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ATTILA JÓZSEF: BY THE DANUBE Title: A Dunánál (By the Danube) Originally Published: in Ferenc Fejtő, ed., Mai magyarok régi magyarokról, Budapest, Cserépfalvi, 1936 Language: Hungarian The text used is from the critical edition: Attila József, Összes versei (Budapest : Szépirodalmi, 1962), pp. 409–411. About the author Attila József [1905, Budapest – 1937, Balatonszárszó]: one of the most important Hungarian poets of the twentieth century. His father was a soap-maker, most probably of Romanian origins, who left the family in 1908. József’s mother, a laundrywoman , raised him and his two older sisters in poverty. After the death of his mother, his sister married a well-to-do lawyer and took the adolescent Attila into her custody. His poetry gained the attention of the reputed poet Gyula Juhász, who helped him publish poems in periodicals and wrote an introduction to his first published volume. He entered the University of Szeged to study Hungarian and French but he never finished his studies. In 1925, he went to Vienna and enrolled at the university there. He became acquainted with the left-wing emigrant artists Béla Balázs, Lajos Kassák, Lajos Hatvany and Andor Németh (who became his best friend). In 1926, with the help of Lajos Hatvany, the most important supporter of modernist literature in the first decades of the century, he went to Paris. He studied at Sorbonne, where he also joined the Union Anarchiste-Communiste. In 1927, he returned to Budapest . His poems were published in many modernist and leftist periodicals and dailies , including the major social-democratic paper Népszava (Voice of the people), the modernist Nyugat (West), the civic radical A Toll (The pen), and the Transylvanian leftist Korunk (Our epoch). After the failure of his plans to marry an upper-class girl, he was hospitalized with neurasthenia. Both in his poetry and political ideas, he sought to fuse Marxism, psychoanalysis and existentialism. His un-orthodox understanding of the communist doctrine brought him into conflict with the Hungarian Communist Party in 1935. In 1936, he became editor of the newly founded Szép Szó (Beautiful word). At this time, his psychological condition was deteriorating and he spent several months in hospital and in a sanatorium. He committed suicide by throwing himself under the wheels of a passing freight train. After his death, Attila József was not immediately made part of the national poetic canon, as he was rather marginal both politically and aesthetically. No longer a communist, he was not glori- ATTILA JÓZSEF: BY THE DANUBE 451 fied by the radical left, but, at the same time, he definitely did not have anything to do with the official discourse. After 1945, he was canonized as a proletarian poet, erasing the memory of his conflict with the Communist Party. In the 1960s, the complexity of his existential poetry was gradually rediscovered and he became one of the common intellectual references for asserting creativity, intellectual autonomy and political liberty. Main works: A szépség koldusa [The beggar of beauty] (1922); Nem én kiáltok [It is not I who shouts] (1925); Nincsen apám se anyám [I have neither father nor mother] (1929); Döntsd a tőkét ne siránkozz! [Fell the tree-trunk, don’t cry]1 (1931); Külvárosi éj [Suburban night] (1932); Medvetánc [Bear dance] (1934); Nagyon fáj [It pains me much] (1936); Összes versei és válogatott írásai [Collected poems and selected writings] (1938). Context By the early 1930s, the intellectual opposition to the neo-conservative regime that had emerged a decade earlier was, to a large extent, divided into two subcultures: the so-called ‘populists’ (népiek) and ‘urbanites’ (urbánusok ). In a way, this division can be considered a local version of the intellectual cleavage typical in all Eastern European cultures, going back to the Russian debate of Slavophiles and Westernizers. However, in the Hungarian case, the two camps perhaps shared more common features than was the case in other contexts. The members of the two groups came from the very same generation, reaching maturity in the late-twenties, and, up to a point, there was a common generational agenda that connected people of different backgrounds . This generational identity was disrupted by the radicalization of politics, along with economic and political crises. The sharpening of the rhetoric, also due to the international success of extreme nationalism, catalyzed an open...

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