hungarians, as well as their persecution, in Czechoslovakia between 1945–1948. Illyés also maintained a network of friendly relations with the Hungarian writers and poets of the Carpathian Basin and the Western diaspora, and without him a spiritual and intellectual unification of Hungarians wouldn't have been achieved from the 1970's on.
Illyés was officially considered a living classic, but in his most important aspirations (his patriotism and his defense of democratic rights) the Establishment constantly hindered him. A two part essay that he published on Christmas 1977 and New Year 1978, „Answer to Herder and Ady", treated with an unprecedented openness the oppression of Hungarians by the neighboring Communist regimes, causing shock waves at home and in the international press, and taking the Establishment by surprise. As a result, the government banned the publication of his „troublesome" collection, Spirit and Violence, which included this article. The book couldn't be published until 1989, on the threshold of the system change, but was printed as a samizdat and circulated in a Western European edition.
The last years
The poetry and poetic language of Illyés was again reborn in the struggle with aging and illness, - it became more abstract and condensed. In his last, completed prose work he re-visited his youth and recalled his efforts to find his intellectual bearings, giving a unique summary of the most important issues of Hungarian history and society in the early 20th century.After his death in 1983 it became more obvious than ever what Illyés meant to Hungarian intellectual life: he was a monarch in the republic of literature. No one could play a similar role anymore: the era of shaping a national sense of mission into a literary and public role seems to have passed. His death closed an era: with his departure, a great artist of the 20th century left us, who was able to integrate the intellectual and public life with the most comprehensive thought.
At his burial many thousands of his admirers gathered at Farkasrét Cemetery, so that it, added to the memorable funeral addresses, amounted to an anti-Establishment demonstration.
The exhibition material was edited and the text was written by: Gáspár Gróh, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts
The English text was proofread by Gyula Kodolányi
Graphic Design: Afrodite Alajbeg
Photos ©: Mária Illyés, Zoltán Móser, Fortepan
Printer: DUALPRINT Kft.
Published by: Hungarian Academy of Arts, 2023
The fence exhibition on the life and work of Gyula Illyés was commissioned by the Hungarian Academy of Arts