It is not easy to find the right vantage point from which a multifaceted oeuvre such as that of Gyula Kodolányi reveals its most authentic face. Traditionally, one might begin by calling him a poet – a title that, in Hungary, carries its own prestige. Gyula Kodolányi is unquestionably a poet, but it would be misguided to assume, by reflex, that poetry forms the core of his oeuvre, or to elevate his poetry above his other works. Doing so would deny precisely the complexity that is the defining feature of his creative personality.
Especially when we remember that every work is but a limited imprint of its creator, and that the creator, in turn, is only a fragment of the human being. Thus, one-word definitions are never fitting. To say “X.Y., poet,” or “writer,” or “editor, literary historian, Anglicist, university professor, environmentalist, public intellectual” – such a formula simply doesn’t work for Kodolányi. He works across multiple genres; and in today’s age of specialization, such a person is often called a polymath – but he is not one in the conventional sense, for he writes always about the same essential thing. Only, his artistic–intellectual subject reveals itself differently depending on context, medium, and form.
However complex, Kodolányi’s thought remains grounded in a single paradigm: he contemplates the same fundamental values, asking the same essential questions, yet always through the instruments and opportunities offered by his situation. He does not seek to define his exact place in the literary hierarchy – for him, this diversity, this fluidity, is the definition. In other words, it is the refusal of boundaries.
In the introduction to his long-awaited first collection of essays (Kentaur szárnyak – Centaur Wings, 1999), he writes from the perspective of an essayist silenced by an environment that deprived him of the freedom to speak: “My creative desire, following its own necessary detours, found itself in translation and in poetry.” (p. 6) This is not the confession of a born poet, but rather an acknowledgment of how one becomes a poet under external constraint. Yet in the same text, viewing his authorial position from an outsider’s perspective, he notes: “It does indeed matter what a Hungarian poet thinks about his own career, its deep currents, and its milestones.” (p. 12) That is, he did not entirely turn to verse by choice; rather, he found freedom in poetic abstraction when more direct forms of public reflection were suppressed – put simply, under censorship. The fact that a poet writes poems needs no explanation; it is natural, and so he speaks of himself as a poet, which in Hungarian literature almost inevitably goes hand in hand with literary translation. Considering the entire body of his work, and not ignoring quantitative proportion, the most accurate description would be: essayist, poet, editor, translator, public intellectual. The order of these terms is justified by the scope and intellectual weight of his essays – which, far beyond mere genre proportion, surpass his poetic output in extent and impact. At the same time, the intellectual nature of his poetry points back to his essayistic practice (while many of his essays, conversely, display a distinctly poetic vision). Much of his essay writing reflects a mode of thought marked by scholarly rigor – though not constrained by academic formalism – and an unrelenting intellectual precision that likewise characterizes his editorial and public work.
When analyzing Gyula Kodolányi’s literary and poetic career, one must recognize how deeply it was shaped by his public engagement – something far more than mere “background”. During the years of the Kádár regime, he was part of the intellectual resistance, taking an active role in smuggling manuscripts to the West, transmitting spiritual and cultural values, building contacts, and importing as well as generating ideas that diverged from official expectations. He created his own freedom by living and thinking as if he were in a free society.
At that time, opposition to the regime found expression primarily in the Danube environmental movement and in the dissemination of an ecological worldview – both of which he embraced with conviction. Owing to his family background, friendships, and Anglo-American orientation, he is a thinker grounded in conservative principles, respectful of and renewing national traditions, and – as a democrat – an opponent of the one-party state. In 1988 he became a founding member of the Party Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). Through his relationships with the Hungarian emigration and leading Western intellectuals, he served from 1990 as chief foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister József Antall, holding the rank of state secretary, and from 2000 to 2005 as an advisor to President Ferenc Mádl.
He has been a board member of the Hungarian Civic Cooperation Association; from 1991 to 2004 a member of the board of trustees of the Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary; vice-chair of the Hungária Television Public Foundation (Duna TV) from 1992 to 1996; and a member of its board from 1996 to 1997. Since 1992 he has been editor-in-chief of Magyar Szemle, the leading periodical of modern Hungarian conservative thought. From 1998 to 2002 he was editor-in-chief and artistic director of Színkép, a weekly cultural program on TV2. Since 2010 he has served as editor-in-chief of the Hungarian Review.
The Poet
A tenger és a szél szüntelen (The Sea and the Wind Are Ceaseless, 1981)
Like his oeuvre as a whole, his poetry fits only with difficulty into the system of clichés that shape the common image of Hungarian verse. This autonomous, self-contained poetic world seems to have been created almost as if it was of secondary importance to its author. Kodolányi did not choose from existing paradigms but created a new one – and one of its essential elements is his break with the traditional poetic role. What does this mean? That he does not set the poet against the citizen; he does not seek his place or role within the artist- and art-centered worldview of Romanticism and post-Romanticism. Poetry, art, and the arts in general are not separate worlds for him, but part of daily, cultivated existence – of an intellectual way of life. They are things without which life itself cannot be whole – yet if they exist only for themselves, they too become a form of renunciation, absence, or deficiency.
This poetic world cannot be derived directly from Hungarian literary tradition, though it fits discreetly within it. His aim is not to rupture the Hungarian poetic heritage, but to enrich it – in this sense, he is distinctly conservative. Yet at the same time he is strikingly modern, even one of the first postmodern voices in Hungary. His poetics was profoundly influenced by Anglo-American poetry, partly through its engagement with Eastern philosophies and cultures. This Anglo-Saxon influence, however, must be properly understood: it is not an imported technique, but expands perception. As he once said in an interview, he found it inconceivable to write within the traditional view that regarded stanza and rhyme as indispensable attributes of verse. Hence the revelation he found in Pilinszky’s austere, spare, stripped-down language and form – and in the way Pilinszky defined poetry through its ultimate content, even while knowing that such a model (like all poetic achievements brought to perfection) could not be continued.
Accordingly, Gyula Kodolányi published relatively few poems, and his first collection, The Sea and the Wind Are Ceaseless, appeared rather late, in 1981. The debut volume, published at a comparatively advanced age, was followed at roughly the usual pace for the period, though with a small peculiarity: among his subsequent books was one released as a university publication – more of a booklet than a volume – and another published in the United States. Thus, the “real” second collection, Hatalmak (Powers), came only in 1989. After that came a long period of silence: due to his turn toward public life, Kodolányi hardly had the time or independence of mind required to write poetry. Of course, we know that in art – and especially in lyric poetry – it is not the quantity but the quality of the work that matters. Kodolányi always wrote sparingly but demanded the highest standards of himself.
This was already evident in his debut collection. What is immediately striking is the maturity of his voice and the consciously crafted poetic language. The nearly forty-year-old “young” poet had the patience to wait; even within the constraints of socialist publishing, he could likely have found a way to bring his first book more quickly through the maze of cultural bureaucracy.
The final line of the first poem in his first book reads: “Thought, as wind is useless, when it stops.” How so? The poet who would later become unmistakably intellectual in his verse begins his career by declaring that thought is useless? Indeed – he does. The poem Kínai tájkép (Chinese Landscape) strikes a tone that is at once delicate and firm. It carries the message that European rationalism imposes severe limits on human thought, and it reveals a strong influence from Eastern philosophies (Zen, Tao), which he encountered not only through Hungarian masters such as János Kodolányi, Nándor Várkonyi, and Sándor Weöres, but especially through the great figures of Anglo-American poetry. This represents a conscious opposition to the norms of the party-sanctioned “official” poetry of the socialist state: an opening toward transcendence against the so-called realism of direct experience. It was a spiritual choice unlikely to attract many followers – just as he himself had no wish to follow anyone. No one, but not nothing: in fact, he consciously drew upon the teachings of great masters, often adopting their masks. Thus, his intellectual temperament is shaped not only by contemplative and meditative tendencies but also by a reflective disposition. This is evident from the significant number of homage-type poems in each of his collections and from the cycles in which he engages in lyric role-playing modelled on admired figures or presents paraphrases of their works. Belonging to this group are the Noah Webster Variations from his first book, as well as poems that show a strong affinity with William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley.
At the time of its publication, the collection’s conceptual novelty was particularly striking: it followed a very different path of modernity than the one characteristic of the Hungarian poetic perspective. Kodolányi’s “Westernness” and modernism did not follow the Rilkean or Apollinairean routes that defined Hungarian modernity. His modernism differs subtly but firmly from the efforts of contemporary poets who sought to renew the Hungarian poetic language by drawing on a distinctly national literary and historical heritage. His masters – Jékely, Ferenc Juhász, Illyés, István Vas, László Nagy, and even Pilinszky – despite their individual innovations, all continued the poetic tradition that emerged in the romantic period of Hungarian literature. Their themes and visions incorporated a particular kind of historicism, which, if nowhere else, can almost always be detected in their language.
Kodolányi, perhaps driven by the experience of being cut off for long periods from his native linguistic environment, sought to create a different kind of language. Not by breaking radically with the heritage of national poetry, but by consciously renewing his own poetic usage. The secret of Gyula Kodolányi’s originality as both poet and thinker lies in his ability to find the smallest common multiple between conservatism and modernity. He clings to every value ever created – and precisely because he needs them, he constantly and radically renews them. (In prose, perhaps only Miklós Mészöly’s endeavors can be compared to this experiment.)
Above all, he breaks with rhyme and with the entire tradition of aestheticized language. For Kodolányi, poetry means not so much the writing of poems as the cultivation of a poetic outlook: a poem is what it is because it records the experience of a poetic vision. Its ultimate “beauty” lies in its uniqueness and precision.
This is not a deconstruction of language itself, but of expectations; hence, it does not require him to turn against tradition. As Zsolt Mórocz writes: “Alongside his commitment to modernity, Gyula Kodolányi is driven by a far-reaching reverence for tradition and by the intention to harness the myth-making powers of the unconscious. To quote Hamvas on modernity: only he can truly be present whose roots reach back ten thousand years.” (http://www.kortarsonline.hu/regiweb/0404/morocz.htm; p. 3.)
In Kodolányi’s poetry, presence becomes emphatic only when confronted with memory (the past), but the reverse is equally true: memory (the past) finds its shape within presence. The juxtaposition of temporal planes is a defining feature of his thought – not only in his poetry but also in his essays. In both major spheres of his oeuvre, subjective experiences and intellectual reflection interact and reinforce each other. Personal time is transcended by the time of humanity and the cosmos – the result is a uniquely floating, poetic timelessness.
In two of the defining cycles of his first volume, Noah Webster – the classic lexicographer and creator of American English grammar – appears (and reappears later in subsequent poems). It is natural, professionally speaking, that Webster should be part of the worldview of Kodolányi, the Anglicist and Americanist, since Webster’s dictionary is an indispensable tool for serious study of the English language and for refined linguistic practice. But that alone does not make Webster a lyrical hero. The relationship with Webster can more aptly be seen as the subject of an intellectual poet who must clarify his own relationship to words and to the formation of concepts – a fundamental poetic and philosophical task. In the Noah Webster cycles, Kodolányi wrestles for and through his own poetics. The mask of Webster signifies both connection and separation: within it lies the gesture of elevating the everyday to the level of concept, as well as a critique of conceptualization itself. The reality of life, he suggests, cannot be grasped without sensitivity both to vast (one might say cosmic) perspectives and to the charm of minute (one might say weightless) particulars.
The experiences of Kodolányi’s years in America already appear in this volume. America became the decisive scene of his intellectual coming of age – a liberation from the “domestic discipline” of the Hungarian culture that had nurtured him. His effort to find his place within another culture affected him profoundly, yet he was intellectually prepared enough not to be swept away by the encounter and to meet this culture shock as a challenge he could master.
Through his direct and intense encounter with American poetry, he received more – and something quite different – than what the Kádár-era Hungary could have prepared him for. This was not only because of the political system but also due to the different orientation of Hungarian poetic culture. Beyond the influence of contemporary American poets he met personally, he was captivated by the tension between classical modernism and the emerging postmodern – an experience that cast his own culture in a new and unfamiliar light. He was compelled to articulate the experiences, values, and worldview he had accumulated throughout his life in a way that simultaneously redefined them. This is why Noah Webster and the websterian worldview he reimagined as a lyrical persona became so important to him – a world in which the Dictionary rises above itself: within it appears the cosmic order of words, becoming in its own way an Archimedean point. “The new edition of the Dictionary is finished at least. A whole. It believes in itself and does not forget.” (Le, Föl [Down, up]). Behind this mask, the poet makes peace with himself about what each word signifies within the system of his own language. By creating a new poetic dictionary through his verse, he retraces Webster’s path in reverse. The word and the poem, as ultimate abstractions, are universal – yet in their fragile individuality of expression, they return not only to the contingency of existence but also to its inexhaustible richness.
This duality never disappears: abstraction takes the place of direct experience, purified of the imprecision of shapeless impressions. By giving the experienced world a puritan, conceptual definition, Kodolányi points toward the development of a new poetic lexicon. This effort is at once a critique and an exaltation of language.
It is now clear that when Gyula Kodolányi opened his poetry in this direction, he made a final, career-defining decision. His relatively late debut volume already reveals a mature, coherent vision whose defining traits remain throughout his oeuvre. Yet this book also has an interpretation independent of Kodolányi’s personal poetic development. Had his intellectual explorations not been so wide-ranging – had he, like many other poets, insisted on being only an artist, only a poet – his first volume might well have marked, alongside Tandori’s Töredék Hamletnek (Fragment for Hamlet, 1968), the emergence of a new artistic orientation. (A new orientation demonstrating a radically different conception of art from the ideological or communally based model still fitting within the framework of the compulsory worldview – that poetry, accordingly, could be something entirely other than the romantic, pseudo-artistic, narcissistic quest for world redemption to which not only Hungarian audiences but many of its creators remained deeply attached.)
It must not be forgotten that the literary policy and the official conception of poetry of the period were unfavourable to modernism – and especially to the aesthetics of postmodernism. Nevertheless, even behind the scenes, the struggle for the renewal of artistic language was already well underway (which, under the particular conditions of the one-party state, also meant a critique of the system…). This struggle, which only became conceivable around the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, was effectively decided within a decade. True, the first victories were not achieved in literature, which was closely monitored for ideological reasons. But this was already the era of Kádárism looking westward, and György Aczél, who exercised absolute control over cultural policy, knew precisely what was needed to promote the regime’s popularity beyond the Iron Curtain. Hence the endorsement of the artistic avant-garde: this is how Kassák ended up in Paris. And there was a need for cinematic experimentation: thus Miklós Jancsó became a celebrated master worldwide. Some concessions were required at home as well – yet whenever artistic experiments reached beyond professional circles to a broader public, even the most tolerated visual art experiments provoked fierce official resistance. Still more so literary experimentation, for literature, by its very nature, involves readers more directly, and the authorities feared its influence far more. For that reason, literature was granted far less room to manoeuvre than the visual arts – but after a decade, nothing could be done to stop change.
The authorities were relatively lenient toward Gyula Kodolányi, perhaps considering him easily isolated. Indeed, he himself never sought to appear in the showcase of change or resistance. Nor did he ever end up there. Yet he was among the first whose poetry radically diverged from the official canon and, in aesthetic terms, offered an alternative even to the ideas of the so-called opposition. By this time, other writers had also emerged who thought differently about poetry than the all-powerful Party’s theorists expected them to. Despite its apparent strength, the one-party state’s ideological and aesthetic monopoly on canon formation was inherently fragile – its rigidity made it brittle. What cannot bend, breaks. Its concessions already foreshadowed the coming collapse.
The transformation within poetry was marked by the growing prominence of figures such as Ágnes Nemes Nagy and János Pilinszky from the older generation, not to mention Sándor Weöres, who, being incomprehensible to the logic of power, was considered harmless (it was precisely at this time that he published Tűzkút [The Fire Well] with the Paris-based Magyar Műhely – whose Western edition, unprecedentedly, preceded the domestic one). Among the younger generation were Ottó Orbán, Imre Oravecz, László Marsall, and Dezső Tandori (while Sándor Csoóri, rather than transforming poetry itself, sought to change public thinking).
Kodolányi’s beginnings were not avant-garde or neo-avant-garde but marked the emergence of a new kind of modernism. Today we know that his work was, in fact, distinctly – though not in the distorted local sense of the term – postmodern, and as such, one of the earliest examples of postmodernism in Hungarian publishing. What is more, he truly understood modernity, and, following Charles Olson, was among the first to recognize that “the postmodern” already existed. (No wonder, then, that he later became inconvenient for the cultural phalanx which would eventually identify itself as postmodern – and that they preferred, for reasons not merely political, to ignore him entirely…)
From the very beginning, an important feature of Kodolányi’s poetry was that he was not a par excellence or exclusively a poet. He was equally at home in the visual arts, theatre, and music – his close personal and artistic friendship with György Szabados, which lasted for decades, deeply inspired both his poetry and his thought. Even within poetry, he was present not only as a poet, but as a scholar, teacher, and translator – and not only as a Hungarian, but as a (Hungarian) cosmopolitan. Thus, he could see not only the bright face but also the reverse side of his own world.
His inspiration was intellectual in nature, because so was his temperament. He first had to understand what and how he wished to turn into verse. This explains why he waited for years before publishing his first book: for him, the poem was that form of consciousness which seeks to record itself with a sense of finality. From this perspective, it is natural that he should have turned toward Anglo-American poetry. The elegant reserve that forms the underlying tone of English poetry suited his personality perfectly. Into this cool detachment he transposed the soul’s inescapable tempests. “Inspiration surges in my head: lava burns away scientific order. A lexicographer must not fall in love,” he wrote in one of the Webster Diary poems Ihlet (Inspiration).
In other words, despite the evident irony of his outlook, deconstruction was not his bread and butter. It was enough for him to witness how reality called itself into question day after day – and in this respect, Kádár-era Hungary provided a particularly fitting terrain.
Compared to that, America represented certainty itself. The closing cycle of his first collection bears the title Új világ (New World) – for at least three reasons. The first is almost banal: the “New World” is America itself, and the poems record his experiences there. The second refers to the “new world” formed within poetic language – to his treatment of notebook-like sketches as finished poems. The third is more complex: the new world taking shape within him through his American experiences. The encounter with American poetry – deepened by meaningful personal meetings with contemporary poets – was a revelation. So too was his experience of nature: the vast, barely touched landscapes offered a cosmic encounter akin to what Bartók had felt in the hidden, pre-modern world of the Carpathian Basin during what he called the happiest period of his life. From this experience – which transformed a childlike, animistic perception of nature into conscious awareness – grew the ecological worldview that would later lead him to join the Danube Movement protesting the Bős–Nagymaros (Visegrád) dam system. And new, too, was everything he encountered within the milieu of the Hungarian émigré community in America. It was not that his family background had given him a fundamentally different sense of Hungarian history or identity, but that meeting living legends and members of the émigré cultural elite (such as András Hamza, Pál Jónás, Károly Nagy, and others) gave these ideas a profoundly personal resonance.
A létezés szakmában dolgozom (I work in the profession of existence, 1983)
His second collection, I Work in the Profession of Existence, was published by Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in 1983 – almost unnoticed. (Later, it also served as the opening of his “real” second book, the 1989 volume Hatalmak [Powers].) Even so, its publication provoked the disapproval of the authorities, though by then such disapproval carried only limited weight. Far more significant was the fact that the title quotation came from Géza Ottlik, who, as the honorary father of Hungarian postmodernism, was regarded as a universal authority and point of reference.
It is worth noting that Ottlik first gained this privileged status among the authors and readership of Új Symposion, a literary journal based in the southern region of the country. It was the neo-avant-garde writers associated with that circle who laid the foundations for the Hungarian Ottlik cult, making Iskola a határon (School at the Frontier) a cult novel. Kodolányi established lasting connections with this intellectual milieu and felt much affinity with the Symposion group (Ottó Tolnai, István Domonkos). Later, in the creation and staging of A Kormányzó halála (The Death of the Governor), the inspiration and creative collaboration of Josef Nagy were of exceptional importance.
At the time the poem was written, Ottlik had already become a symbolic hero of moral and spiritual resistance, of civil courage – a figure who, through School at the Frontier, offered the recipe for inner freedom to those living in a region suffering under the sickness of dictatorship. It may not be obvious today, but to invoke Ottlik’s name in those days was, de facto, to reject the regime. The authorities were well aware of this, dismissing those who gathered under the Ottlik slogan as “existentialists.” Needless to say, one did not have to be a true existentialist to earn that label – it was enough to lean toward a bourgeois worldview instead of conforming to official ideology. (The term “existentialist,” meant as a stigma, carried ideological rather than philosophical meaning; it functioned as part of a ritual of excommunication, much as “Trotskyist” once had. By that time, however, such labelling no longer entailed imprisonment or harsher punishment.)
The cycles of the volume reveal a certain distance between them – unsurprisingly, since they were written during a period of significant and accelerating change. The intellectual and poetic worldview behind them, however, is more unified than the poems themselves. What is new here is the emphasis on the haiku form and the presence of playfulness. The former is by no means an exotic vehicle for Eastern content: despite its form, it is deeply European, reflecting the gentle esotericism of Christian mysticism and Jung’s worldview. As a counterbalance, the personal, lyrical voice grows stronger, and the family gains a special place in the poems; they show a more intimate, emotional face.
His attraction to prose poetry also deepens, and he develops his own model in this field as well. First, he asks: “Rhyme-smiths: tinkerers of kettles?” and then: “Tinkerers of rhyme: smiths of kettles?” The rhetorical questions posed through variation cannot be answered, but Kodolányi adds a wry remark: “We are bewitched by the enchantment of exuberant music.” Later, however, he seems to reply: “In prose poetry the dance of sounds draws a more intricate shape: within it are the movements of feet and hands, the gaze of the eye, the clink of memory, and the thoughts that think without thought” (Traktátus a rímről [Treatise on Rhyme]). Thus he continues to master the form of the prose poem, which also becomes part of his new myth-making. He seeks freedom – in this sense as well – while noting that the laws of the prose poem are exceedingly strict, just as those of free verse. (A view that also reflects his general conception of freedom.)
Kodolányi is not a political poet, nor even a civic one, but as a homo politicus, he is a public man. Public affairs deeply concern him (as is natural in both his real and intellectual families), and he wishes to take part in shaping them: the defense of minority rights (such as forwarding Károly Király’s memorandum to the West), involvement in the Danube Circle, and intellectual friendships increasingly regarded as political associations (the circle around Mozgó Világ). How could one not be public-minded who senses how the regime is creaking and cracking? His poems, acting as sensitive seismographs, in hindsight clearly register the approach of tectonic upheaval. He dedicates poems to well-known system critics (Miklós Vásárhelyi, Júlia Levendel, and Béla Horgas) – some of whom would later diverge far from his own path. Reflecting on books in general, and surely on poetry books too, he sighs: “Precise intuitions in a scandalously functioning world” (Az olvasás metafizikája [The Metaphysics of Reading]). Or he formulates a somewhat torn allegory in which a certain mouse named Egeressy fights against the “cheese-moulders” – suggesting that he retains humour even as he moves from the tragedy of 1956 to the farce of the decaying regime. True, he reveals this talent not through gags, but through a trace of dry English irony. He offers an exact diagnosis: “Our faces are creased by unfinished dreams” (Insight). In this equation, on one side lies hopelessness – “for we believe neither in event nor in chance” – and on the other, hope: “yet we could be, we might be, a silvery splashing ascent, a liberating sword, a translucent marble, a perfect rose, a fulfilment absorbed in love, a personal death, and an old-fashioned resurrection” (Honkeresők polka [In the Inferno of Those Seeking a Homeland] – notably dedicated to Árpád Szabados).
All this does not mark a transformation of his poetry, but rather a premonition of the coming social change. His poem dedications reveal a search for alliances, an intent to build human and communal ties. The poet Kodolányi is not only an interpreter and beneficiary of the great myths – he is a myth-maker himself. Yet he knows that a one-man mythology is not truly mythology; myth is inconceivable without community. Hence, whether consciously or not, he expects the approaching transformation to offer an opportunity to extend his own mythic vision.
The summary work of this long period of waiting is the dramatic piece A Kormányzó halála (The Death of the Governor, 1989), which was also published in his poetry volumes. Given its hybrid nature – both traditional text and prose-poem – and the fact that Kodolányi wrote no other stage work, it is appropriate to discuss it here as a dramatic poem. Created in collaboration with György Szabados and József Nagy (Josef Nadj), the piece was never performed in Hungary, yet it enjoyed numerous stagings and significant critical success in Western Europe. It was deeply influenced by Japanese and Chinese theatrical traditions. Its stylized quality and puppet-like characters lift it out of the realm of straightforward political parables. The work was clearly inspired by the spectacle of Kádár’s – and other similarly senile, politically or physically decaying dictators’ – regimes collapsing. Like most of the literature born under dictatorship, it portrays tyranny and the absence of freedom in order to speak about freedom itself. Sometimes it does so indirectly, at other times with unmistakable references to Hungarian reality and everyday Kádárism: “a little wine, a little wheat, a little peace,” (“God give us wine, wheat and peace” being a Hungarian proverb) or in ironic echoes of the so-called consensus dictated by György Aczél’s cultural policy: “Oh how good for you, how good for you, / oh the insight, oh status quoooooo!”
One of the commands of this world uncannily coincides with Taoist wisdom – except that while in Taoism it conceals freedom, here it conceals the essence of tyranny: “Know – but do not act. Resist the intoxication of rolling the stone, lest you be forced to use your knowledge” – thus, the command of passivity. Present, too, is the Marx-derived motto used by György Lukács in his aesthetics, which saw art as a weapon of class struggle (“They know it not, but they do it,”), and also Camus’s Sisyphus. To know and not to act can signify either infinite helplessness or infinite wisdom. Kodolányi’s text remains open to both. The earlier version I cited points in the first direction, but the same monologue later turns elsewhere: “Know it, but do not do it. Show forth images, images, the fullness of imagination. Forget yourself, and conjure the whole world above the five senses and the mind’s winding, self-devouring serpent. Dream, live freely.”
If we read this text carefully, we see that it refers to more than a single extraordinary (world-historical) situation. There exists a tyrant more dangerous and powerful than the one who subjugates the state: human nature itself, with its selfishness and impermanence. To attain freedom, one must free oneself not only from external forces, but from one’s own darker impulses. In his personal struggle for freedom, Kodolányi attends to both. Earlier he dramatized this through the mask of Noah Webster (lest we become slaves to words and precision); as of late he does the same by writing Shakespeare Sonnets.
“Of my poems, only this cycle bears the expectations of 1989 – that receding, radiant historical moment – together with the still-living experience of dictatorship. These poems were helped into being by ‘commission,’ by occasion, yet I believe they are cut from the same cloth as my other poetic works,” he wrote in his commentary.
This social and communal calling then carried him far from poetry, preventing his return to it for years. The return was not easy: as a poet who had merely suspended his craft, he needed time to reenter his own world. The volume Január (January, 1997) – in which The Death of the Governor also appeared in book form for the first time – marks his reengagement with poetry, the relearning of his poetic vision. It represents both a poetic and a personal transition: the confidence of youth gives way to the tone of mature retrospection – “You see far, far away, as if suddenly you saw your own life from above” (Mondhatnád-e bizonyossággal? [Could You Say It with Certainty?]). The characteristically dominant intellectuality of his poems remains central, yet they have become more meditative and therefore more personal. This is no coincidence: this period also marks Kodolányi’s “ascent” as an essayist. As he himself noted, the semi-total censorship of the Kádár regime had suffocated the essayist in him for decades, allowing him to write only about Anglo-American poetry. After his interlude in public and political life, it was precisely the essay that led him back to literature – and thus, to poetry.
In January and later in Táncban a sötéttel (Dancing with the Dark), the emotional landscape underlying Kodolányi’s new poems differs markedly from that of his earlier books. The poet – seeking his own life and artistic path – appears here in a more direct, personal way, even though the experience of culture remains a defining layer of his poetry. An impressionistic, meditative current grows stronger, while the experience of nature – central to him since childhood and reinforced by his consciously ecological worldview – gains particular weight. His linguistic puritanism remains unchanged, yet his poetic voice flows more freely and no longer strives toward extreme abstraction.
His poetry now aligns closely with the world of those earlier contemporaries who, having absorbed diverse influences and undergone many intellectual adventures and personality-shaping experiences, reached maturity around their fiftieth year – when not only their art but their very being became increasingly complete. Perhaps sensing this, Kodolányi’s voice becomes steadily more personal. In this phase of his work, he integrates what he had learned from the masters of Anglo-American modernism into the Hungarian poetic tradition, creating an original poetic model.
“I was the unbridled colt, the shaggy cub. / Under a star, among wonders, / my step followed the lines of poets; // from their verse the real world was born, / and the inner radiance. I trusted them, // those demigods. I know now: / only the clod, the mud, can bear the crystal. / But what I learned from them: I still guard it.” (Weöres Sándor hála áldozatára [To the Thanksgiving of Sándor Weöres])
And who were these poets? The list itself is less important than the bond that connects him to the Hungarian poetic tradition. Still, we can sense the beckoning touch of certain spirits in the evolution of his verse. In his worldview, we hear the echo of the mature Kosztolányi, marveling at the beauty of the created world, as well as the spiritual kinship of Babits, Milán Füst, and István Vas. These poems do not rest on imagery or concrete, graspable experience; their true protagonist is the distinct poetic sensibility that reshapes its own inner story in words. Yet the sentences woven from these words are so elusive, speaking of everyday realities through so many layers of mediation, that they might almost be treated as musical motifs.
This is no accident: Kodolányi’s close artistic friendship with György Szabados deepened his engagement with music as a vehicle for conveying intellectual meaning. What matters in his poetry is not musicality in the traditional sense, but rather the intellectual rhythm that becomes the primary formative force of his poetic universe.
In this, he most closely resembles Lőrinc Szabó, who – especially in his poems of A huszonhatodik év (The Twenty-sixth Year) – explored the artistic possibilities born from the interplay of external and internal events, dissolving the gravest experiences of his life into mysterious, allusive lines. It is no coincidence that in 2006 Kodolányi commemorated the revolution with the timeless paraphrase of Valami (Something).
Kodolányi’s change in outlook is marked by a poetic shift that, after the previously dominant free verse, prose poem, and occasional haiku, led him toward the most classical of forms – the sonnet – which he then made his own permanently. Later, the sonnet form took on even greater significance (though this does not mean that Kodolányi’s “traditional” prose poems disappeared). The modern sonnet, by its very form, refers back to Petrarch – the poet who first brought poetry into the public sphere and established the autonomy of the poet, only for his perfected form to become, over centuries, a vessel for ever-changing meanings. Against this background, the sonnet becomes an artistic mask, a structure behind which the poet’s creative force can take shelter. Are there other masks as well? Charles Olson, Plotinus, and later, almost as a sole guiding spirit, Shakespeare? This only underscores the fact that today’s culture is unified not merely horizontally, across space, but vertically – through time.
Over the decades since the beginning of his career, Kodolányi’s poetry has changed little in essence, yet the environment surrounding his verse has been radically transformed. It is not only that poetry’s role in society has diminished, nor merely that the circle of poetry readers has shrunk; what remains has itself changed in nature. At the outset of his career, what made Kodolányi a curiosity was his rejection of “literarism” – that is, a break with the musicality of language, rhyme, and imagery, and with the continuation (albeit with a reform) of the Romantic tradition. His abstraction and linguistic puritanism were acts of rebellion. Yet this tone in Kodolányi’s poetry did not arise from a wish to provoke a formal revolution. It stemmed from his intellect, his outlook, and his temperament: as a university lecturer, he had studied the evolution of poetic modernity in depth, yet in general he approached form only through the lens of precision in expression.
This did not change with the fact that the very form he had pioneered soon found remarkable success in Hungarian poetry. The style, with its apparent simplicity and austerity, may seem easy to emulate – yet its real worth lies in its profound intellectuality, its transcendent sensitivity, and its openness. (Few of his successors, however, could claim to share these qualities.)
Kodolányi has never been a stranger to formal play and experimentation: his evolving perception of the world has continually driven him to seek new solutions. As we have seen, he has always been drawn to classical masks – not merely for a few cycles, as in the days of Noah Webster, but for entire volumes. In Kodolányi’s second poetic flowering, the Shakespearean sonnet became a decisive force. Among his artistic forebears, the Hungarian tradition of Shakespearean reverence occupies a central place. Petőfi once wrote that the author of Hamlet is “himself half of creation” – a statement that still distills the Hungarian experience of Shakespeare. For the triumvirate of Vörösmarty, Arany, and Petőfi, the founders of Hungary’s literary reform era, Shakespeare was not only required reading but also an object of continual interpretation. This reverence extended to his sonnets: in an age already inclined toward the form, it was natural to turn to them.
But there is more. Each generation rediscovers Shakespeare anew, and it is no accident that countless readers cite him as a spiritual and intellectual source equal to the Bible. Just as Gospel verses have been interpreted for millennia (indeed, the term “hermeneutics,” later to flourish in Hungarian postmodernism, originally meant biblical exegesis), and just as the Gospels still underlie every sermon, so too do Shakespeare’s texts continually inspire new readings, new ideas, and new imaginings. Even a single line, chosen at random, can unleash a cascade of meanings – streams of thought as inexhaustible as Monet’s shifting visions of Rouen Cathedral.
Járj merre tetszik (Walk Where You Will, 2012)
The poems in Walk Where You Will (2012) evolve from Shakespearean paraphrases into a great and original body of poetry. This volume also proves that Kodolányi, who in the meantime had become best known for his essays, has remained a poet at heart. And it proves something else as well: that the intellectual depth gained through essay writing has expanded his poetic possibilities, creating a uniquely powerful model of meditative, intellectual poetry. (That verse and essay can be organically interrelated is shown by his essay Semmi zaj – Egy Petőfi-mondat [No Noise – A Petőfi Sentence], in which he analyses several of Petőfi’s poems. It is worth quoting, since it is particularly revealing for our subject: “‘Is this your daughter, Gábor?’ – so begins the poem Egressy Etelka. Yet it is entirely literary: ‘Shakespeare’s imagination created this girl in one happy moment.’ How effortlessly he moves from a domestic address to the world of the essay, then back again: ‘Tell your daughter not to look at me!’”)
It is striking – or perhaps not at all – that Shakespeare’s name should appear precisely when Kodolányi cites an example of the interpenetration of poetry and essay. For Shakespeare’s sonnets exemplify the countless ways a poem can be born from an intellectual impulse. Despite their structural constraints, the sonnets are open both in form and spirit – the perfect vessel for Kodolányi’s synthesis of thought and vision. Behind the mask of Shakespeare gleam the lights of both contemporary and classical modernity, the Hungarian poetic tradition, the cosmic openness of folk culture, and the thought of the great figures of universal philosophy – including the influences of Eastern traditions. Thus, the Shakespearean text that serves as his point of departure meets its Hungarian interpretation: “To give yourself away keeps yourself still. / Add át magad, s magadat megőrzöd” – recalling the Gospel passage: “Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will find it” (Magadat megőrzöd[Keeps Yourself Still]), as we read in Mark. And if we look carefully at the sonnets, we can even discern haiku hidden within them: “my body blends with clay, / my soul carries away its form” (Ne gyászolj már [Do not mourn any more]). Or we may read them as Taoist admonitions: “For each detail is part of the whole; / give thanks to the whole, and forget / the hand that wrote it” (Emlékezz [Remember]). Originality, then, does not depend on where a work begins, but on where it arrives. Shakespeare himself, having transformed so many borrowed themes, proved this beyond doubt.
Do these poems draw merely from an experience of erudition? By no means. The Shakespeare Sonnets are not about the immortal playwright’s creations, but about Kodolányi himself – his cosmology, his sensitivity, his intellect. Their roots may lie in reading, but they grow through creative interpretation. Out of his encounters with Shakespeare’s sonnets emerge autonomous works of art. It may sound surprising, yet it is so: this conscious and deliberate embrace of external inspiration has yielded Kodolányi’s boldest and most original volume – the pinnacle of his poetic career. Its exceptional intellectual depth, and the juxtaposition of English expressions within Hungarian sonnet lines – both intimate and estranging – are impossible to ignore. The effect is akin to the freedom of a great performer’s improvised cadenzas within a classical concerto – gestures that, in secret, give birth to entirely new works.
Kodolányi, however, does not stop at literary inspiration. A striking example of cross-genre dialogue was the exhibition in which his poems were presented alongside leather collages by Erzsébet Katona Szabó. (Even when displayed among visual artworks, the very idea of exhibiting poems – not as picture-poems, but as visual experiences – was in itself a brilliant and daring concept.)
The exhibition was later turned into a book, in which the original calligraphic rendering of the Shakespeare text appears alongside Kodolányi’s contemporary version and his reflections. The archaic presentation of the poems creates a unique perspective: when we look at cuneiform tablets or the enchanting order of Eastern script characters, the visual experience becomes detached from the notion that the visible text must carry decipherable meaning. It is therefore no great wonder that we discover a visual message within a system of signs that communicates intelligible content to us, when the classical text – and its translation, reinterpretation, commentary, and reimagining – appears through multiple layers of mediation, framed in quotation marks, as a kind of painted tableau.
This eclecticism and peculiar simultaneity of genres and forms brings about an expansion of meaning. Katona Szabó’s sense of wonder, her use of natural materials, her restrained and harmonious colour palette, and her subtle solemnity all complement Kodolányi’s intellect, and seem above all to arrest time itself. The two artists approach the viewer’s consciousness from different directions, leaving no doubt that these works demand exceptional concentration – a willingness on the part of the reader-viewer to offer a fragment of their own life to the Spirit. For one of the constant features of Kodolányi’s poetry is that it requires extraordinary attentiveness from its reader.
The essayist
The natural unfolding of Kodolányi’s literary and poetic career was interrupted by the historical challenge of the regime change. Yet a life’s work does not consist solely of what are conventionally called “works”. It often develops like an underground stream, shaped by other organic processes – not only measurable by the number of written pages, but also by the enrichment of personality. Years without publications or new volumes can sometimes contribute more to later works than the kind of growth that can be quantified by titles, page counts, or catalogue entries.
This was precisely the case with Kodolányi. His public role and his activities within the Hungarian opposition – minority rights advocacy, participation in the Danube Movement, efforts to inform Western Hungarians and intellectuals abroad about Hungarian realities, and the building of bridges between émigré and domestic intellectual circles – all took on concrete form after the fall of communism, when he became József Antall’s chief foreign policy advisor. In the intellectual civil war of the 1990s, this open political commitment marked him indelibly. Entering the political sphere in an environment divided by party loyalties – where ideological allegiances soon became the basis for moral and intellectual judgement – had its consequences. To his friends from the struggles for modernism, he became persona non grata, as he was now associated with a political camp they had demonized.
Thus, Kodolányi found himself excluded from the postmodern networks of interest that had gained dominance in Hungary’s cultural sphere, and from the literary canon they shaped – one to which he had little desire to belong anyway. His political work further removed him from an already fragmenting literary scene. This exclusion prevented him for years from returning fully to his literary pursuits, depriving him of the freedom to focus solely on intellectual creation. Such an external and mental environment was fundamentally ill-suited to his poetry, and it was therefore almost inevitable that his path back to literature would lead through the essay form.
He did not continue where he had left off. The spirit of the age had also changed considerably: literature, in whatever form it was conceived, had lost much of its influence. His essays were not born from the self-propelling dynamics of literature but from the challenges of everyday life, from reflections on the ordinary – yet it was literature that provided him with both the vision and the language to articulate them. Many essayists naturally build upon poetic foundations, even those who do not write poems. The essay is the genre of lived experience; its essence lies in feeling, in the contents of consciousness that take shape in the subconscious, before rationality. These usually appear in poetry. If we say that reason plays an exceptionally important role in Kodolányi’s poetry, we must add that his essays often have their roots in his poetic way of seeing. The poems of Kodolányi the essayist are built upon the pillars of intellect, even when they take their final form under the inspiration of a given moment, while his essays often grow out of moods, emotions, and “poetic” experiences.
Thus, in his oeuvre, his studies, essays, and even his public engagements – including his editorial and curatorial work – form an organic whole. Regarding the latter, it must be emphasized that in his case the mediation of value is not merely as important as the creation of value; it is itself an act of creation.
This way of thinking did not evolve before a broad public. Its genesis is scarcely traceable in published works, for it unfolded during the thickest greyness of the Kádár era. The expectations placed upon literature at the time, and the cultural policy as such, practically excluded the possibility that this intellectual development could appear in artistic form. The “soft dictatorship” did not assign meaningful tasks to its intelligentsia, and thus, despite its many dark sides, it inadvertently provided one of the most essential conditions for self-cultivation: time. The significance of this would become apparent later, at the great turning point of the regime change. It was this that made it possible for a remarkably well-prepared intellectual group to prove capable of governing almost without prior political experience, overcoming the limitations born of inexperience and refuting the accusations of the former technocrats of power – who, in terms of ability and knowledge, were vastly inferior to them. The new circle of those exercising power initiated the transformation process with far greater effectiveness and vision – something that became truly evident only after 1994, following the return of the old “elite.”
Kodolányi’s political engagement was a characteristic example of how intellectuals who were committed to and invested in the process of democratic transformation placed their knowledge and abilities at the service of the regime change. His intention was not to assume a party-political role, but rather an intellectual one. Thus, in 1990, he became Prime Minister József Antall’s chief foreign policy adviser, with the rank of state secretary. Naturally, he had never prepared for such a position – it was not a bureaucratic or administrative role, but one that, in both spirit and substance, corresponded to his intellectual stature and moral integrity. In this sense, those four years did not represent an interruption, but a distinctive chapter in his creative and intellectual life.
His linguistic proficiency, his deep familiarity with the culture and mentality of the Anglo-Saxon world, and his professional and personal network – including ties, through Gyula Illyés, to the French and émigré intellectual elite – promised significant help in fostering international understanding of Hungary’s transformation, while also providing the Hungarian decision-makers with invaluable intellectual insight. Unlike the formal encounters typical of traditional diplomacy, these connections often took the form of genuine intellectual friendships.
In other words, what temporarily assumed a political form had, in reality, a lasting and formative influence on Gyula Kodolányi’s thinking and on the direction of his intellectual path.
This path was deeply embedded in the twentieth-century history of the Hungarian middle class, and it was given a distinctive colour by the literature of the era. Kodolányi often stated that his uncle, János Kodolányi, played a decisive role in his becoming both a writer and an intellectually mature man – he regarded him as a paternal mentor.
According to the stereotypes of literary history, János Kodolányi is usually regarded as a “folk writer.” This indelible label attached itself to his name because of works such as the Ormánság stories, Földindulás (Earthquake), his treatment of the issue of the one-child system (egyke), and his opposition to Hungary’s large-estate system – a stance that in some respects seemed close to that of the Communists. At other times, however, he was mentioned in the same breath as Hungarian fascists. In his post-1945 persecution, his being associated with both extremes likely played a role. Yet the novelistic world of János Kodolányi’s later (indeed, his “mature”) period moved within an entirely different set of coordinates. His interest in myth and metaphysical openness can be linked to a Bartókian understanding of “folk” culture – which is not to be confused with the often-invoked but ill-defined “Bartók model” – and to the népi (folk-oriented) literary movement itself. Assessments of János Kodolányi tend to place disproportionate emphasis on his pre-war period, while his later creative phase, which constitutes the other half of his oeuvre, has yet to receive due attention. Yet beyond his earlier, strongly social engagement, it was precisely his metaphysical openness that most deeply characterized him. For the young Gyula Kodolányi, coming of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was the message of this later period that proved most significant – above all, the conviction that the limitations of everyday life can only be transcended by turning upward.
In an interview, Gyula Kodolányi explained that it was this longing for transcendence that led him toward literature. For this reason (relying also on his uncle’s encouragement), he abandoned his studies at the Technical University – in keeping with family tradition, he had been studying electrical engineering – to pursue a degree in the humanities. Yet the official humanities curriculum of the 1960s could hardly provide answers to the questions forming within him, especially not within the Hungarian literature department, which represented the state-imposed canon. One must remember that this was the period dominated by the aesthetic doctrines of Zhdanov and, at times, the partially disavowed György Lukács, under whose influence literature was regarded as both an expression and an instrument of class struggle. Accordingly, realism – that is, socialist realism – stood at the center of its aesthetics. This outlook held a privileged place in literary education, though not everywhere. While it dominated Hungarian literary studies, it did not in the field of English language and literature. Thus, his decision to switch majors (from Hungarian to English) opened the door to an entirely new direction.
Within the Hungarian literary heritage, there has been ample precedent for the exploration of German, French, and Italian literary influences. Far less, however, has been said about English influence – though it, too, is indispensable. The birth of the Hungarian novel, for instance, shows clear traces of English models in the works of Eötvös and Kemény, while the Shakespeare cult that swept through the founders of Romantic literature in Hungary acted almost like an epidemic. Among the poets of Nyugat – especially in the case of Babits – the English experience is equally present, and the generation of Hungarian essayists was also shaped under Anglo-Saxon influence. American influence, however, after Whitman and Poe, faded significantly and could only be said to have survived in fragmentary form.
Gyula Kodolányi had the rare opportunity to immerse himself directly in the Anglo-Saxon world. His turn in this direction was exceptional, even though he was not entirely alone in it. What was granted to few was granted to him – the chance not only to become acquainted with contemporary American poetry through books and journals, but also, by living in the United States several times and for extended periods, to experience another culture from within.
Just as Gyula Illyés truly discovered Hungary through France and reshaped his sense of Hungarian identity, so Gyula Kodolányi became a truly Hungarian poet through America. It should be added that his time in the United States was a revelation for him in more than one respect. He became acquainted with the finest members of the Hungarian émigré community, and through them his vision of history – already radically different from the expectations and propaganda of the dictatorship – was deepened and reinforced, while he also gained access to information that could not have been obtained at home. His encounters and conversations with key figures of national resistance to German and Soviet influence, with former prisoners of Recsk, and with participants of the 1956 revolution, provided him with a historical and political narrative that later informed his activities in the Hungarian opposition, in minority rights advocacy, in the ecological resistance movement, and, eventually, in his advisory role alongside József Antall.
However, when we consider his later public and political engagement, it must be understood that none of this stemmed from political ambition or a sense of mission – not even in the most idealized sense of those terms. Kodolányi’s involvement in public life was devoid of personal ambition and any interest in power; he had no connection to politics in its everyday, party-political meaning. His motivations were entirely different. One factor was intellectuality itself – a kind of spiritual and intellectual exploration, a quest for truth that found its form in public action but remained poetic and literary in essence. The other was more personal: the acceptance of moral responsibility arising from the recognition of his exceptional social position.
A writer’s family background and kinship ties are not necessarily the most relevant facts in understanding their creative path. In the case of Gyula Kodolányi, however, they must be mentioned, since as a relative of two outstanding figures from the earlier generation of Hungarian writers, he had to find his own path by breaking free from their shadow. Without his uncle’s intercession, it would have been unimaginable for him to change universities in the 1960s, and as the son-in-law of Gyula Illyés, he too benefited from that peculiar kind of “extraterritoriality” and relative protection that his father-in-law’s intellectual authority and the regime’s bad conscience together created. No lesser gift was his participation in a wide-ranging intellectual network connected to the international cultural elite – something that, because of the party-state’s isolation and the prevailing atmosphere of distrust, was entirely inaccessible and impossible to build for most of his contemporaries. Yet Kodolányi never abused this exceptional position; on the contrary, he accepted the greater responsibility that came with greater opportunity. Traces of this attitude can be found throughout his essays. The advantages offered by a more open world he shared in his writings with those less fortunate, while his broader perspective and wider intellectual horizon could serve as inspiration to others. He never exploited the career opportunities his circumstances might have afforded, nor the forums of publicity that were more readily available to him than to others. He was never a prolific author, and even by the standards of an era when the term “young poet” – used as a tool of ideological control – was stretched to cover an unusually long period, he began publishing his works relatively late. As a poet, he was convinced from the outset that the dominant literary models of his time were unsuited to express his own worldview. The interpretation of existence and the poetic voice most closely aligned with his intellectual temperament and aesthetic sensibility he found in the poetry of János Pilinszky, though he was well aware that he could not follow in his footsteps. He needed to find something different – something that would truly be his own.
He did not have an easy task at the beginning, since at first he thought only in terms of poetry. In his early creative period, he did not yet write essays, but he was already translating his favorite Anglo-Saxon poets and writing introductory studies about them – texts that foreshadowed his later essayistic outlook. The poets who were especially important to him radiated an exceptional intellectual intensity; their poetry appealed not to the senses but to the intellect.
Meanwhile, the leading figures of Hungarian poetry at the time – Juhász, László Nagy, Pilinszky, Illyés, István Vas, Weöres, and others – were creating within the framework of the classical modernist tradition in the line of T. S. Eliot, adapting it to the genius loci, continuing the ancient, magical-sensual heritage of poetry or its communal mission. Kodolányi’s debut beside them was seen as a generational event, foreshadowing the later “paradigm shift,” and it attracted serious critical attention. This attention was directed not only toward the formal world and radical novelty of his poetry but also toward its intellectual resistance – a defiance of cultural-political expectations that conveyed a message beyond aesthetic meaning. If the regime believed it should fear every uncontrolled metaphor, then let it fear them – the poet was thus explicitly encouraged to fight the system through his metaphors.
This poetic practice, however, covered only a part of Kodolányi’s intellect. It was important for him to be present in intellectual life – in the uncensored sphere of the spoken word and deep conversations. The public arena offered no real space for genuine criticism, which posed a serious obstacle to the self-organisation of his generation. In a sense, Kodolányi did not lack criticism (beyond the natural desire for attention and recognition shared by all creative individuals): for him, quality mattered more than quantity, and outstanding masters and peers (Cs. Szabó, Jékely, Péter Balassa) found him worthy of both their recognition and friendship. Verbalism and informal canon formation continued to function even under the most vigilant state control of culture. In Kodolányi’s view, the recognition due to the translator and cultural mediator rose alongside the attention given to the poet, while the interest directed at his intellectual achievement was no longer limited to the poet alone, but extended also to the emerging essayist.
Amerika ideje (The Time of America, 2007)
The book The Time of America was not Kodolányi’s first published collection of essays on English and American literature or cultural history, yet most of the texts it contains were written during a period when he could publish them only sporadically. They are primarily professional studies, dealing with modern and contemporary American poetry – hardly an appealing topic for the official poetry policy struggling with the problems of socialist realism. It took several decades before the mindset and value system that had already taken shape in these early studies could also manifest itself in his literary essays. Kodolányi refused to practice self-censorship for the sake of publishability, but he also considered it unnecessary to write merely for his desk drawer – he still had his profession and his poetry. What these meant to him becomes clear in his large-scale essay volume The Time of America. Published in 2003, the book collects his writings on American poetry, modernism, and modernity. It is no exaggeration to say that while writing about poets and theorists known at the time mostly within narrow academic circles in Hungary, and about developments in Anglo-Saxon literature, he was always, in a sense, “speaking home.” These essays are academically impeccable, meeting even the most demanding scholarly standards, enriched by impressive erudition and a depth of background knowledge. Had he published them as strictly academic papers, written in a suitably formal style and furnished with the conventional scholarly apparatus, nothing could have saved him from a university chair, a professorship, or even membership in the Academy. Yet his nature led him elsewhere. The personal dimension of knowledge mattered more to him than dry philology. The scholar’s essays present their subject; the poet’s essays, even when written as studies, also speak about himself. This is why the essays collected belatedly in this volume are so revealing: they outline – with precision – the key insights, aims, and coordinates of a poetic career that developed in parallel with, and increasingly intertwined with, his intellectual path, offering the best framework for understanding both his poetic world and his worldview at large.
Anglo-Saxon poetry or modernism aside, what is perhaps most important is what he quotes from Pilinszky, who, after a 1969 poetry conference, referring to American poetry – especially the verse of Robert Creeley – was astonished to find “how real those poems are, and how, in comparison, the literariness of the European contemporaries’ poems almost seems offensive” (Ai10). Kodolányi considers this observation significant (Pilinszky’s surprise stemmed from the character of Hungarian poetry at the time), but he also notes that “Pilinszky did not learn from Creeley, but rather received confirmation for his already mature voice. In that passage he was, in fact, speaking about himself” (Ai35). Given Pilinszky’s place in literary history, his influence, and his resonance, this also suggests that the world of American and English poetry – though at times it may seem distant – is not so far removed from the Hungarian poetic language and worldview.
The authenticity that emerges in connection with Creeley remains a fundamental experience for Kodolányi. If we could determine precisely what this authenticity means for him, we would likely hold the key to his entire oeuvre. Yet, to define it fully, we would also need to define that entire body of work – for what is at stake here goes beyond the mere relationship between poetry and reality.
For Kodolányi, the literariness rooted in Romanticism, having grown into the peculiarly false pseudo-reality of the world on this side of the Iron Curtain, was an evident negation of authenticity. The resulting sense of poetic unease became expressible for him only through his American experience – through the impact of American poetry. (To better grasp this category, one might recall what he quotes from Kodály’s wife in the screenplay he co-wrote with György Szabados about the friendship between Bartók and Kodály: she said that her husband “loved everything that was real.”)
His interpretation of America, however, radically differed (and still differs) from the widely used, everyday image of the country. What appeared to him was not what America’s consumer culture offered, but what the creators of its highest culture revealed: Creeley and others whose outlook helped guide him along the paths of contemporary modernism. E. E. Cummings, Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson introduced him to a form of poetic modernism whose aim was not to destroy tradition but to renew it – a modernism that could also embrace conservatism. (This is likely why Ginsberg was never truly important to him.) This perspective also influenced his relationship to English poetry, where he was interested in the possibility of reconciling modernity with conservatism. He was drawn to those “who themselves wrote their poems under strong American inspiration” (Ai14). Yet from this direction he also received an inspiration that went beyond poetry: in the Anglo-Saxon world, the essay has never been regarded as literature’s stepchild. This realization profoundly shaped Kodolányi’s developing intellectual outlook. Particularly striking is his comment on the Williams volume In the American Grain, given to him by Tom Raworth: in that brilliant collection of essays on the American character, “the joining of sentences, the intonations, revealed unknown possibilities of prose” (Ai14). In other words, the essay, as a genre, may be significant not only for its intellectual depth but also for its specifically artistic potential.
America, however, was not only a crucial experience for Kodolányi in shaping his literary and poetic vision – it also transformed his entire relationship to the world. He became acquainted with Native American poetry, which (not unrelated to the folk heritage so central to Hungarian literature) reinforced in him the idea of the modernity of mythic perception, while also deepening his already emerging ecological outlook – or perhaps the other way round: it was his developing ecological awareness that made him receptive to Native American poetry. What has since become a commonplace worldview was, at that time, considered almost esoteric.
Kodolányi also discovered two authors rarely mentioned in the context of literary modernity: Henry Adams and Lewis Mumford, both of whom, he said, had the greatest influence on his thinking. He wrote excellent essays on each and played an outstanding role in introducing and popularizing Mumford’s thought in Hungary. According to Kodolányi, Adams, with his calm elevation, was perhaps closer to his temperament, while Mumford – though he later regarded some of his ideas with criticism – proved to be the more fertile and mobilizing force.
Even in these early works, Kodolányi did not merely wish to present the subjects of his essays, although introducing authors who were at that time little known or entirely unknown in Hungary naturally required a degree of objectivity. He consciously steered his studies in the direction of the essay, consistently expressing personal readings. He wrote about what he regarded as important for his own intellectual enrichment and formative to his inner journey – in shaping his models, he inevitably inscribed elements of himself into the portraits.
For Kodolányi, Henry Adams was the first and still one of the most comprehensive thinkers of classical modernity – a creator who believed that intellectual fulfilment also requires activity beyond the world of intellect. Adams’s versatile culture, his ability to connect with others and to grasp real processes made it almost natural that he should undertake diplomatic duties – yet these abilities could hardly have developed without such duties. “The most educated man of his time”, “a diplomat and historian, a refined connoisseur of the arts”, who moreover “stands above material concerns” (Ai79). In Kodolányi’s interpretation, Adams was a true spiritual aristocrat, one who could afford to publish his great works privately and distribute them among his friends. What is more, armed with encyclopedic knowledge, he could declare that knowledge had added nothing to the unfolding of his personality. Adams was perhaps most of all a historian, though not in the academic sense. He had a precise understanding of what the impact of modern natural sciences (especially physics) meant for humanity’s worldview – above all, that they rendered invalid the image of the world based on the knowledge of earlier times. As a son of the most optimistic of centuries, the nineteenth, he also regarded science and technology as “the depositories of intellectual supremacy” (Ai81). Yet he clearly saw the personality-corroding effects of large cities and the frustrations suffered there – and he believed deeply in the power and regenerative capacity of nature. He was simultaneously the herald and the critic of modernity’s increasingly distinct character. In this perspective, Kodolányi discerned the imprint of the eighteenth century. “Although he was one of the few contemporaries who knew, understood, and valued Walt Whitman’s ideas, the structure of Adams’s scientific thought bears no mark of the Romantic movement’s striving for a unified cosmogony, nor of pantheistic or mystical traditions,” he observes (Ai85). This closely relates to his summary statement that “multiplicity, as an ordered, comprehensible chaos, appears as a guiding concept in Adams’s historical work between 1880 and 1890” (Ai84). What fascinated Kodolányi in this conception was that Adams accepted modernity and progress, was even swept along by them, yet at the same time sought to withdraw from them, searching instead for a world that was peaceful by its very nature. “He knows the new, understands it better than most of his contemporaries – yet finds it shallow and alien. He makes use of the achievements of the modern world, the car and electricity – yet indifferently. He finds them alien, even frightening, and admits as much. […] He does not wish to be up-to-date, even though he must be modern, for the age into which he was born made him so.” (Ai85) – writes Kodolányi, who would later seem to follow precisely this model throughout his essays, with their elegant scepticism, their portrait of an age, and their reflective relation to it. That is, a model in which identification and critique, acceptance and denial, coexist.
There is, however, something more – something that already leads toward the later, ecologically inspired worldviews: the emphasis on the significance of the Cosmos, of the energy that governs nature. Reflecting on the message of Adams’s two great late works, Kodolányi formulates it thus: “What is it that remains constant? The cosmos or the structure of thought? Neither. Adams finds only one constant, and toward it – as much as his restraint allows – he expresses an almost mystical veneration, or at least admiration. This constant is energy – and the symbols of energy, which, as he puts it, possess an occult attraction” (Ai92). This proposition is relatively easy to accept, but it becomes extraordinary through Adams’s identification of the two defining historical embodiments of energy: the Virgin (the Virgin Mary) and the Dynamo. At least, so it appears in Adams’s post-1900 thought. This also demonstrates not only that he perceived essential truths, but that he also understood how to formulate his ideas in a way that commands attention.
Kentaur-szárnyak (Centaur Wings, 1999)
Centaur Wings was Kodolányi’s first published collection of studies and essays. It, too, took a long time to appear, gathering nearly three decades of writing. And what thirty years those were! It is symbolic that the earliest piece dates from 1968 – the year when Paris and several major Western European cities were being torn apart by students, incited and financed from who knows where (though we may have our suspicions…), while in Czechoslovakia the autumn “deep ploughing” of the roads was carried out by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact (one of Moscow’s movement-era cover names). The generation of ’68, west of the Iron Curtain, was that of boundless demands for freedom. East of it, however, a generation confronted hopelessness, forced to live with the suppression of even the faintest yearning for liberty. Kodolányi’s education and destiny allowed him to view both alternatives. As his later, memory-rich writings reveal repeatedly, living at home in Hungary, freedom could exist only as an ideal – that is, solely as virtual freedom. This is more than unpleasant for a citizen, but not necessarily a disadvantage for a writer. There are things whose importance – indeed, whose necessity for our survival – we understand best when they are taken from us.
Consequently, Kodolányi and many of his contemporaries faced a fate that could be expressed in a brutally simple yet immensely difficult imperative: they had to be free (see Géza Ottlik’s stone tablets).
The writings in Centaur Wings from before 1988–1989 (and why not, the later ones as well) are about fulfilling precisely this task. Ecological thought plays a decisive role in the book, for two especially important reasons. The first is the complex experience of freedom offered by nature itself, and its protection through environmental and ecological awareness. The second is that the possibility of living in harmony with nature served as a critique of the impossibility of coexisting with the one-party state. These two aspects converged in the collective movement that demonstrated its strength in the Danube movement – the struggle against the Visegrád dam, nicknamed Dunasaurus. Kodolányi played an active role in this effort. In doing so, he not only helped to prepare the imminent political transformation, but – as it soon became clear – also foreshadowed his later public engagement.
A hullám taraja (The Crest of the Wave, 2006)
The adventure of politics reshaped Kodolányi’s outlook in many ways. More precisely, it helped to further clarify it, giving not only intellectual but also emotional depth to the interpretation of his distinctive outsider position – an inherently oppositional intellectual stance – and made him fully aware of his modern conservative perspective. For the poet and writer, participation in the work of the Antall government, which opened a new historical era after the age of dictatorship, could have remained only an episode. Yet in the development-novel of his life, it became a defining chapter. “When the mid-1980s arrived, history’s unfathomable whim or wisdom offered us a chance that turned everything upside down. It offered the possibility of action and free will – to us, who had lived through a century denying the very meaning of action and free will. Perhaps in practice we were given only a small chance, but a tremendous one for the spirit and for morality. Did we notice it? Or did we suddenly find it too little?" – he asks, characterising the challenge he faced (Alulnézet és pillangóhatás [Worm’s-eye View and Butterfly Effect], 134). Kodolányi answered history’s call. With the “add-ons”, he devoted nearly a decade to this grand experiment. This period transformed into practice and perceptible reality everything he had previously thought about democracy and the functioning of societies and burdened him with the weight of responsibility. He fulfilled something that had earlier been more a dream than a concrete aim – but understanding its true meaning required that it not last too long.
Kodolányi had to confront what he expressed by quoting Jaspers: “A person becomes what he becomes through the cause he takes as his own." He took the aims and philosophy of the Antall government as his own. But the second free election rejected this direction. The Hungarian voter, despite every warning, believed that if Hungary followed the political and economic model of Austria, then he himself would immediately live at an Austrian standard. Since this did not happen – and has not happened to this day – he continually seeks scapegoats: partly to release accumulated tensions, partly to avoid admitting his mistake. In such an environment, it was not easy for Kodolányi to reposition his former role as an independent intellectual, for political involvement not only stigmatised those who undertook it in ways previously unimaginable but also turned them inside out in relation to their earlier thinking. It took Kodolányi years to find his way back to his intellectual self, although he took on the roles demanded by the new kind of public life as well.
In this volume, published in 2006, the epochal shift marking the opening of the new millennium and the strategic problems of culture – both universal and specifically Hungarian – are given particular emphasis. Not primarily in a political sense, although the book does include essays that invite a distinctly political-science reading. Such is the personal-toned Ördöglakatok (Devil’s Padlocks), which reckons with the system of informers, or the largely source-like summary A hosszú forradalom (The Long Revolution), in which Kodolányi presents the most critical phase of the regime change through his distinctive perspective that connects foreign and domestic policy, universal and personal considerations. Even so, the author prefers to rise to a philosophical height and offer an intellectual mirror of public life. He can do so because he gained experience in a political workshop shaped by the thought of József Antall. It would be worthwhile to collect Kodolányi’s writings on him. One thing, however, is certain: within a few years the Prime Minister entered that Pantheon where Kodolányi’s masters reside – above all alongside János Kodolányi and Gyula Illyés, though others could also be listed, from Bibó and László Németh to Cs. Szabó, Nándor Várkonyi, and beyond.
Few people have this perspective. His outlook and position were as far removed from the doctrinaire intellectuals who scourged public life with the offended superiority of an outsider's attitude as from the pretentious pettiness of the cultural politicians who treated intellectual life with the arrogance of ignorance. For for him, intellectual life was not the quasi-achievements of men who were telling the truth in line with party politics, but, say, Dante and Brueghel. (8) He thus examined the presence of culture in our everyday lives (and in the lives of those who, in fact, perceive almost nothing of it!) on a different scale and in a different dimension. “The life of the mind and of culture is dynamic, wave-like, as is almost everything that touches life and participates in it. The curve of the wave, its height until the next peak, the crest of the wave, is determined and driven by the impulse it receives as the motion recedes from the previous peak” (9), he wrote. An important observation, and at the same time a consolation for those who feel that only the cultural trough has fallen to their lot. It also defines their task: attention to the earlier peaks, the obligation to transmit the energy of earlier heights. If we had not understood it earlier, we can grasp from this image the nature of Kodolányi’s future-oriented, value-centred conservatism. And from this standpoint we also understand how he interprets the crisis-phenomena of our age.
“Our age, to use a monstrous word, is success-oriented. It loves success, quick success. It does not love silence, it cannot endure failure, it does not believe in what is invisible.” Yet… For the life of the mind, what our age calls success – a model defined not by achievement but by profit – is of secondary importance. Kodolányi believes that for the spirit, the work itself is what matters, the sustaining, horizon-giving success. He does not seek recognition; he seeks a connection with a higher sphere. As an extreme example, he evokes the experience of the labour camps: how in the Recsk camp those had the greatest chance of survival who organised a self-education circle or free university for themselves, creating an oasis of the spirit amid the freezing desert of hunger, cold, daily humiliation and torture – says Kodolányi the philosopher of culture. But immediately afterwards the cultural policymaker also speaks: “The artist lives dangerously. The creator of culture takes risks. He stakes his existence and livelihood. The far-sighted community must also take risks. It must give trust and material security” (20).
This way of thinking is closely connected to how he sees the process of globalisation, its possibilities and its risks. Only fifteen years had passed since he wrote his 2001 essay – a mere blink of an eye in historical terms, if even that. And yet one is struck by how much has come to pass of what he had already recognised as a danger, though even he could not have foreseen how quickly the threat latent within it would unfold. Not to mention the danger posed by the grandiose vision of “multiculturalism” advancing on globalisation’s backwash, and by the aggressive tendencies behind it that threaten European-type culture – the rich ensemble of national cultures blending in harmony.
Regarding globalisation, Kodolányi starts from the premise that “high art – but at its peak also folk art – has always crossed national borders”; artists travelled the world, and it was the dramatic changes of the early twentieth century that obstructed this free movement – only for it to resume after a historically brief interruption with greater intensity than ever. He believes that “globalisation … is effective because natural instincts open the way for it: not only the desire for conquest, but also curiosity and the desire for universality” (23). This approach rests on two fundamental experiences. One is the lack of freedom in the Bolshevik system, whose corollary was the prohibition of free movement and the experience of the Iron Curtain. The other is the boundlessness he encountered in America in the 1960s and 1970s, and the way he met the professional elite there. As a result, he saw in globalisation above all a vast liberating and fertilising force, a tremendous opportunity. (It is no coincidence that during this creative period he also wrote The Time of America, discussed earlier and also included here.)
This is followed by disillusionment, the discouraging experience of encountering the reality of the turn of the millennium. The recognition that globalization is driven primarily not by culture but by the interests of capital and profit – a process that, while it flashes unprecedented possibilities before the spirit, is profoundly and aggressively opposed to values. This threat is exacerbated by the digital explosion, which reinforces the same duality in our world. The consequence is clear: as Jean Baudrillard formulates it, reality becomes replaceable, while the lack of reality reproduces itself in a radically transformed social environment. This also means that one must recall the memories of the struggle against the Bolshevik-type dictatorship. After the former struggle for political freedom, the task of the intellectual is to wage a struggle for freedom against a far less obvious form of oppression.
In the spirit of this intellectual challenge, he assesses the sixties (A nagy szétbomlás és a nagy kinyílás [The Great Disruption and the Great Opening]). His point of departure is Fukuyama’s 1999 book The Great Disruption. In many respects he agrees with it: in the image of the disintegration that began in the sixties he sees the reverse side of the changes, while believing that – as he says – “the master of seductive half-truths” does not speak at all of their bright side. Despite his reservations, in analysing the book he focuses not on its shortcomings but on the usable perspectives, and he agrees with many of Fukuyama’s key theses and critiques. It may well be that this era was experienced differently in our region, suffering under the oppression of the Soviet system (including the oppressors!), than in the West (not to mention the Third World), but from the 1990s onward we too became part of the intensifying processes. Thus, for example, we had not previously been in a position to be participants in “complete moral relativism” or to confront the excesses of “the political correctness of left-wing liberalism.”
As an East European who also knew America well, Kodolányi acquired abundant experience of both the bright and the dark sides of the era’s transformations. Thus, although he does not accept Fukuyama’s formulas, he knows that what Fukuyama says already contains, in some way, what shapes the fate of our region, since “we are closer to America and Sweden than to Japan and South Korea” (81). He says this because he thinks not in terms of technology and consumption, but in terms of culture. From this point of view, Kodolányi’s youth – the world of the Sixties, often recalled with various (and partly false) nostalgias – takes on a distinctive meaning. For the Hungarian intellectual generation starting out at that time, this era was not a period of individual struggle for freedom, but a period of processing the post-traumatic condition that followed the destruction of the heroic attempt embodied in the 1956 revolution. In this, the power interests of the dictatorship intersected in a peculiar way with the needs of society. It was not the dictatorship that became consolidated, but the spiritual and material economy of scarcity, the unbearable lack appearing in every domain, which stabilized at the level of mere tolerability. “The great attempt of the Hungarian spirit to transcend itself and history failed so unworthily, the fall from soaring to dark retribution was so immense, that in most people the dark thrill of oblivion and self-destruction arose in place of joyful self-sacrifice, and not the sustaining consciousness of moral victory, that it had nevertheless been worth it.” In its place there surged up a peculiar, (barely, yet still) consumer mentality striving toward a dumbed-down version of the petit-bourgeois prosperity that elsewhere had emerged decades earlier, a mentality that the regime – intent on what it regarded as pacification – gladly welcomed. In parallel with this, under less transparent considerations, a very modest intellectual opening also occurred. Or was it merely a crack in a closed system? Through even the smallest fissure in the sealed world of Hungary in the sixties one could see very far indeed – perhaps farther than an intelligentsia without walls might have looked. Such exceptional glimpses gave in reality very little, but virtually much more: they made it possible to preserve intellectual aspiration and to maintain faith and hope in eventual opening. And if we consider our region as a whole – Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Russian film, poetry, the suppressed avant-garde, and the receptive audience that awaited new works – then we cannot do anything with Fukuyama’s theory of disintegration. Kodolányi’s problem with Fukuyama’s book is that “he finds nothing noteworthy in this rich humus. He notices only the disintegration – but not the flowers of decay. Not the blooming, but the rotting.” (95)
This writing is profoundly characteristic of Kodolányi's practice as an essayist. Starting from a reading that is in vogue worldwide, he formulates his own generational meaning and historical overview of the most typical years of the Kádárist period in Hungary. For him and his fellow generation members who played an active role in the democratic transition in the nineties, this was the sixties. And it is in these times that the mindset and even the ethos that continues to define his intellectual and public behaviour in the new millennium is still rooted.
A fény rétegei (The Layers of Light, 2010)
Given how many directions Kodolányi Gyula’s attention turns, his essay volumes can hardly be anything other than multifaceted. Yet what binds these books together has never been their subject matter, but the author’s creative outlook. In a substantial part of the 2010 volume, the social commitment and public engagement of some twenty years earlier seem to return – or perhaps of even earlier years: it is not direct political involvement, but civic responsibility that leads him to write studies demanding extremely serious work, excellently analysing the problems of Hungarian intellectual life and Hungarian culture.
These texts have, among their precedents, Sándor Márai’s cultural-policy ideas in Röpirat a nemzetnevelés ügyében (A Pamphlet on National Education) and László Németh’s essays Ha most lennék fiatal (If I Were Young Now) and Ha én miniszter lennék… (If I Were Minister…). In terms of genre, therefore, it is by no means alien to the Hungarian essay tradition that analyses the culture’s state at a given historical moment – formulated with both scholarly and literary ambition and outlining expectations and proposals. At the head of this volume stand two substantial sequences of reflections which are not only clear-sighted situation reports and summaries capable of laying the foundations for the future cultural policy of a changing government but also form part of Kodolányi’s writerly and intellectual ars poetica. What he formulates in these writings can be regarded as principles that have been decisive at every point of his life’s path. “The chief task of culture is the transmission and renewal of traditions. Tradition and innovation – achieving a successful synthesis of this relationship is what today confronts people of culture,” he says. (30) In the literary script of a Bartók film that was never realised he has his protagonist quote an outburst by an American: “Only a fool would break with the past out of sheer defiance. Whatever is new and of great significance is always grafted onto old roots – onto the genuinely viable roots that are carefully chosen from among those that have merely survived.” (122) Achieving this, of course, requires knowledge, which is more than mere information – even though the latter, in the form of “data”, has become one of the most dangerous myths of our age. Kodolányi is not anti-technology, but already in the writings collected in Amerika ideje (The Time of America) he had taken stock of the fact that faith in the gospel of technological progress entails grave risks. Here, in connection with the information revolution, which creates exceptional opportunities, he remarks: “There is a danger that those who rely on the internet for the acquisition of their knowledge will gain only a kind of informedness instead of knowledge – or perhaps not even that.” (42) It is a diagnosis that worries its maker more than the person whose problem it is about. For the latter does not even notice his illness. But the disorganised mass of information today does not bring people closer to knowledge, but separates them from it, with all kinds of negative consequences. Not only does Kodolányi see it this way in general, but he also cites a thought-provoking example from an American psychologist: 'dyslexia is merely a consequence of a deeper symptom. The ability to read dies out because the spaces and programs of silence and reflection are gradually removed from education' (43).
The phenomenon is troubling. Yes – but especially because the circles that dominate global media through their financial power and are therefore regarded as authoritative do not seek to defend themselves against a threat that is likely to worsen even without them. Instead, they manufacture an ideology for it, grounding the essence of their own progressiveness and modernity in the justification of a negative process. Let there be no misunderstanding: Kodolányi is not an enemy of technological civilisation. On the contrary, he is firmly convinced that we must integrate it into our daily lives, since it offers fantastic possibilities for understanding the world and for the fulfilment of the human mind.
Szóló hangra (For a solo voice, 2012)
Kodolányi’s essay collections are usually defined by their study-like pieces – in some cases written with a rigour and objectivity that fully meet scholarly expectations. Thought is the dominant tone, yet each volume contains looser, more impressionistic notes that at times resemble prose-dissolved poems, alongside subjective reminiscences of eras, people, and events. This variety is closely tied to the complexity of his thematic concerns: the tone and the mode of the essay stem from the subjects he addresses. And this variety merges into a natural unity, grounded in a deeper reason that is both generic and transgeneric. This volume displays everything that makes Kodolányi’s essays so distinctive: the richness of thought, the branching, multifaceted knowledge and experience, and the poet’s vision that draws even more into the background. For him, the value of his knowledge of the world lies in how much it contributes to the knowledge of himself. At the heart of a Kodolányi essay is this noble kind of poetic ‘selfishness’: his discursive prose is more personal than usual, and the coherence of ideas is reinforced by the author’s personality, by the credibility of the lyrical self.
In this personal tone, notes, snippets, brief impressions that trigger trains of thought, studies, recollections, and essays summoned by the importance of their subjects all meet. Though prompted by anniversaries, invitations, or occasions, every line reveals that they took shape over years or decades in the soul of a poet until they found the possibility of expression – not necessarily by their own nature, but because life, our life, pressed them forth.
Even if one sets aside the external pressures of the one-party state period that so profoundly shaped Kodolányi’s path (the omnipresent censorship causing the ‘pen-lock’), or the public tasks of the transition era, one still senses how many obstacles stood in the way of reaching the naturalness of everyday speech. That is, if such naturalness is attainable at all for a creator whose need to penetrate to the depths of things and inclination toward reflexivity are stronger even than the desire or compulsion to communicate.
Here we can see it most clearly: a piece of writing by Kodolányi – whether verse or prose – may start anywhere and may lead anywhere, but it is never accidental. In fact, one of its hidden aims is precisely to prove its own sense of destiny, its cosmic ordination. For association here is never free: accumulated experiences, knowledge, memories, his insight gathered about the world, his wide-ranging curiosity, sensitivity, and widespread attention can set almost anything in motion within the mind. What appears in Kodolányi’s writings is this spiritual movement. It may begin from a natural image: a dawn in Tihany, a scorching summer day on József Hill, or four giant puffballs received as a gift (to avoid misunderstanding: wild mushrooms) – any of these may lead equally toward ultimate metaphysical questions, toward childhood memories, toward reflections on the feminine principle of the world, or toward the many challenges of intellectual life and the responsibilities that come with the intellectual vocation. He may recall intellectual encounters he feels obliged to speak about, or his thoughts may be set in motion by a contemporary anniversary or an unexpectedly surfacing intellectual cue. It is striking that, despite his rich network of personal relationships, his point of departure is most often solitary contemplation.
To see more clearly what lies behind this phenomenon, it is worth keeping in mind that, in an intellectual and literary sense, Kodolányi’s reflective prose, his theatrical experiments, and his poetry constitute a rather solitary phenomenon. This is due in no small part to their diversity and complexity. The world today is less receptive to such qualities, since it is largely run by specialists. Nothing illustrates this better than what was said about János Szentágothai, the world-renowned brain researcher, on the centenary of his birth. In retrospect, many believed that the reason he never received the Nobel Prize was that, thanks to his exceptional versatility even within his own narrow field, he had earned it in several sub-disciplines. Yet the specialists of each of these sub-fields expected the others to nominate him for the award. Which means that the surplus intellectual achievement expressed through such multifaceted work often fails to earn recognition and may even become a disadvantage. The analogy is, of course, imperfect, but it may nevertheless point to one of the reasons why Kodolányi Gyula’s recognition was long delayed.
In terms of values and worldview, Kodolányi is a conservative – not in the sense in which the term is carelessly applied in Hungary, but in accordance with Anglo-Saxon norms, where conservatism meets a form of openness that overlaps with liberalism. He is conservative in the sense of being a guardian: a keeper of values in an age that, willingly or unwillingly, would prefer to rid itself of values that entail obligations. His respect for value also extends to the task of defending tradition. For this reason, he is not a follower of today’s resurgent “neocon” ideology. Even if he were not tied to classical conservatism, his resistance to the anti-value tendencies of our present “transitional age” would make him conservative. This spirit appears repeatedly throughout the book’s reflections: he regards the often-programmatic destruction of values as one of the most alarming intellectual phenomena of our time. As he writes, “tradition has been shaken”, “tradition has lost its validity for entire intellectual subcultures and aesthetics – which are trying to establish themselves precisely against it”. He considers it important to say of Zoltán Szabó that he sits “on the unshakable stones of classical tradition” as he observes his age – and ours. His portraits of János Kodolányi, György Szabados, and others are united by the same trait: in all of them he highlights the guardian of value, the continuer of the economy of tradition. Similarly, in his exceptionally precise and affectionate portrait of Ferenc Mádl, the defining thought is that the jurist-president, “through the long personal pilgrimage of culture, reached the point where he recognised that the greatest knowledge is simplicity”.
It is thus deeply characteristic that in the final lines of the book he summarises once more: “For me, tradition has become very important. I define tradition as change within permanence, permanence within change. […] And it is possible that in the 1970s change within permanence was more important to me. Now permanence within change is more important.” It is perhaps worth emphasising that both change and permanence refer to the realm of values.
This commitment to preserving value is multifaceted and exemplary in its openness. For Kodolányi, tradition is not a dead museum artifact, but a living reality that must be continually renewed. It is like an inherited garden whose shrubs, trees, flower beds and vegetable plots will perish if their owner wishes only to guard them rather than cultivate them. This way of thinking characterises the portraits already mentioned, which are not only factual and authentic but also animated by artistic reflection (if you will: a subjective lyricism), by the urge to think further, to place things in new contexts, to interpret. This spirit permeates his portrait of János Kodolányi, personal in tone yet citing facts of philological interest, as well as the recollection in which the story of the meeting between István Bibó and the distinguished English sociology professor Bernard Crick is revealed. In organising this meeting, Gyula Kodolányi played an exceptionally important role, and its outcome was a substantial – although not “breakthrough” – English-language selection of Bibó’s writings.
This story, in presenting its rich layers, offers a nuanced portrait of Kodolányi’s personality. The exceptional opportunities that arose from his position (being close to Bibó through his family background while also being perfectly trustworthy to the Western thinkers who initiated the venture) were accompanied by exceptional obligations and a strong sense of responsibility. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Kodolányi was the only person who could have brought about this meeting – and he did so. Wisely, responsibly, successfully. Not for his own sake, but in the service of the intellect, the nation, and Europe. His greatest reward lay in being able to do the work itself. When he recounts the story, he speaks not only as a participant in and witness to history, but also sketches a writer’s portrait of Bibó, provides valuable insights into Hungarian–English relations, introduces Professor Crick to Hungarian readers (Crick even contributed his own money to the publication of the Bibó volume), and offers an account of the book’s reception (which, unfortunately, did not bring a breakthrough). In many ways, this piece resembles the one in which he celebrates Sándor Csoóri’s 80th birthday. With similar polyphony, he reports on the action during which, with Csoóri’s help, he succeeded in delivering to the Western press not merely a general protest against the Ceauşescu regime but the memorandum and documents of Károly Király, who openly confronted the conducator himself.
What did this mean? It meant that the homeland may exist “in the heights”, yet it must be served on the ground on which we have walked. Gyula Kodolányi, like so many others, both famous and unknown, felt this with perfect clarity. They claimed as their own the nation of values and the Hungary of values. This homeland, in the realm of the spirit, was never torn into pieces. Kodolányi still carries within his very bones the fullness of the former Hungary, yet he does not turn his personal and intellectual pain over its physical disintegration into small change. He believes that the true homeland is always above, in the heights of the spirit. The true “greater Hungarian” is not the one in whom the loudest laments resound over the lost territories, but the one who preserves the capacity to think in terms of a unified homeland, who keeps its spiritual values intact – as Babits and so many others once did.
It goes without saying: Gyula Kodolányi also feels deep pain over the now nearly century-old dismemberment of the nation. But he feels no less pain over today’s continuously unfolding “Trianon” of the Hungarian intellectual heritage, when the pillars of national culture are demolished by forgetting, and what remains is assimilated into nothingness. More dangerous than the loss of territory or population is the process in which it is not the state that diminishes, but the spiritual homeland itself, the values that express the essence and cohesion of the nation – values that are perishing before our eyes and amid our silent despair. Kodolányi raises his voice against this “culture” of forgetting and destruction. At the same time, he accepts the possibility of organic forgetting as part of every living culture – the kind of forgetting that makes room for new initiatives and new values, without which there would be no creativity, no possibility of renewal. But creative forgetting, through which new values are born, is something altogether different from that other forgetting which is itself the grave “where a nation sinks and dies” (from the poem Szózat [Appeal] of Mihály Vörösmarty).
Perhaps it should be noted here that, witnessing today’s erosion of values, Gyula Kodolányi is not satisfied with making a few critical remarks in the spirit of general cultural pessimism. He consistently seeks to provide a deeper explanation for these changes. However disheartening what he sees may be, there is still a kind of hope in the way he searches for the combined cause of the phenomenon. If there is a cause, there is an explanation; if there is a correct diagnosis, then we do not merely have to defy fate, but space opens for the process of healing and recovery.
This hope can be detected, in a peculiar way, in the way the overtones of his writings also resonate with one another. Thus, for example, he interprets the phenomenon widely, though incorrectly, referred to as postmodernism – a phenomenon that, expressing itself mostly in the destruction of traditional values and in the cultural battles of public policy, reshaped Hungarian literary life after the democratic transition. He does not see in this some kind of anti-national conspiracy, but rather an offshoot of major intellectual currents. As he says, a “postmodern sensibility” was at work in him as well when “there was an ethics to rebellions,” when the then-modernism “opened windows,” when it pushed against the constraints of a very rigidly enforced monolithic aesthetic (and correspondingly social) order. But, as he writes, “it is not important whether I am avant-garde or postmodern,” but whether what comes into being “in these periods is lasting or not.”
But beyond worldview, aesthetic and taste-related considerations, and beyond questions of intellectual and public morality, he interprets the problem of “paradigm shift” within a peculiar framework that may seem accidental on the surface yet is in fact connected to intellectual-historical processes centuries in the making. He believes that, after many decades of interruption, German influences – always of great importance – have once again begun to play a significant role in Hungarian literature and intellectual life. In the emerging dictatorship of taste, Kodolányi points to the strengthened role of these influences. He sees in this the reason for the rift between contemporary Hungarian theatre and its audience (“the gigantic bulldozer of German hyperrealism and neo-expressionism crushed Hungarian theatre sometime in the mid-1980s, initiating a shift in taste that the Hungarian audience has not accepted and never will”), and he also tries to interpret this influence while reflecting on the contrast between Tibor Déry’s American successes – especially strong among German audiences – and his loss of standing within the domestic canon.
He argues that this powerful German influence, still very much present today though not clearly understood by many, appeared in the mid-1980s. As he writes, “the aesthetic pace-setters of the moment, like Péter Balassa, followed German models; German Romanticism and Expressionism became their compass.” (He could, of course, have mentioned Ernő Kulcsár Szabó as well.) He finds this problematic not because of some clichéd ancient opposition, but because, in his view, the Hungarian literary taste has traditionally “tended more toward the more plastic and temperate French, Italian, and English sensibilities.” With this line of inquiry, he offers an interpretation of the deep structure of today’s literary divisions that differs from all others – one that is noteworthy also from the perspective of the history of intellectual factionalism. (We can only hope that he will one day elaborate this well-founded idea in detail.)
Epilogue
Reading Kodolányi’s essays, we can continually sense that his poetics is not confined to his poetic oeuvre. His understanding of art – shaped by contemporary Western (and not only Western) poetry, essays, as well as visual arts, music, and film – is resolutely modern. It reflects a degree of openness that extends far beyond the domestic (always only “so-called”) postmodernity, whose aesthetics were never so much artistic as culture-war driven. This breadth of vision, formed through such diverse influences, is also at work in the essays, making him a solitary figure in our sharply delineated and often programmatically narrowed literary environment. He is too modern as a poet for a value-conservative thinker; yet as a thinker, he is conservative. He thinks about history, culture, and politics within the national paradigm, yet he is so at home in the world that, from the standpoint of conventional notions of national commitment, this amounts virtually to cosmopolitanism. The logic of intellectual civil war prefers bipolar thought, but for Kodolányi every nuance matters. At the same time, he had to fight not only the natural freedom struggle of the Hungarian intelligentsia but also a personal battle that is difficult to articulate.
For no matter how independent he may be, he belongs to a family network that fundamentally shaped his reception, especially during the decisive early phase of his career. To claim his own face, he had to contend not only with himself but also with the expectations and prejudices directed toward him. It was not easy, but he found his own path. He did not turn against the masters given to him as gifts of fate – in other words, he did not betray them – yet he still did not become classifiable within the category of “folk” writer. At most in the sense allowed by that label’s own flexible boundaries, for this sometimes stigmatizing, sometimes elevating category has, when convenient (especially when the aim was to strike at them), included writers who were unmistakably cosmopolitan in orientation, such as Lőrinc Szabó or László Cs. Szabó. And for political-ideological rather than literary reasons, it is natural that among his contemporaries this category also included László Németh, one of the finest connoisseurs – and in many respects follower – of contemporary world literature.
Kodolányi therefore did not become unfaithful to his great exemplars – but in no respect did he become their epigone. He never once denied what he owed them, and he made full use of the exceptional opportunity of entering a network of relationships that has since become part of Hungarian cultural history. In this milieu he could feel, day after day, the warm touch of the greatest figures. He lived in an intellectual world that lifted him out of the immediate political–ideological constraints of his environment, and he could attend an “university” where – besides János Kodolányi and Gyula Illyés – he was taught by figures such as István Bibó, Zoltán Szabó, and László Cs. Szabó.
Gyula Kodolányi knows perfectly well to this day what he owes to the unusual trajectory of his life. He does not conceal how much it meant for the shaping of his thought that, under the one-party system, the (very relative) protection enjoyed by his father-in-law extended to him as well. He made use of this opportunity, but he used it in order to arrive at his own authentic self. Encounters with the finest figures of Hungarian literature guided him along this path – for example with László Németh, or with Zoltán Jékely, from whom he received his first English edition of Shakespeare and to whom he now repays his debt by translating Shakespeare’s sonnets. But his good fortune also led him, later on and increasingly on his own merit, into contact with contemporary American, English, and other writers who were dear to him – people like Ted Hughes or Salman Rushdie.
For these fated gifts, Gyula Kodolányi paid by taking on public responsibilities that often hindered his creative work. However different his poetic principles were from those of Illyés, he too could accept the command to “let the poet be a useful will”. His essays show that the years which may seem wasted from a purely literary perspective were, in fact, far from useless.
He travelled widely and had to face many different tasks. Along the way he acquired a great deal of knowledge and many acquaintances, receiving an exceptional number of impulses that could never have been expected from literature alone. He served as József Antall’s foreign policy adviser, helped midwife the birth of Duna Television, and was able to observe the processes of both universal and Hungarian culture from many different angles. His public roles broadened his perspective even further, just as his American visiting professorships offered him exceptional opportunities (most recently in Atlanta, where at Emory University he taught American students about Central Europe – that is, the Europe relevant to Hungary). From afar many things appear more clearly and in their true proportions. Not only in history or literature, but even in small things: Lake Balaton reveals more to someone who has seen the ocean as well.
Reading his poems, essays, and following the course of his life, we can see that Gyula Kodolányi was granted exceptionally rich background knowledge by both fate and talent. It is no wonder, then, that he is receptive to so many things. This complexity is present in his personal relationships, in his attitude toward Hungarian and universal history, toward many kinds of cultures, in his universal sense of space and time, and it is expressed in the many fields in which he works – in his intellectual and public activities alike.
I would venture to say that in today’s Hungarian intellectual life very few can rival him in this. Such richness has its disadvantages as well. For example, criticism cannot keep up with him – his oeuvre does not fit into its clichés. There are no categories for him, because there cannot be. For this reason, although valuable studies have been written about him, he has given important interviews, and after receiving several major state awards he was presented in 2015 with the most prestigious civil recognition, the Prima Primissima Prize (to which he first came close through the Prima award won by Magyar Szemle), the reception of Kodolányi’s work does not match his achievement. With his modern conservatism he is an outstanding creator of a mode of thought that is not at the center of today’s intellectual discourse. Perhaps this is no misfortune, since he does not write to be mentioned alongside the pampered celebrities of the mainstream. In many respects it is certainly better this way: to work in silence. That too is needed for the excellent volumes of the last decade to continue appearing, allowing his oeuvre to grow steadily and become ever more significant. He is clearly living through a period of summation, and this is surely a form of recompense for his writerly solitude – whose great advantage is that in this way he is assuredly in good company.
[2016]