Sandor Petofi

Anyone asking who was Sandor Petofi must begin on the Hungarian plain. He was born on 1 January 1823 in Kiskoros, a market town in the Great Hungarian Plain, and baptized Alexander Petrovics in the Lutheran church there ^[1]. His father, Istvan Petrovics, was a butcher and innkeeper of Serbian descent; his mother, Maria Hruz, came from a Slovak-speaking family and had worked as a servant before her marriage ^[2]. The future national poet of Hungary, in other words, grew up in a household where Hungarian was an adopted rather than an ancestral tongue, a fact he answered later by Magyarizing his surname to Petofi.

The family moved to Kiskunfelegyhaza while Sandor was an infant, and he always regarded that town, rather than Kiskoros, as his true home. His father's business prospered enough in the 1820s to pay for a good education, and the boy passed through a long string of schools, including periods at Kecskemet, Sarszentlorinc, Pest, and Aszod ^[1]. He was a restless student, more drawn to the theatre and to reading than to formal lessons. In 1838 catastrophic floods and a failed loan guarantee ruined his father financially, and the family's fall from modest comfort into poverty ended any hope of a settled path through school ^[2].

His final academic stop was the Lutheran lyceum at Selmecbanya, which he left in early 1839 after clashes with a teacher and worsening marks. From that point the teenager was effectively on his own, walking between towns, sleeping where he could, and nursing two ambitions that would shape the rest of his short life: acting and poetry ^[1].

The years from 1839 to 1844 were an apprenticeship in hardship. Petofi enlisted as a common soldier in an imperial regiment at Sopron in September 1839, partly out of sheer destitution, and served until 1841, when he was discharged on health grounds after illness ^[2]. The experience gave him an enduring hatred of barracks discipline and, later, a soldier's practical knowledge that he would carry into the revolution.

After his discharge he tried the stage. He joined travelling theatre companies, played minor roles in provincial towns, and copied scripts for pay, all while composing verse in inns and on the road ^[1]. These wanderings took him across much of Hungary on foot and fixed in his imagination the flat horizons, herdsmen, and village life of the Alfold, the great plain that became the signature landscape of his poetry.

His breakthrough as a writer came in stages. The literary journal Athenaeum printed his poem A borozo (The Wine Drinker) in May 1842, his first appearance in a national forum, and soon afterwards he began signing his work Petofi ^[2]. The decisive moment arrived in 1844, when he walked to Pest and presented his manuscripts to Mihaly Vorosmarty, then the most authoritative poet in the country. Vorosmarty's backing persuaded the national literary society to finance the publication of Petofi's first collection, Versek (Poems), which appeared in November 1844, and helped secure him an assistant editorship at the fashion journal Pesti Divatlap ^[1].

Any account of Sandor Petofi achievements has to start with what he did to the Hungarian language. Earlier Hungarian poetry had largely followed classical and German models, elevated in diction and remote from everyday speech. Petofi wrote instead in the idiom of villages and market towns, using folk-song rhythms, direct address, and concrete detail, and he did so with a technical control that made simplicity look effortless ^[3]. Critics of the older school accused him of vulgarity; readers made him famous within two years.

His narrative poem Janos vitez (John the Valiant), published in 1845, sealed that fame. It follows Kukoricza Jancsi, an orphaned shepherd boy, through soldiering, adventure, and finally into a fairyland where he is reunited with his dead love. The poem fused folktale material with polished verse and remains a staple of Hungarian childhood; it was later adapted into a popular operetta and, in 1973, an animated film ^[4]. Alongside it Petofi produced comic epics such as A helyseg kalapacsa (The Hammer of the Village, 1844), personal lyrics, genre pictures of plain life, and increasingly, from 1846, political poems on liberty.

In 1846 he organized the Society of Ten, a group of young Pest writers who briefly boycotted the established journals to assert authors' independence ^[2]. By his mid twenties Petofi was the most widely read poet in Hungary, a public personality whose opinions on national questions carried real weight. His declared models were Pierre-Jean de Beranger and the ideals of the French Revolution, and his verse turned steadily from wine songs and love lyrics toward republican politics ^[3].

In September 1846, at a ball in Nagykaroly, Petofi met Julia Szendrey, the educated, strong-willed daughter of an estate steward. Her father opposed the match with a penniless poet, but the couple persisted and married on 8 September 1847 in the chapel at Erdod ^[2]. They honeymooned at the castle of Koltó, lent to them by the aristocrat and fellow writer Sandor Teleki, and there Petofi wrote Szeptember vegen (At the End of September), a meditation on love and mortality that many Hungarians still rank among the finest lyrics in the language ^[3].

Julia was more than a muse. She read widely, wrote herself, and shared her husband's radical politics; on 15 March 1848 she is remembered for sewing revolutionary cockades. Their only child, Zoltan, was born on 15 December 1848, in the middle of the war ^[2].

Friendship also anchored Petofi's life. His closest literary bond was with the epic poet Janos Arany, formed in 1847 after Petofi wrote an enthusiastic verse letter praising Arany's poem Toldi. Their correspondence, playful and candid, is a classic of Hungarian letters, and Arany later became guardian of the poet's memory ^[3].

When news of the Paris and Vienna uprisings reached Pest in March 1848, Petofi stood at the centre of events. On the morning of 15 March he and other young radicals, later called the Youth of March, led crowds to occupy the Landerer and Heckenast printing press, where they printed the Twelve Points, a list of national demands, together with Petofi's poem Nemzeti dal (National Song) without submitting either to the censor ^[5]. He recited the poem to the crowd that day, its refrain a sworn oath that Hungarians would be prisoners no longer. The bloodless Pest revolution of 15 March forced concessions from the Habsburg court and remains a Hungarian national holiday, with Petofi's recitation at its symbolic heart ^[5].

His subsequent political career disappointed him. Standing for the National Assembly in June 1848 in his home district of Szabadszallas, he was defeated amid organized heckling, and his blunt republicanism, including verses attacking kings as such, unsettled the moderate leadership ^[2]. When open war came in the autumn, he joined the honved army as a captain. In January 1849 he attached himself to the Polish general Jozef Bem, commander of the Transylvanian campaign, serving as his aide-de-camp. Bem treated the poet with fatherly indulgence, promoted him to major, and tried to keep him away from the front line ^[1].

Petofi kept writing through the war, producing battle songs, dispatches, and the long poem Az apostol (The Apostle, 1848), a dark narrative of a revolutionary destroyed by the society he tries to free ^[3]. He also quarrelled repeatedly with the war ministry over questions of rank and honour, resigning his commission more than once.

By the summer of 1849 Russian intervention had doomed the Hungarian cause. On 31 July 1849 Bem's small Transylvanian force met a far larger Russian army near Segesvar, at the village of Feheregyhaza (now Albesti, near Sighisoara in Romania). Petofi, unarmed and against Bem's wishes, was present at the battle. In the rout that followed he was seen fleeing on foot and then never again; his body was not identified among the dead ^[1]. Most historians conclude that he was killed by Cossack cavalry during the pursuit and buried anonymously in a mass grave ^[2].

The missing grave bred legend. For decades after 1849 impostors and rumours kept him alive in the popular mind, and sightings were reported across Hungary. The most persistent alternative story held that he was taken prisoner and died years later in Siberia; a 1989 expedition to Barguzin in Russia claimed to have found his skeleton, but forensic examination indicated the remains were those of a woman, and Hungarian academic committees rejected the identification ^[6]. He was twenty six when he disappeared, leaving roughly a thousand poems written in less than a decade.

Petofi occupies a place in Hungarian culture comparable to Burns in Scotland or Mickiewicz in Poland: national poet, revolutionary icon, and household presence all at once. Statues of him stand in nearly every Hungarian town, the national literary museum in Budapest bears his name, and schoolchildren still memorize Nemzeti dal and Szeptember vegen ^[7]. Among essential Sandor Petofi facts is the sheer reach of his afterlife: his work has been translated into dozens of languages, and nineteenth century admirers abroad included Heinrich Heine, who praised the freshness of his song ^[3].

His political symbolism has proved just as durable. The Petofi Circle, a discussion club of reform-minded intellectuals named in his honour, helped prepare the ground for the Hungarian uprising of October 1956, and demonstrators that year gathered at his statue in Budapest to recite the National Song ^[8]. Successive regimes of every stripe have claimed him, which is itself a measure of his standing.

For readers coming to a Sandor Petofi biography today, the literary achievement is the surest ground. He democratized Hungarian poetry, proving that the speech of ploughmen and innkeepers could carry lyric weight, and he bound personal feeling to public cause without letting either swallow the other. Janos vitez, The Apostle, and a core of perhaps a hundred lyrics remain living texts rather than monuments, read for pleasure a century and three quarters after their author walked off a Transylvanian battlefield into myth ^[3].