From early childhood, he has lived for most of his life in two counties of north-eastern and eastern Hungary – Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén and Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg – regions exceptionally rich in historical, cultural, and artistic traditions. Alongside his parents and grandparents, his schools and later his reading, it was the heritage radiating from these places that shaped his intellectual credo. In Sátoraljaújhely, the primary school named after Tamás Esze, followed by the secondary grammar school bearing the name of Lajos Kossuth – whose predecessor institution had also educated Gyula Andrássy – and the Kuruc region, deeply marked by the trauma of Trianon: Újhely (Slovenské Nové Mesto), Patak, Széphalom; the legacies of Rákóczi and Kazinczy; and Monok, the birthplace of Kossuth, all transmitted to him ideals and patterns of conduct. Later, during his years in Szabolcs, similar vectors of vocation were conveyed by the grave of György Bessenyei in the Morgó Cemetery in Nyíregyháza; by the college whose façade bears Bessenyei’s name; and by Kölcsey, Móricz, Krúdy, Ratkó József; the spiritual inheritance of the Báthory family and Ádám Vay. And then there were the lecturers of the Hungarian departments at the Nyíregyháza College, especially the attention of Béla Katona; at the University of Debrecen, the nationally oriented intellectual stature of András Görömbei, István Bitskey, and László Imre; and later the friendships of Béla Márkus and Zoltán Bertha. And already from his secondary-school years onwards: the poetry of László Nagy.
His intellectual credo was formed primarily along these lines of force, placing national existence at its centre. These sources instilled in him the conviction that, even in the third millennium, above the destinies and cultures of individuals and families, the nation remains the strongest anthropological network capable of ensuring the most dignified life for the members of humanity – born as individuals into community – on earth. This deeper meaning of the nation was illuminated by Géza Páskándi as follows: “The nation is somehow (…) the most human-scale form of social existence … collective intimacy. (…) The nation is the final contour – a linguistic and cultural outline, a boundary of memory – that can still be grasped by the naked eye and clearly followed. (…) The nation is therefore the most ‘human-sized’. (…) a creative, constructive, positively law-creating will.” (The Hand of Your Legend Does Not Tremble). The innermost supports of the nation are its shared language, historical memory, and cultural tradition. The service of Hungarian culture – and of literature – is therefore simultaneously a national and an anthropological interest. The conscious articulation of the nation’s concerns and values is indispensable both in literature and in scholarship. It cannot be replaced either by global values or by alien systems of thought. The absence of such awareness leads simultaneously to the erosion of national consciousness and to the mutilation of universal culture.
He expressed this conviction in numerous writings, pointing out at the same time the embeddedness of works addressing national destiny within world literature. This is why he undertook responsibilities in institutions serving national culture, scholarship, art, and education. First in Nyíregyháza, as director-general organising faculties of humanities and arts; then for eight years as rector of the college; and likewise for eight years as president of the Kölcsey Társaság (Kölcsey Society). Subsequently, for three years he served in Budapest as head of a section of the NKA Szépirodalom Kollégium (National Cultural Fund of Hungary – College of Fiction); as editor-in-chief of Irodalmi Magazin; at Magyar Napló; and as literary director at the publishing house. In this way, he also found an intellectual home in the executive committee of the Magyar Írószövetség (Hungarian Writers’ Association), the board of trustees of the Nagy Gáspár Foundation, and the MMA Művészetelméleti Tagozat (Hungarian Academy of Arts – Section of Art Theory).
The legacy of the Rákóczi family, of Bessenyei, Kazinczy, Kölcsey, Kossuth, Andrássy, Móricz, Krúdy, and others still shines before him today. He partakes in their shared aims, which nourish and protect his personality – together with the anonymous Kuruc fighters, peasants, manual labourers, and ‘rank-and-file soldiers’ who shaped the nobler chapters of Hungarian history. Together with László Nagy, he professes the thought (from Lélegző elevenség [lit. Breathing Vitality]): “I have never felt the need to establish a relationship with the people. That relationship was established at my birth.”
Alongside the oeuvre of László Nagy, in recent years he has been increasingly engaged with the problem complex of the ‘Indian canon’ [referring to American Indians]. A fundamental component of both is a system of motifs or image-based thinking derived from folk or archaic zones of consciousness. Asked how he first encountered the phenomenon of ancient, archaic elements emerging in literary works, he responded: “From the moment I began to read, this sphere of ideas opened up before me, although at the time I could not yet know that these were ‘ancient, archaic elements’; that is, I could not separate them from other contents of the world. The awareness that such grand signs stand behind our culture only began to form later, at the age of eight or nine, when among the books of my Great Plain peasant grandparents – where I spent a significant part of my school holidays – alongside György Gracza’s deeply affecting book Talpra magyar! (lit. Rise, Hungarian!) about the 1848 War of Independence, I came across Sándor Szűcs’s volume A régi Sárrét világa (lit. The World of the Old Sárrét), published in 1942, filled with hitherto unknown faces, occupations, and stories emerging from folk consciousness. This was the first work of an ethnographic nature that I not only read, but whose air – the lives of marshmen, bird-catchers, fishermen; their ways of thinking; the memory of their material world; the deeds of Csuba the táltos [a figure in Hungarian mythology, a person with supernatural power similar to a shaman] and the dragon of Csökmő – I breathed in as though it were that of an unknown Hungarian continent.”
Beyond his reading, his sensitivity to such hidden treasures was further shaped by the fact that, even in his early childhood, while learning to speak, he heard and retained countless vivid linguistic and dialectal expressions, riddles, proverbs, and phraseological peculiarities from his maternal grandparents living in Szeghalom and from their human environment. His paternal grandfather, a railway worker in Nyíregyháza from Kótaj, originating from a ten-child landless labourer family, would – in their apartment opposite the railway station, still bearing the scars of wartime bombing – read aloud after his shifts from Illyés’s 77 magyar népmese (77 Hungarian Folk Tales) (published in 1953 with illustrations by Piroska Szántó) to the child who did not yet know his letters. Upon these experiences were later built, through schooling, innumerable elements from literature, cultural history, and music lessons, giving rise to an ever-stronger curiosity about the world of archaic humanity: how language and art emerged, how rituals came into being, how archaic myths were born, and what the intellectual and emotional nature of early humanity might have been. Yet the most decisive influence on the further direction of his intellectual life was marked by a single poem. In 1970, in the club library of the dormitory of the Kossuth Lajos Secondary Grammar School in Sátoraljaújhely – a building erected after the Mongol invasion – he came across a literary journal containing László Nagy’s poem Július, nagy láng (lit. July, Great Flame). For days its lines echoed in his mind; even as he walked along the main street of the border town beneath Kossuth’s balcony, they flared up within him. He borrowed all available volumes of László Nagy from the library, read them through, and began to live, as it were, within the halo of those poems. After Csokonai, Ady, and Attila József, László Nagy once again profoundly altered his way of seeing the world. His powerful imagery, moral substance, and artistic quality affected him in ways previously unknown from literature – though he did not yet clearly understand the structure and background realm of the metaphors. He began to read studies about him, first and foremost the outstanding writings of András Görömbei, which led him once again to folk poetry and archaic sources. Later, as a college and then university student, he systematically immersed himself in ethnographic and mythological theory, reading virtually everything available in Hungarian from Károly Marót through Vilmos Diószegi to Vilmos Voigt and others, and, motivated by these works, turned to universal myth research: Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, Lévi-Bruhl, Frazer, Northrop Frye, and especially Meletyinszkij. Gradually, the conceptual framework came together with which he could approach László Nagy in his first scholarly monograph, Nagy László mitologikus költői világa (The Mythological Poetic World of László Nagy) (1996), and subsequently, on this basis, other creators of the Hungarian ‘Bartók’ model, their works, and their points of contact with world literature.
The ‘pure source’ he began to examine is a concept born in the wake of Bartók, highlighting the power of authentic ancient folk music. He also came to realise, however, that signs originating in archaic culture may display different characteristics in different historical periods, may serve to express and comprehend varying existential situations, and may intermingle with other cultural elements. Works have also emerged that did not draw, or did not draw exclusively, from living folk culture directly, but rather from ethnographic books, yet nonetheless became significant creations. He further recognised that – since today, in Europe and in Hungarian-speaking regions as well, the human milieu that once preserved and developed this culture is dwindling or disappearing – it has become very difficult for artists to rely on direct folkloric inspiration. Yet the recorded materials remain: folk poetry, music, dance documentation, and other collections, including material artefacts, which offer an immense reservoir of signs for all branches of art, should the creator wish to distil into their work the signs of humanity’s anthropological beginnings or early folk memories. His fundamental idea is that Hungarian integration of archaic and folkloric elements fits into this universal endeavour. Within world literature, this branch of Hungarian literature – especially lyric poetry – may be related to works such as Federico García Lorca’s Cigányrománcok (Gypsy Ballads), Nicolás Guillén’s Son-motívumok (Son Motifs), Toni Morrison’s Salamon-ének (Song of Solomon), Gabriel García Márquez’s Száz év magány (One Hundred Years of Solitude) – and the works of numerous other Latin American writers – as well as to the oeuvre of Chingiz Aitmatov and, earlier, Sergei Yesenin. From modern visual art, certain works by Picasso and Gauguin may also be mentioned, as he summarised in his books, and numerous parallel examples can likewise be drawn from music. Thus, within this universal process, Jánosi Zoltán’s literary-historical work situates, from Hungarian-language literature of the Carpathian Basin, the oeuvres or specific layers of works by István Sinka, Áron Tamási, Sándor Weöres, László Nagy, Ferenc Juhász, Anna Kiss, József Tornai, József Ratkó, Ferenc Buda, László Kalász, Zoltán Szöllősi, and many others. The Hungarian ‘Bartók’ model, as he formulated in numerous places, is therefore a coherent part of world culture – not a peripheral tendency or stylistic trend, but a mode of creation, a conceptual–perceptual and expressive form that responds to the human questions of the age while fitting organically into universal literature.
In fact, the crucial question is not where the archaic or folkloric element comes from in a given creator’s work – whether from lived experience, from study and research, or from reading experiences. What matters is what social and human content it serves to illustrate, what messages and world-view trajectories it supports, and how it serves to express the historical, cognitive, and emotional situations, desires, and states of mind of a people or social stratum – or of the nation, or even of a single individual. In this sense – according to his research – following our nomadic pastoral culture that retreated into orality, it was first the Judaeo-Christian cultural and mythic sphere that provided the primary points of reference (even if bearing archaic traces); from humanism to classicism, and even beyond, Greek and Roman myth and historical analogies supplied parallels for literature; and then, from the Enlightenment to the present day (though with a vein already beginning with Péter Bornemisza and Bálint Balassi), the formulae of Hungarian – and Central European – textual and other forms of folklore. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into the twenty-first, as he has noted in several places, these gradually grew richer, first through the Finno-Ugric folk world of consciousness and the great archaic epics, and then through the text- and ritual-memories of distant ‘primitive’ peoples that inspired works and became incorporated into them. These latter entered the field of Hungarian literary consciousness primarily through literary translation. It is likewise only a secondary question whether a given writer incorporated the archaic element into their work instinctively, naturally, or consciously and deliberately.
It is not easy to draw clear boundaries here: in the oeuvres of García Lorca, Áron Tamási, István Sinka, and in part László Nagy, for example, the use of this archaic field is both intentional and natural, both voluntary and arising from within. All of them were born into living folk culture, among texts – songs, nursery rhymes, ballads – as well as rituals, customs, beliefs, and superstitions; and it was at once a natural self-expression and a conscious programme when they brought folkloric traits into their works – even amidst the broad European diffusion of the avant-garde, and indeed as part of it, as in Picasso’s painting and later developments. In the endeavours of the representatives of the Hungarian ‘Bartók’ model, however, the conscious element is already very strong: construction from more distant anthropological signs, the search for motifs and exemplars.
Zoltán Jánosi delivered his inaugural address to the Academy on the Hungarian 'Indian-centric' literature. Asked how he first encountered the Indian theme in his life, he gave the following answer in an interview: “When, as a first-grade pupil, we were learning to write in Nyíregyháza in 1960, my aunt gave me Az utolsó mohikán (The Last of the Mohicans), Cooper’s well-known work, as a Christmas present. I didn’t yet know every letter when I started – in practice I learned to read from it. Even today I remember the foreign personal and geographical names as I pronounced them then. Once I had fought my way through some twenty pages over the course of weeks, reading had taken hold, and curiosity about the Indian condition of fate and its exoticism was implanted in me as well. The Mohicans, of course, became our favourite tribe, and in our later childhood games the role of the enemy fell to the Iroquois.” Later, at the margins of his examination of the ‘Bartók’ model – as it were, along its ‘backwaters’ – he gradually came to see that there also exists a larger field of Indian–Hungarian literary correspondences. The striking work of several decisive authors, and the unavoidable, if scattered, observations by literary historians and critics directed towards them, inspired him to search beyond individual authors for a fuller motif-field and its complexity. In literary history it was, evidently, the presentation of larger-scale processes and systems that attracted him most. First the poems of Géza Szőcs, then those of Sándor Kányádi; later Imre Oravecz’s work Hopik könyve (Book of the Hopi); afterwards the poems of József Tornai and Anna Kiss; the essays of István Ferenczes; and finally the Vojvodina novels by Károly Dudás and Zoltán Varga helped him to perceive the system assembled from many small elements which by now appears large in arc, and which he, Zoltán Jánosi, understands as quasi-canonical. Among the theoretical works addressing them, he has so far studied above all the writings of Györgyi Pécsi, Éva Toldi, Ibolya Cs. Nagy, József Balázs Imre, László Gerold, and Attila Antal. Further motivations for the final arrangement were provided by the 2021 exhibition of the Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum (Petőfi Literary Museum), “Rézbőrű volt az alkony” – A magyar indiánozás nyomában (lit. “Dusk Was Redskinned” – In the Footsteps of the ‘Indian-centric’ Hungarians), and by its intellectual appendix, the volume published under the title Az utolsó indiánkönyv (lit. The Last Indian Book) – edited by Gábor Gyukics, Attila Jász, and Imre Wirth, with an afterword by Sándor András – containing a total of 79 pieces across more than 570 pages. Among them are notable works by Gabriella Nagy, László Márton, Tibor Szántó, László Darvasi, Ottó Fenyvesi, Márta Júlia Nagy, László Lázár Lövétei, Sándor Olivér Murányi, Roland Orcsik, Zita Murányi, László András, Gábor Vida, Ferenc Horkay-Hörcher, Attila Berka, Attila Tomaji, Tamás Jónás, Zoltán Poós, Tibor Zalán, and Ákos Győrffy. And even after this, numerous further volumes and texts entered his field of view, among them books or excerpts by Ferenc András Kovács, Sándor András, Attila Jász, and Szilárd Demeter, as well as the drama by Géza Bereményi and Krisztina Kovács, and other works. Zoltán Jánosi considers it noteworthy that Indian thematic material has appeared across all three major literary modes and a multitude of genres – from lyric poem to short story, novel, essay, and drama – and has also opened the door into Hungarian film.
Among the literary mediators of the Indian theme, he came into the closest relationship with János Xantus: the former artillery officer of 1848 who, in 1852, fled to the New World to escape reprisals, and later became a natural scientist. During the dozen years he spent there, working on railway construction, the former freedom fighter made two longer journeys into the regions of the Wild West, and after his encounters with Native Americans he was the first to identify – with a focus-like clarity and for centuries to come – the elemental parallel between Hungarian and Indian existence. He wrote of his experiences to his family, and these texts were also published in book form in 1858 under the title Xántus János levelei Éjszakamerikából (lit. János Xántus’s Letters from North America). In his research, Jánosi pointed out that later Dávid Somfai Kara analysed these journeys in greater detail, while Attila Jász, in his book XANTUSiana (XANTUSiana), framed a biography cast into lyric form.
The principal parallels identified by authors within and beyond Hungary between Hungarian and Indian existence were set out by Zoltán Jánosi as follows. Hungarian authors living in different eras and states found above all, in the Indian model, an anti-dictatorial ideal of freedom, harmony between humanity and nature, archaic artistic and conceptual messages, and moral content. Accordingly, the theme appeared – in foundational form already between the two world wars – through the works of Sándor Borvendég Deszkáss in youth literature; later in youth-educational and field-based ‘Indian-centric’ spiritual movements; later still, first through Iván Fónagy and then József Tornai, and in the present most powerfully through Gábor Gyukics, in Indian verse translations. Subsequently it entered lyric poetry attentive to cultural-anthropological messages, and numerous Hungarian-language analogies of displaced, threatened minority conditions of existence – including Jewish and Roma. Yet beyond all this, it is the Indian fate-metaphor of authors living beyond the borders that, in Jánosi’s view, forms the most emphatic and most elaborated part – the defining and distinctively Hungarian literary phenomenon – of this motif-field. This image, as he formulated it, speaks of nothing other than this: the historical analogy spanning two continents between a dwindling people, driven from its territories, threatened in its culture, faith, morality, identity-consciousness, and traditions, and the individuals living within that community. It fulfils in literature – as he has summed up in more than one place – what had already earlier become drama in fate; and what Xantus’s encounter with an Indian tribal chief testified to in these words: “When our interpreter introduced me and told the [Seminole Indian] chief that I had come here from beyond the great water, he asked: ‘why?’ – to which the interpreter replied: ‘because he was driven out of his country’. Then the chief took his pipe from his mouth and removed his moccasin from his right foot, and handed it to me as the greatest sign of friendship, saying: ‘You are truly mine (a good friend), for you too, just as we, were driven out of your country…, accept the tokens of my friendship…’”
On this basis, the most important Hungarian ‘Indian-centric’ works are identified primarily in letter-excerpts by János Xantus, in the shattering essays of István Ferenczes, in the poems of Géza Szőcs, Ferenc András Kovács, Anna Kiss, and Imre Oravecz, and in the novel by Zoltán Varga. He has many favourite quotations as well. Most recently he was gripped by László Lázár Lövétei’s poem Egy pénzérmére (lit. On a Coin), in which, in the United States, he silently rolls away – alone, at home in Székely Land – a well-known one-dollar coin, the so-called Sacagawea dollar, issued in 2000 in honour of Indigenous peoples and named after the Native American woman associated with helping the first settlers, “Somewhere on the Harghita / For instance in Őzeresztő / among the beech trees”, while also quoting Radnóti at the moment he sets the coin on its journey: “So that the happy posterity may see in what age I lived on this earth.” But one might also mention this verse from Éva Finta’s poem Sic fata volunt, dedicated to Sándor Kányádi: “within us the concoction drifts / the devised history / the poison-mixer’s torment / Indian song votyak chant / csángó laments existence.”
On the self-determination of Hungarians living beyond the borders he formulated, in comparison with reservations, that Native American tribal remnants in the United States have more than three hundred (approximately 310) reservations that relatively protect their rights, their territory, and the people living there, covering in total more than 225,410 square kilometres – that is, lands two and a half times larger than present-day Hungary. Across these territories, more than 550 tribes exercise ‘tribal sovereignty: “it is not the state or the federal government that has jurisdiction over the reservations.” By contrast, for Hungarians living beyond the borders – apart from the Magyar Autonóm Tartomány (Hungarian Autonomous Province) in Transylvania created between 1952 and 1960 under Soviet political pressure, and, as its legal successor, the Maros Magyar Autonóm Tartomány (Mureș–Hungarian Autonomous Province) that existed between 1960 and 1968 – there has never been an autonomous territory in the successor states, he concluded. The United States, moreover, granted citizenship to Native Americans from 1924. Their equality before the law and their rights are identical to those of any citizen. Of the so-called Beneš decrees constructed in Czechoslovakia, however, thirteen legal provisions that discriminated against German and Hungarian citizens as collectively guilty remain in force to this day. In the creation of connections, he therefore also regards as very important the Native American reflections directed from America towards this region, within dialogues in which the two worlds recognise one another. For example, Sándor Borvendég Deszkáss was elected an ‘honorary tribal chief’ and ‘Doctor of Indian philosophy’ by The Indian Association of America for his activity in raising awareness of the dramas and values of Indian existence.
Among the parallels of fate, he also noted that Wowoka, the Paiute shaman, launched his famous Ghost Dance movement between 1880 and 1890 in order to preserve the identity of his tribe, which had come into mortal danger – calling on Native Americans to the ritual dances of magic to fight for an Indian future-vision. A few details of his programme run as follows: “Let the Indians dance everywhere. Next spring, the Great Spirit will come and bring back our game. The dead will return and live again. (…) When the Great Spirit comes, the Indians will go into the mountains…. The whites will no longer be able to harm the Indians then. (…) Let every Indian dance, and good times will come. Those who do not dance and do not believe what I say will be small, one foot tall, and they will die like that. Some will become trees, and they will simply be thrown into the fire.” Beside these words – and beside many Hungarian literary works born of minority fate – one is most organically reminded of the lines by Sándor N. Szilágyi concerning Transylvanian dance movements: “The constantly endangered identity of a person with a focused national consciousness fills them with a sense of the tragic. (…) For instance, under normal circumstances one goes to the dance-house to be entertained. We do not only do that. We go there to survive.”
In recent years, the researcher has been gradually expanding the available material, gathering further data on Indian–Hungarian parallels, tracing accessible sources, and widening the range of studies he has written. He believes that, in today’s European and national history, neither the ideological string nor the force of parallelism has become obsolete in terms of the timeliness of articulating Indian inspirations and their Hungarian correspondences. In this context he also regards János Szentmártoni’s thought as a motto for his research. Returning from his North American journey – during which he also visited a reservation – the poet-writer set down as his principal lesson: “we commit one of the greatest mistakes in our lives when we join the mercenaries who are paid to hunt down the Indian living within us.”
[2024]