His poetry
What first strikes the reader in the poetry of Kornél Döbrentei is the unparalleled dynamism of his verse, the sweep of images radiating immense intensity and expansiveness. His winding, multiply complex verse sentences seem as though they were representing a poetics of horror vacui: a designation cannot stand bare, without expansion; figurative expression seeks to convey a sense of totality. The creator’s image-cathedrals, yielding to the desire for monumentality, ascend from the depths toward the heights – branching, stretching verbal constructions. Compression and boundless spaciousness coexist within them. His visionary, metaphor-based poetics is made distinctive by a lyrical–grotesque tonality tinged with surreal elements. Alongside formal variety, his method of creation fundamentally builds on the thought-rhythm of free verse and on the poetic tradition of the long poem, giving voice to a complex composition of memories, emotional–atmospheric elements, scenes, visions and imaginative projections. His imagery enlarges, extends, re-dimensions. In his early poems the image tells everything: the poem is identical with the composition of images. “In the cage-sized cosmos of the vision” (Nagyanyánk utolsó vászna előtt [lit:Before Our Grandmother’s Last Canvas]) the trope does not signify an underlying meaning but is itself the meaning: “the all-unifying moment of the miracle” (Before Our Grandmother’s Last Canvas). The connectors of the image-cascades are motifs, moods, correspondences, similarities and logical parallels – all serving heightened intensity, the compression of visual components, cultural content and events of fate into unity. His metaphors and image-making do not present an everyday visual world; their strangeness is the result of artistically individualised stylisation. The transfiguration of objects and elements of reality enclosed in the poem, the elevation of appearance into a disturbing vision, the creation of symbols all serves an important role, since the poems aim to make perceptible the unity assembled from heterogeneous components. Grotesque–baroque splendour, sacred awe, lust for life and the depiction of beauty – counterbalanced by naturalistic representations, the fragility and repulsiveness of physical existence and paradoxes – strive toward the timeless evocation of the essential.
His faithful critic, Lajos Szakolczay, calls this mode of creation “paraphrases of the universe”. Behind the horizontal spaciousness of these poems stands an outlook that sees the abstract essential as something occurring in time; therefore, to intimate it, the poem turns to speech, so that the truth of the essential may come to pass in the very act and process of utterance. The poem is the assault on the unsayable essence.
Kornél Döbrentei is an ego-centred poet. Characteristically – though not exclusively – he writes about two themes whose every element is interconnected: his own fate and the fate of his homeland, which stand in a relationship of mutual conditionality. Fate appears as a monumental image combining extremes on the horizon of totality. The historical boundedness of one’s own life, its determinism resulting from external violence, the ill fate of the nation one feels as one’s own and is ready to identify with ethically, its imperfection when measured against moral expectations, and the mysticism of the Christian story of redemption all fall into a shared plane of meaning. The path toward articulation leads through paradoxes and vulnerability to extremes. The intense vertical movement – rising from the mud toward the sky – the interplay of grandeur and lightness, the hymnic and odaic elevation counterbalanced by bitter grotesquerie, the coexistence of splendour and crude materiality, of decay and dissolution within the poem all convey the impossibility of unity, completeness and harmony, the necessity of a “half-existence”. It is precisely against these limits that the poem rises up, seeking to overthrow unwelcome determinisms and, in the spirit of self-realisation, to create spaciousness and infinity through the outpouring of language. Against the smallness of life, the poem becomes the scene of great clashes and immense struggles: a created reality in which the existential drama of the hero and sufferer of the battle acquires dignity and meaning. Strong subjectivity and confessional tone, communal reckoning and self-scrutiny carried to the point of self-diminishment, calling to account – all these ultimately articulate the principle of hope in the tension between the sacred and the satanic as an abstract final explanation of existence, and in the moral imperative of unbreakability, of never yielding, in the search for a higher meaning above tragic earthly life.
From a wide-ranging treasury of motifs, the world of solitary existential struggle is organised into linguistic reality. Elements of everyday life, Christian faith, classical culture, ancient Hungarian myth and belief, numerous components of Hungarian history, natural elements, flora and fauna – from the microscopic to the organic humus – all appear as symbolically shaped existents in this poetry, typically as the projection of a Christian, nationally committed, civic cultural outlook. Recurring characteristic nouns and verbs include: heaven, Sun, sea, stones, blood, snow, light, sky, elemental beings, sailing away, rising upward, rain, scraped rose, opening womb, battle, sails, masts, flags; alongside uniquely crafted verb forms such as “máglyálló” (máglya: pyre, a verb tense) , “csordállunk” (csorda: herd, verb tense), “pokolodik” (pokol: hell, lit: “it’s becoming like hell”) – from which the extraordinary energies and suggestive force of expression draw nourishment, expanding all the way to anger, to impassioned contention. Familiar expressions from world literature are raised to the level of symbols. “Glistening gold” suggests elevation and solemnity; the fist signifies struggle and combat; the sword becomes a symbol of primordial strength and hope; precious stones and diamonds represent purity and nobility; the mother becomes the emblem of home, acceptance and care; flowers, plants and animals symbolise the elemental purity of existence.
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The time of life is, in this poetic world, fundamentally the time of expulsion. The reality beyond the homely, loving environment of childhood is a diminishing, limiting environment. Nostalgia flashes up – “once the Whole was yours, but today you no longer recognise it” (Búcsú a tengertől [lit:Farewell to the Sea]) – invoking the sea as an image of totality; yet the decisive experience is the general feeling that “decay breaks through everything” (A sár taktikus hősei [lit:The Tactical Heroes of Mud]). Heightened desire for life, the “sky-vault’s worth of thirst” (Harmincadik születésnapomra [lit:For My Thirtieth Birthday]) clashes with the realisation: “history takes everything from me” (Karácsony, 1956 [Christmas, 1956]). The image-circle of boy-sacrifice is linked to childhood and youth. It has a dual origin: on the one hand, it is a self-image; on the other, it alludes to the tragic loss in his own life – the death in infancy of the poet’s young son. “A rose above them a lantern of the blood-yard –: the smell of roasted human flesh torments our noses, / perhaps not vomiting, yet we consumed already / so many of our future heroic dead” – we read in a portrayal borrowed from Greek mythology, from the deed of Kronos. To rationalise suffering and render it comprehensible, he turns to classical explanation; likewise, the experiences of the past provide support for his own social marginalisation – the mark of “system-alien” placed upon him by dictatorial Hungary because of his origins. Yet instead of resignation to the necessity of sacrifice, he chooses defiance against predestination, rebellion. “Bearing struggle and breaking with gleaming defiance” he writes in his poem Válságos órán szemközt egy régi karddal (lit:In a Critical Hour Facing an Ancient Sword), affirming his resolve and his stubborn belief: “and I believe: my fate is not a historical half-shadow.” The meaning-range expands further through the Christian mystery of sonship. In Fekete advent (Black Advent), a poem processing the last days of József Antall, the possibility of a pure historical new beginning flashes up in the transmission of the Task: “every resurrection begins here with re-creation.” The Christian interpretation of sonship, the possibility of redemption brought through sacrifice, is made utterly acute by the desperate state of the homeland: “I see the coffins, / on high biers, the earth has lifted them up as if to cradles.” The stake of commitment is the struggle to win the chance of beginning anew.
“Existence grows bored with us while we obediently stand in line for our fate” (Mondatok síron innen s túl [lit:Sentences on This Side and Beyond the Grave]) – this is the fundamental stance that seeks the possibility of an “essence-chafing existence”, modelling patterns of behaviour. Among the existential models he presents, one is the fate of the “Jonahs of the modern age”, the state of being swallowed up wordlessly and hopelessly; the other is formulated in the poem Magyar Jób-sors (lit:Hungary’s Job-Fate). The addressed subject, “driven by constant attack”, is exposed to extremes, and his response is the compulsive clown-existence, the harlequin’s mask, “who, even as a ham in this vale-of-tears race of hope, still has power”. It is here that the possibility of the incorruptible border-fortress role is articulated, in its ambivalence of being both “self-willed” and “self-hating”, “always in dispute and wrath”, fixing the mode of conduct in the vocation of standing firm: “for he never steps aside out of sheer defiance – and for this, and because of this, a man is a man”. A fundamental trait of Döbrentei’s vision is that he incorporates the ugly, the deformed and the ridiculous even in the construction of images dealing with the most exalted subjects. This aspect of his outlook is shown excellently in the poem Amikor a szippantók megjöttek (lit:When the Tankers Arrived), written still in the 1980s, which – despite its title – may be regarded as an ars poetica–like, existence-summing piece. His view of humanity and the world is raw, brutally sober: “And / creation / farmed out on contract: there is no refuge, / man is a broken-down, filthy little workshop / where horror feels at home, / where death is being prepared.” The possibility of a multiply meaningful purification is, under such conditions, naturally “smelly” and “smudged”. Because of everyday ordeals and failures, in his works after the political transition the lyrical subject pours his complaint ever more often – dispensing with earlier winks and with even the slightest uncertain cheer – into bitter–grotesque confessions. He reports on “solemn decay” (A tó [lit:The Lake]), “infectious resurrection” (Celebrált idő [lit:Celebrated Time]), and on our gigantic dwarfishness (Don Quijóték temetője [lit:Cemetery of Don Quixotes]). “And still here, tormented by doubt: like a dung-worm to a manure-heap, am I equal to the task?” he asks in Istentelen színjáték (lit:Mundane Comedy), and as if to reinforce this painful concern, he presents the disillusionment of the collective self-image: “Remaining, crippled Hungarians, wild boars with prepared tusks” (Sorspannó [lit:Fate Tapestry]).
The best-known parts of Kornél Döbrentei’s oeuvre are undoubtedly his patriotic poems. The tradition that elevates national existential concerns into poetry – originating in the Age of Enlightenment and strengthened in Romanticism and continued by prominent twentieth-century predecessors such as Ady, Attila József, Gyula Illyés, László Nagy, Gáspár Nagy and Sándor Csoóri – lives on in our time most emphatically in his work. Following the thematic treatment of Ferenc Kölcsey, Dániel Berzsenyi and Mihály Vörösmarty as authoritative legacies, the state of the homeland, the moral–spiritual condition of the nation is a self-evident public matter, an issue with which engaging is both a “bounden right” and a “tormenting must”. The question tolerates no equivocation; its stakes are fatal, of dramatic importance: it is a matter of life and death. His inherited perspective is that of a tragic historical past threatening survival, while his fundamental experience is the national abandonment: “There is no smouldering accusation / in the flicker of the candle, / the great loneliness of a small country / shivers as it burrows into the flame” (Halottak napi vers [lit:All Souls’ Day Poem]). The past, full of tribulation and loss, is on the one hand the consequence of malign foreign intent: “but no, not then either, nor now, and who knows how long / they do not allow, they do not allow, / they ban the sky to the turul bird, / wing-clipped it stagnates in the mud, / a devilishly contrived machination: / with longer or shorter tether / they yank it back” (Rebellis türelem [lit:Rebellious Patience]); on the other hand, it is the consequence of the Hungarian nation’s own sins, impotence and weakness. The poet’s community-reckoning, community-calling-to-account poems form the backbone of his poetic output over the past decades. His presentation of national faults is nuanced from multiple angles. “Cowering incompetents, / we let ourselves be shut out of our own fate” (Ez is a Dunánál [lit:This Too at the Danube]); our lot is internal betrayal, self-destructive resignation, excessive meekness, gullibility and indifference. The inner accusation, the merciless self-examination, speaks in a harsh, sizzling tone: “there is no confrontation, no dismay, no guilt, / with such obstinacy, with such stupidity / we squander away the remaining one-third share of our country, / and when there is nowhere left to run, / like one who has done his job well, we flee away on St Michael’s horse” (Hóvirág, a tisztaság strázsavirága [lit:Snowdrop, the Sentry-Flower of Purity]). He warns of the historical recent past that casts its shadow over our daily lives, of the ambivalent nature of the political transition, in one of his best-known works, Átpingált március (lit:Repainted March): “Lord above, how many fickle cockades, / the old guard plays at national colouring.” The poet presents in his poems the various examples and modes of national loss of memory and self-abandonment. His gravest accusation is cowardice and self-surrender. The question cries out of the poetic text in the oratorical composition Szoboravatás (Unveiling the Statue), which memorialises the martyr Ilona Tóth: “A STATUE can be a fresh, pulsing memento only where the people breath soul into it as a creating God […] WAS IT WORTH IT FOR THEM?”
The readiness for battle demands constant self-spurring and the search for sustaining exemplars. Such exemplars may be national–historical symbols: the Crown, the Sceptre, the Globus Cruciger, the Holy Right, and the Turul; uncompromising steadfastness may be embodied by a statesman such as István Tisza, or by the ranks of the “tall-bearing ladies”: mothers, the women of Eger, the Ilona Zrínyis, Karády, Szeleczky, Tóth Ilona. A distinguished place in this chain of glory belongs to a component of personal life experience, the 1956 Revolution and War of Independence. “Vác, Márianosztra, Central Prison – little Hungarian freedom tourism” is the bitter depiction of the perspective of Hungarian heroism in the poem written in memory of Attila Gérecz, A Medveölő halála (lit:The Death of the Bear-Killer). Our forefathers are addressed, Prince Géza and Saint Stephen. In the example of István Széchenyi, he discerns that “fateful self-duel” which is characteristically emblematic of Kornél Döbrentei as well. In the suicide of “the greatest Hungarian”, the life-giving nature of death and sacrifice is also expressed. Yet an exemplary attitude may likewise be shown in the contemporary figure of László Tőkés: “the deadly meekness of endurance is waning, / the wall of silence must be torn down. // It is finished, it had to be said” (Elvégeztetett [lit:It Is Finished]). The hymnic supplication of Celebrált idő (lit:Celebrated Time) speaks for the reconciliation of the fathers, the Hungarian victims of the Second World War. The final trust of a fate held to the sword’s edge takes linguistic form in the longing image of homeliness: “I am homesick / drunkenly and sober-fearfully, breathing adroitly, staying alive / awkwardly, / I am homesick for a Hungary that never was – could have been” (Honvágy egy álom után [lit:Homesickness for a Dream]).
Finding a homeland on a religious–metaphysical plane is likewise a dominant theme in Döbrentei’s poetry. God – the “someone of mighty-silence” – arouses conflicting emotions in the poet. Acceptance, bowed-head submission and, at the same time, disputation, the ever-recurring urge to argue, collide within him. On the one hand, he adopts the Christian explanation of the world, accepting trials for the sake of overcoming sin and bringing about redemption. On the other hand, he rejects excessive humility, the uncritical acquiescence in higher decree, predestination, the existence of being “the mannequin of immortality”. In A Szent Margit lázadása (lit:The Rebellion of Saint Margaret), he formulates a question that is validly applicable to himself as well: “Why did you accept, why did you resign yourself to / the present time being merely the training ground of suffering?” For: “Without dignity down here, what is salvation up there worth?”
This is the conceptual situation of A Zsoltáros ultimátuma (lit:The Psalmist’s Ultimatum): “believe it, without me You too will be more orphaned, / and if knowing this through experience you truly know it, / then I shall ask Your forgiveness” – God needs the faith placed in Him, indeed, He may even speak through the poet, as he writes in the birthday greeting to Sándor Csoóri, A megkerülhetetlen élet (lit:The Inescapable Life): “through you the silent God becomes eloquent”. Two temporal planes are perceptibly distinct in these poems. Against historical time, the metaphysical dimension of meaning – despite defiance – contains the possibility that truths, values and explanations rendered uncertain in practical existence may regain their significance. To the perpetual doubt – “Does the flame of the Holy Spirit consume me, or the heat of damnation?” (Magyaroknak való [lit:For Hungarians]) – the demanded answer is the possibility of faith itself, wrestling and wavering.
Döbrentei Kornél chose the poem Tartsd meg a sziklát (lit:Hold Fast the Rock) as the title piece of his collected poems published in 2007. Creating the symbolic figure of a Hungarian Sisyphus is an act of self-definition. The life-programme of perpetual straining – as he writes elsewhere, a rising above the treadmill as a living space – is meant to represent dignity in the face of tragic predestination. “There has been enough of punishment already” – the poet declares through it. “Within you God dreams certainty” – this is the final hope of fate. Alongside seriousness and pathos, one must not forget the poet’s lyricism and humour. His sensitive, disarmingly pure images – “Let me take seven-league-steps of tales, life! / undo the quince-weight from my ankle” (Harmincadik születésnapomra [For My Thirtieth Birthday]); a locomotive stoked with diamonds; “The grape-juic starts awake from its own distances” (A kis Dionüszosz végnapjai [lit:The Last Days of Little Dionysus]) – attest to a fundamentally aestheticising poetic vision. The Vitézeknek való dévaj balladák (lit:Ribald Ballads Fit for Braves) – stepping beyond the well-bred pedantry that surrounds intimacy, “where is that foolish modesty now” – share their teachings on eroticism with light, risqué humour and delightful formal play. For Döbrentei Kornél intimacy itself is a life-model versified under the sign of the longing for wholeness, the bearer of the message of “flowering through tormenting delight” (Egy körtefa erogén zónáiról [lit:On the Erogenous Zones of a Pear Tree]). It contains the possibility of harmony with the divine plan: “the miracle is this: nothing need be done, / and joy permeates down to the last cell, / and two beings are a single magical realm / where the Creator’s existence is sensed. /To fit together is a divine gift” (Illeszkedő ballada [lit:Ballad of Fitting Together]).
Essays, public writings
“You must not be afraid” – this morally binding command, elevated to solemnity by its ceremoniousness and military crispness, was given to Döbrentei Kornél in childhood by his former officer grandfather. “An unwritten inner command” is how he describes the imperative to stand firm, one that his origins and family heritage “imposed” upon him. The example of his soldier forebears, the acceptance of homeland defence as vocation and life-programme, almost predestines him for this role. And the sense of being chosen is reinforced by the fact that after the second world conflagration the communist regime in Hungary set out to destroy the entire Hungarian Christian middle class – including the Döbrentei family. “I was born into a historical age and situation in which, apart from two or three years, I spent my life in a state of negation, always in the category of the tolerated. […] Everywhere and always: walls, barriers, prohibitions, dogmas and lies, the crippling of soul, mind and character – this was the stage granted to my youth.” It is from here that the spirit of csakazértis defiance originates: the personality asserted in spite of something or someone, which has become the characteristic trait of his intellectual, artistic, and public conduct.
If we use a metaphor to render more pictorially the attitudinal character that emerges in the oeuvre’s essays, writerly publicistic texts, and civic or politically themed commentaries – as reflected in the volumes A hadrafoghatóság ábrándja (lit:The Illusion of Deployability, Püski, 2000), Vajúdó feltámadás (lit:Labouring Resurrection, Püski, 2002), Helybengalopp (Gallop in Place, Püski, 2005) and Az igazság merész áhítása (lit:The Bold Longing for Truth, 2012) – then the word that suggests itself is duelling, combat. It is a man who takes up a verbal fight, one who seeks to build himself a cathedral out of “defiance in action”, and who claims that “one must challenge fate, otherwise no fate is given here”. As he explains in the introduction to his book The Illusion of Deployability, he does not strive for the “aggressive enforcement” of agreement; his manner of formulation is deliberately sharpened and professedly subjective.
According to Kornél Döbrentei, a struggle of life and death is underway, and our everyday present unfolds under the sign of this “war-like” condition. The symptoms of the precarious situation are human debasement, civilizational decay, “imitated” existence, wounded identity, the disintegration of moral principle and truth, and the mortal peril threatening the homeland and the Hungarian nation. As can be seen, the crisis he perceives is not confined to the nation: its horizons are universal. The resurgence of anthropological scepticism goes hand in hand with the experience of a general cultural emptying-out. Leafing through the author’s books, what we find is in fact the intimation – and the forced lived experience – of a universal existential crisis. The troubles of the community overlap with the personal fate: the writer feels in his own skin, and suffers through, every anti-human consequence of an era that is “labouring”, regarded as transitional. His existential condition is (moral) solitude.
The concern is magnified to a cosmic scale, as shown by the repeated invocation of the Bible and the expansion of phrasing and reference practices toward the spiritual-emotional dimension of religious vocation and sacrality. The stake is the ultimate question itself: the metaphysical meaning of human life. And the challenge is of almost Christ-like weight. “For the world is sinful”, “existence is absurd”, “humanity is exhausted, having polluted itself and its environment, human life has been degraded, rendered meaningless”. In this context, sin naturally does not mean merely the transgression of civilizational laws, but a philosophical concept that is closely linked to the realm of the sacred: a fate standing above our personal sphere of action, an eternal human inclination. It is an integral part of the divinely ordained world order, whose indispensable element is punishment. His reflections on the sacrifice of Jesus perceive not only triumphant redemption but also, at times, its failure – through the example of the good thief and the hardened one – and its hopelessness. In a world under judgment, irredeemability, that is, sin, is unavoidably present, whose ultimate form is self-betrayal, the damnation of “not taking on the responsibility of who you are”. It is evident that the command to cling to one’s identity also has a communal dimension. The expectation that one be accountable for usefulness, service, and moral commitment becomes self-evident. The writer reacts with particular sensitivity to this recognition in relation to Hungary. “Here you may do anything with impunity”, he notes, and extends the responsibility for complicity to all those who “undertake this homeland with only half a heart, half a soul, half a will, with alibi participation”. Because of the religiously grounded severity and maximalism of this expectation, the image of the devil emerges directly within the demonology of these texts: “the country must be reclaimed from satanic forces”, and likewise: “Hungary can be reclaimed from Satan – I believe it, I know it”.
The writer’s understanding of time is chain-like, showing continuous progression. Past, present, and future form a unified sequence and presuppose causal interconnectedness. In this unfolding, every participant is responsible for posterity as well. Within this relation “the dead are living examples; their moral existence does not cease, indeed it is intensified through the sacrifice of life” – he notes in remembrance of the victims of war. The historical, cultural, and familial past appears as characteristically value-laden, exerting an almost prescriptive, normative force. Because of the shared tradition, national and individual fate fuse together: the ancestors, too, belong to the community of Hungarians – with consequences for the present. At the same time, an elemental need arises to bring closure to a centuries-long historical legacy burdened with blows of fate and still exerting destructive influence, to create a tabula rasa. All this must occur in such a way that the norm of tradition remains alive and retains the enduring validity of its authority. Attachment to the past – to its examples and its moral standards – is the precondition for the fulfilment of one’s personal destiny in the present and in the future. In a single sentence: “He who remembers has a past, and he who has a past is dangerous, because he can learn.” And the reversal of this: “And where an entire people forgets, moral decay becomes unstoppable, and may be followed by physical annihilation, by extinction.”
The act of rendering justice is beyond question not only because it is tied to the sacred, but also because “there are situations in world history when there exists such a thing as absolute truth […] for a people”. The struggle with sacral implications – the confrontation of the good and the true with sin and falsehood – produces irreconcilable oppositions. In this constellation, compromise means the abandonment of truth, an act of betrayal. The claiming of exclusivities leads to the absolutisation of the moral horizon. Döbrentei Kornél’s moral idealism does not tolerate practical reconsideration or re-evaluation. This is why the opposition between courage and cowardice appears so sharply in his writings. His criticism is severe; he recognises no hypocritical herd mentality, no false sense of solidarity when he castigates the contemporary intelligentsia, accusing them of servility, faint-heartedness, weakness, harmful pseudo-neutrality and self-renunciation. He speaks of pretenders, of wolves in sheep’s clothing. His calling to account extends to the entire nation, asserting that it lives in “imitation-of-existence”, in a pathologically cowardly, submissive manner, and “produces poor human material”. It has lost its dignity, and practices its Hungarian identity furtively, “on the sly”. In contrast, what would be desirable is the proud assumption of one’s roots, love of the homeland, moral steadfastness in its defence, the preservation and cultivation of national dignity, “existing within the healthy force-field of self-identity”, and the maintenance of a stubborn rigor toward oneself. On a societal level, his ideal is the realisation of national self-determination, autonomous thought and action, the harmonious coincidence of private and public interest, and fidelity to the “great and profound system of traditions that constitutes Hungary”.
It can be said of his vision of the nation that it displays a hierarchical structure. He distinguishes between an abstract ideal image that relies on the authority of tradition as an ever-valid model, and the everyday empirical reality that diverges from it. In accordance with this division, this collective self-image is ideological in nature insofar as it elevates exemplary figures, ideals and models worthy of emulation, while at the same time it is conflict-laden and based on the principle of dissensus, since its moral demands and its relentless guarding of the “spiritual essence grounded in self-respect” do not tolerate compromise. The opposition between what is one’s own and what is foreign thus becomes the point of reference for assessing the existential environment and the conditions of Hungarian social and political life. His consciously assumed, self-identical image of Hungarian identity is morally and emotionally grounded; its characteristic feature is a cult of talent and heroism. He locates the secret of the Hungarians’ “miraculous” survival in heroic personalities who excelled in intelligence, vision, strength of character and human quality. He draws his examples primarily from literature. Poetry – he writes of Janus Pannonius, Zrínyi, Balassi, Csokonai, Berzsenyi, Vörösmarty, János Arany and Illyés – regarded its primary task as serving the survival of the Hungarian nation, strengthening self-respect, raising fundamental questions of destiny, and educating its audience towards responsibility and the willingness to make sacrifices. He calls Petőfi, Ady, Attila József and László Nagy “holy fools”, who in his view were “fanatics of purity, of purification”. In Weöres he emphasises spiritual sovereignty. He singles out Attila Gérecz, who “was a true poet”, a genius of character, because “HE GAVE HIS ENTIRE EXISTENCE as the gold standard of his words”. In his fate “the WORD became flesh”. In his figure he sees the unity of thought and action, of writing and life – just as in Petőfi’s. As an eternal model, he seeks in his predecessors the inseparability of intellectual quality and moral genius.
The martyrdom of 1956 becomes exalted. It serves as an unassailable point of reference and a foundational basis of comparison when measured against the present democracy, which appears hypocritical. It represents a firm ethical ground in contrast to the perpetual Hungarian divisiveness, deceit, and hypocrisy as characteristic symptoms of the age, and the prevalence of “lukewarm compromises.” Its legacy is both an eternal horizon and an ongoing task: “The nation and the ruling elite of any given era would have to pass through a great purifying fire in order to reach, to dare to reach the true essence of ’56, and thereby arrive at a belief in an independent, free country redeemed by its own blood.” The value system of the revolution reinforces a pronounced separation between moral integrity and political structure. For democracy is not a value “in itself” – though certainly an indispensable instrument for the publicist – if it loses its moral dignity, if “the firmness of ultimate matters” disappears, then “this small country will cease to be a homeland; it will become a no-man’s-land abandoned to the whim of predatory hordes hungry for plunder.”
The recent intensification of Hungary’s history of suffering and its consciousness of martyrdom, along with the sense of an approaching apocalypse of national existence, permeates the thought of Döbrentei Kornél. He already detects contradiction in the work of the state-founding Saint Stephen: that he had to create the preservation of the Hungarians against the Hungarians. In this historical paradox he sees the source of the destructive fraternal strife. Beyond internal discord as a national calamity, the coercion of external forces has likewise driven us into a difficult position. In his conviction, since the Treaty of Trianon our people have been fighting a continuous war of independence for survival, and that war continues today. “Even if in isolation, even if seemingly hopeless, it is waged by those who will not resign themselves to moral dispossession.”
The twentieth-century precursor of Döbrentei Kornél’s culture-critical attitude is László Németh. “[…] we must acknowledge the painful fact that we are in the minority, unable with full heart to fill the homeland” – writes today’s author in a moment of painful realisation. What we encounter here is a claim to the traditional Hungarian intellectual role that Németh himself represented with such far-reaching consequence: the attitude of one who undertakes the attempt to solve the national questions of destiny, who is “afflicted” with a sense of historical responsibility, and who bears the burden of communal service as a moral imperative. Yet this ideal can now be fulfilled only in a necessarily diminished and fragmentary form. Why? Döbrentei Kornél gives the answer: “as the ‘result’ of the past fifteen years, the controlling, defining, at times responsibility-awakening role of the educated intelligentsia – those committed to the nation even by virtue of their language, those who see through the tavern that passes for our age – has been reduced to nothing, or rather humiliatingly devalued, including their role as inspirers of new political ideas and approaches.” In an age of amorality, this morally motivated worldview has become untenable. Moreover, the influence of the humanities and, through them, of national culture has retreated from the sphere of public life.
Ultimately, Döbrentei Kornél’s writings address the spiritual and moral crisis of the Western world and the crisis of Hungarian identity. His work carries within it the legacy of Hungarian national romanticism: he sees individual, nation and humanity in their interconnectedness. He affirms the purposiveness of history, the moral determination of action, and the autonomy of national existence and culture. Trianon is, for him, a fatal fate, a divine calamity, “when the Holy Spirit abandoned the Hungarians.” His ideas are formulated on an ideal level, as wishes or demands, striving to revive the ethical heritage of an idealised historical past. The obstacles to direct influence, the hopelessness of shaping the future, push the thinker towards the creation of immediate impact: “This century and this fin-de-millénaire is not an age for dreamers. Crudely utilitarian, bleakly realist, bloodily disillusioned, it does not tolerate abstraction.” The essayistic mode recedes, and the writer’s note and publicistic style become dominant. The resulting style becomes entirely distinctive: poetic, full of pathos, or pointed, or expressive. Adjectives, intensifications, accumulations, metaphorical and metonymic constructions, rhetorical questions, classical maxims, literary quotations, and proliferating associative chains create the glittering verbal surface and ensure the impact, which must be forceful and immediate.
[2015]