Sándor Lezsák is a poet, playwright, literary and community organiser, institution founder, public figure, politician, and since 2006 Vice President of the National Assembly.
His name is inextricably linked to his chosen place of residence, Lakitelek, where he moved in 1969, when he was barely twenty years old, and where he still lives today. He created a concept of the name Lakitelek: since the late 1970s it has been the symbolic and real centre of the national opposition. In 1987, the Hungarian Democratic Forum, which was to play a formative role in Hungary’s history, was established in the garden of his family home. Lakitelek – Hungarikum Liget, now an administrative settlement, became one of the intellectual and community centres of the Hungarian community in the Carpathian Basin, a pilot project for society building. He establishes the Folk College Foundation, Anthology Publishing House, Retörki (Institute and Archives for Researching the History of the Regime Change), the Mindszenty Foundation; welcomes and inspires filmmakers, writers, folk artists; amateurs and professionals, teachers and students, from the country and across the borders, the widest spectrum of Hungarian society comes to visit. Its role as a catalyst for goodwill is almost impossible to list. To quote László Németh, Sándor Lezsák is indeed an organiser of intellectual forces.
The public career of the poet, Sándor Lezsák began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the 1980s he published two books of poetry, followed by three more since then, as well as two social dramas and three historical stage works dating back to the old Hungarian times. He has earned his widespread fame and popularity as a writer through his highly successful theatre productions of the latter.
However, the aforementioned very strong public and constructive presence, which characterised Lezsák from the mid- to late 1970s with unchanged intensity, sometimes camouflaged the poet. The question is, of course, whether it is possible or worthwhile to separate the roles, to separate the public figure, the politician and the artist. “I am not a poet, a teacher, or a politician. I always have different tasks to do. On the surface, they are different, but they are about the same thing: life, country, our life and our country” said Sándor Lezsák as an answer to Péter Spangler’s questions. “It is an extraordinary career” says Lajos Szakolczay, because in all its forms of action he has striven for the same thing: to follow and continue the noble tradition of Hungarian writers and literature, to uplift his nation and people. In the case of Sándor Lezsák, these forms of action and roles are clearly distinct, and are aligned in perfect harmony.
His poetry
The intellectual movement, the social self-organization that would culminate in political regime change by 1989, began in the 1970s. The 1970s and 1980s are also a time of strong self-organisation among young writers. Fiatal Írók József Attila Köre (Young Writers' Attila József Association) (FIJAK) was founded in 1973, and by the early 1980s its board members included authors such as Sándor Lezsák, Dénes Csengey, Miklós Tamás Gáspár, Ákos Szilágyi and Erzsébet Tóth. They demanded autonomy, freedom of expression and their own journal, but their social criticism led to the temporary suspension of the association in 1981. They were not allowed to launch a journal, but they were allowed to edit the JAK booklet series. (Their first volume, Fasírt avagy viták a “fiatal irodalomról” (Meatballs, or Debates on “Young Literature”), was published in 1982.)
In the 1970s, cultural policy thought that the solution to the problem of young poets and writers starting their careers in large numbers was to publish an anthology. In 1979, poems by 45 young poets, including Sándor Lezsák, were published under the title Bird's Way. The anthology, which featured a wide range of styles and trends, was received with mixed reactions, and Tibor Zalán (also the author of the anthology) provocatively adopted the name “Faceless Generation” in response to the complainers.
In the same year, 1979, Sándor Lezsák organizes the “Meeting of Young Writers” in Lakitelek and invites nationally committed writers such as Gyula Illyés, Sándor Csoóri, Gyula Fekete, Zoltán Bíró. The young teacher and ethnologist was by this time a respected figure in the young generation of writers and a subject of surveillance by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (his surveillance file contains more than a thousand pages, and apart from the Hungarian one he was under surveillance by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of all the neighbouring socialist countries). In 1985, also in Lakitelek, he arranged the Anthology exhibition and literary evening at the community centre in order to present the coherence of contemporary Hungarian literature and poetry. Sándor Csoóri, Gáspár Nagy, István Baka, Simon Serfőző, Margit Szécsi, József Tornai, Erzsébet Tóth, Tibor Zalán, along with readings of their own poems, were reading poem from the Carpathian Basin and poem of emigrant poets, such as Sándor Márai, Tibor Tollas, and listened to Gyula Illyés' banned poem Egy mondat a zsarnokságról (A Sentence on Tyranny) recorded on tape, all this on 22 October, as the first barely concealed public commemoration of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The highly successful evening was followed by harsh reprisals, harassment and threats against the participants, Sándor Lezsák's teaching job was restricted, so he organised further meetings in Lakitelek at his family home.
Not apart from Sándor Lezsák's suspiciously watched public activity, his first book of poems, Békebeli éjszaka (The Night in Peaceful Times), was published belatedly, only in 1983, at the age of thirty-four. From a generational perspective, the poet can be associated with the “faceless” Madarút group, a view further justified by his work in FIJAK; however, a more precise approach, when defining the generation more narrowly, is to accept the group’s own self-designation. Six young poet friends, Gábor Cyprián Csajka, Gábor Csordás, Sándor Lezsák, Lajos Parti Nagy, József Szervác and Erzsébet Tóth, called themselves “Thursday night fellows” after their regular meetings. Their poems, although they all had their own volumes by then, were published together in 1986 in the JAK booklets under the title Üdvözlet (Greetings). In a poem from 2015, Lezsák resolves the title of the book, which is not necessarily meaningful on the basis of the texts of the anthology. They meant Üdvözlet a győzőnek (Greetings to the Winner) header by Ady, but neither the motto of the ars poetica (“We were the fool of the land, / Worn-out, poor Hungarians. / And now come, winners: / greetings to the winner”), nor the Ady header were allowed by the censors.
The six young people shared the same career, but Sándor Lezsák's poetic world, his choice of tradition and his poetic solution are closer to those of Gáspár Nagy also born in 1949, who started his career earlier. They are less likely to regard Attila József as their master than the folk poets, their personality is more hidden, they often use the means of the gentler avant-garde in addition to folklorisation, they express their desire for freedom in a strong way, they are committed to their national identity and embrace their 1956 heritage. In Lezsák's work, all this is emphatically complemented by the defence of personal integrity and a high degree of solidarity with the poor and vulnerable.
Sándor Lezsák's 2015 volume of collected poems, Társai elmentek Megváltót nézni (His Companions Went to See the Saviour), divides his poems into four cycles. The first two cycles contain poems from two volumes of the 1980s, Békebeli éjszaka (The Night in Peaceful Times) (1983) and Fekete felhő, teafű (Black Cloud, Tea Grass) (1988), both published separately. The third cycle, Attila, Isten kardja (Attila, Sword of God) (1993), contains poems from the rock opera of the same title, but it has not been published as a stand-alone volume, nor has the final cycle, Amit nem mondtam el (What I Did Not Share), which contains poems written in the 1990s and 2000s. After the 2015 collection, another stand-alone book of poems is published: Misi, a puska és a lódenkabát (Misi, the Rifle and the Loden Wool Coat), a collection of “lyrics” mainly dedicated to the memory of 1956, but also including poems and singable songs from the “romantic folk play” Attila fia, Csaba királyfi (Prince Csaba, son of Atilla). The poetic oeuvre is about four hundred pages long, as Lajos Szakolczay notes, the poet only writes selected poems.
The poetics, worldview and outlook of the debut volume is most closely related to the poetry of László Nagy, Sándor Csoóri, István Bella, István Ágh, Ferenc Buda, József Ratkó, Sándor Kányádi, and the aforementioned Gáspár Nagy (later Pilinszky). Related, because his first volume bears witness to a mature, self-contained poet (even if in some places the imagery of the masters, such as László Nagy, is vaguely perceptible). His second volume, Fekete felhő, teafű (Black Cloud, Tea Grass) (1988), is “almost identical in style and vision” (Szakolczay) to the first, and essentially expands the tone,poetic and linguistic registers found. Even the archaic, archaising songs and lyrics of the Atilla and Csaba stage works are not without precedent – poems of the 1980s, such as Julianus barát harmadik útja (The Third Voyage of Friar Julianus), Viorika!, Felnőtt fiát siratja (Mourning the Adult Son) or the A Csíki Névtelen jegyzései (Nameless Notes of Csíki), are indicative of his affinity for linguistic antiquity and the early history of Hungarians. Not only does his poetic manner and vision show a kind of subtly nuanced constancy, but his world view, values and value orientation are also clear and rock-solid. Like Pilinszky, he could say: “I have not changed over the years. I keep doing what I started.”
The poems of the 1980s take a variety of voices and forms, from free poems to objectively concrete descriptions, visionary half-length poems to lighter songs, epigrammatic short poems, role poems, philosophical poems; epic content and dramatic dialogue are as much a part of the poems as linguistic archaism and avant-garde stylistic elements. There is a variety of tone and subject matter, from life portraits and lyrical confessions to anxious meditations on the past and national destiny. Yet even his seemingly simple poems are not private histories, they are imbued with a metaphorical quality – the lyrical self, protesting, rebelling, defending its integrity, pushing the boundaries of the unspeakable. A fine example of this stubborn struggle is the opening verse of the first volume, the poetic entry, Március (March). In the conventional sense, March is the beginning of spring and the time of remembrance of the Revolution in 1848. But the poem evokes the Revolution of 1956 ('concrete pillars', 'wire fences') and captures the relationship between the Self and the World in the present of the 'puddle-eyes'. Személyem Köztársasága (Republic of the Self) is the key concept: unprotected dignity, vulnerable in society, but not a dilemma, not an uncertainty, a firm claim to maintain integrity in the face of a barbed-wire, wiretapped world, but a categorical protest in declarative mode. His refuge is nature, but nature is not only a refuge in the conventional sense, the arrival of spring is announced by the radio, and the poem thus ends with a metaphor of communal hope. Another refuge besides nature is Lakitelek, home, family, love: as he writes in his rhapsodic poem, Zúzdadáról majd másik verset írok! (I'll write another poem about Zúzdada). “Here I am in Lakitelek, / Alkotmány utca 9 - // I look out into Europe, / I see trees, bushes, foil”. Dawn breaks, he watches over his sleeping family and waits for the news, but the radio remains silent. “Europe feels very close now... this blade of grass is Europe” – there is a fixed point, the symbolic and real Lakitelek, but this peace and harmony must be guarded against the dissonant world and social environment. He yearns to a peaceful world, Mint a madarak (Like birds), to the idyll of his childhood, to the world of his grandparents in Nyírség, where "every movement would be understood, / no hidden camera would film on the wagon road in Sóskút, / conversation would not get stuck in the barren sand desert of utterability / but he would eventually return to Lakitelek, “to the middle of my world”, to create the idyll he once had.
Lezsák transforms the oppressive airlessness of the 1980s, the stifled freedom, his concern for Hungarians and his personal harassment and observation into poetry in several large-scale compositions: in visionary prose or free poems (Csoóri Sándor látogatói (Sándor Csoóri's Visitors), A fészkéből kizuhant város (The City Fallen Out of Its Nest), A skizoid viharlámpa tünetei (Symptoms of the Schizoid Stormlamp), Éjszaka a Váróteremben (Night in the Waiting Room), A Kertben (In the Garden)), in a half-length cycle (A Madárijesztő hagyatékából (From the Legacy of the Scarecrow)), in a poetic phantom play (Szavak piacán (On the Market of Words)), in documentary grotesque prose (A kimondhatóság határáig… (To the Limit of Pronounceability…)) – the poems often already warn of the metaphorical suggestion by the nouns highlighted in the title.
One of the best examples of this verse type, which is the strongest strand of Lezakian lyricism, is Szinopszis 2 (Synopsis) and the couplet Szinopszis (Synopsis). The same venue, Lakitelek, the same story: the poet (speaker) is being watched by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The first poem, Synopsis 2, records a real life situation: at night, on the way home, in a suspicious calm, a stranger suddenly steps in front of him, asks his name, anything could happen, even a beating, but the stranger gets into a black car and suddenly leaves. The threat is obvious, fear and anxiety settle in the poet, who is worried about his family, sleeping peacefully. A tense portrait of life, a taut telling of a terrifying story. Synopsis is also a free poem, but divided into stanzas, the narrative is similarly stripped down to the level of live speech, but the poem, structured with symbols and allusions, no longer presents the uniqueness, but the universality of the story. The story is a vision: every evening the Prince comes to the speaker's house and they play cards. In the situation, the reader can allude to world literary contexts such as Ötödik pecsét (Fifth Seal) by Bergman (playing cards with Death), the nocturnal visitors of Mester és Margarita (Master and Margarita) by Bulgakov, the reception of Goethe's Faust. There are no two equals playing cards, the Prince is an irrational power, there is no avoiding him, he deals the cards and always cheats. The game is absurd, there is no stakes, it is merely a demonstration of strength, power, threat, vulnerability. The poet's fear and humiliation are obvious, but he thinks of his children and wins. “WHO WAS HIS MASTER, the Prince asks / every night, and goes to the door. My father. / WE ALMOST EXECUTED HIM. Yes, I reply. He survived. / Forbidden gambling.” The poem's conclusion brings us back to the realistic present, and authenticates the surreal card-playing vision with a chilling realism. The real and symbolic Lakitelek is a refuge, but it is also extremely vulnerable, which is why the grotesque prevails in these types of public poems. It is important to emphasise that, although these poems had a specific additional meaning in their time (exposure of power, metaphorical message), their topicality has only declined with the passing of time, while their universality of truth and their lasting aesthetic and poetic value have been enhanced.
Experience, spectacle, surrealistic vision organise the similarly grand, otherwise grotesque, broad rhapsodies of Éjszaka a Váróteremben (Night in the Waiting Room) and Régi vár omladékán, Kölcseyvel (On the Ruins of the Old Castle with Kölcsey), set in the context of national tradition. The latter is a personal and communal reckoning: the poet's everyday life in Lakitelek is imbued with the memory of Transylvanian journeys and war fates, the requisites of a hopelessly confused and confused world. The former, with its guest verses and allusions to Hungarian poetry, rises to the ranks of the great thought poems that question national destiny. The title and situation of Night in the Waiting Room is also an intertext, a profane re-situation of Dsida's poem Nagycsütörtök (Great Thursday), and the text incorporates further quotations and allusions from Tibor Tollas, Petőfi, the legend of the Csodaszarvas (Miraculous Stag), and Romanian into a series of images of life in Transylvania, depicting miserable everyday life.
The image of life, the genre, is also an important poetic form for Lezsák. His most beautiful pieces evoke Old Men and Old Women. He dedicated one of his poetic cycles to the memory of his grandparents in Nyírség (Drága Nagymama mellett virrasztani (Vigil at My Dear Grandmother’s Bedside)), where he spent the most beautiful summers of his childhood. In a world full of inward-looking people, smears and lies, they, the Old People, are the idea, in their lives work, order, duty, unconditional love and care are proportionate and human – or it is this harmony that history is shattering (Keresztapa (Godfather)). In keeping with austere life, the language is sometimes austere and colloquial, the descriptions are objective (Csendélet (Still Life), Nagyapa (Grandfather), Öreg házak öröksége (The Heritage of Old Houses), Öregember Öregasszonyával (Old Man with his Old Woman)), while at other times colloquial is recreated (Nagymama levele karácsonykor (Grandmother's Letter at Christmas)). In addition to his personal attachment, he also has a deep solidarity with the vulnerable in general, with the abandoned,lonely, homeless elderly (Csendélet II (Still Life II) and Csendélet (Still Life)).
In the 1970s, Sándor Lezsák travelled the Carpathian Basin (in the Highlands with one of his masters, Rezső Szíj), getting to know Hungarian writers across the borders, and in the 1980s he also travelled to Western Europe with the help of his uncle, who had fled to Germany in 1956. It was then that he became friends with prominent figures of Western emigration, Gyula Borbándi, Tibor Tollas, László Juhász and others. Everywhere he looked for signs of the survival of Hungarians, and in addition to the creative spirits he always saw them in the poorest, most abandoned ordinary people. The 2018 volume Misi, a puska... (Misi, the Rifle...), a poignantly beautiful, painful half-length poem entitled Balladai félhomály – Tíz jelenésben (Balladic twilight - In ten Apparitions), was born from the memory of an encounter with an old woman living in a lonely, dispersed region. In Sándor Lezsák's poetic language, archaic linguistic elements evoking old Hungarians occupy a privileged place, the poet marvels at the beauty of the old language, he himself writes archaic songs (Felnőtt fiát siratja (Mourning the Adult Son), the verse settings of Csaba királyfi (Prince Csaba)), and in Balladic twilight a contemporary ballad comes to life. Fate itself is balladic: the family tragically falls apart, the only son is far away, the old woman is left alone. The tragedy is fulfilled by the fact that he lives in a rural area, where no one speaks or understands Hungarian. The exceptional bravura of the large composition is that the songs paint a sociographically accurate, nuanced picture of Hungarians stranded in the dispersion, their hopeless living conditions, their thinking, their shattering beliefs, but all this raw realistic content is transformed into beautiful poetry in a language and rhythm that beats the Moldavian Csángó songs and ballads. The poet doesn't imitate the old ballads, but builds on their spiritual and linguistic structure in such a way that the same air exudes from the poem.
In Lezsák's poems, archaisms sometimes occur in surprising contexts - for example, in the bittersweetly playful irony of the song Séta a Grand Trianonban (A Walk in Grand Trianon). Here, in the coldness and strangeness of the marble halls, the guest lyrics of the archaic prayer (“Oh dawn, oh dawn, / Nice red dawn, / Nice red dawn, / Bright dawn!” the last line is doubly intertextual, alluding to the Old Hungarian Mary psalm). And Vörösmarty's vision of national death (“Surrounded by people”) urges him to leave the delicate and bright palace with austerity. Here, the somberness of the theme still restrains the vagabondry of the lighter tone, but in addition to the great verse processions evoking serious, dark forces, we must also mention Lezsák's songs of light elegance and gracefulness, his mockeries (Eurovízió (Eurovision)), his playful settlement sorrows (Rímes névmutató… (Rhyming nomenclature…)), nota bene! his naughty-frivolous dance songs proclaiming the eternal joy of life (Táncoltató (Dance poem), Sej-baj, lúdvér! (Hey-ho, goose blood)).
Only with these light, life-affirming songs - and the poems dedicated to his wife, confessing his love again and again is the Lezsák lyric complete. But there is no doubt that the capital of his poetry is the poems whose deep current is inspired by the nation, by Hungarians, by freedom, by fair solidarity, by the spell of moral purity, by integrity, by the preservation of Személyem Köztársasága (Republic of the Self).
Social dramas
Nyolcvan vödör levegő (Eighty buckets of air) * Sándor Lezsák, known as a poet in the 1980s, wrote his social drama Eighty buckets of air in 1982, before the publication of his first book of poems. However, the author, considered an opposition (or even an enemy) by cultural policy, kept his play in a strange obscurity until the end of the decade. It was not performed in the theatre and could not be published in a book, but in 1985 it was allowed to be published, but only in the drama supplement of the Színház (Theatre) magazine. The two-character chamber play was first performed in 1988 at the Hevesi Sándor Színház (Hevesi Sándor Theatre) in Zalaegerszeg, directed by Béla Merő, to unparalleled success. It was subsequently staged by other companies: in 2005 at the Mosonmagyaróvár theatre, directed by Róbert Kurucz, and in 2022 in Veszprém, directed and co-starring Pál Oberfrank.
The drama, subtitled Tragikus komédia két részben (Tragic Comedy in Two Parts). The two-actor chamber play is unnamed, but is recognisably set sometime during the Kádár regime. An elderly couple in the lowlands, Old Man and Old Woman, fleeing from the prospect of a nuclear attack, build a bunker in the wall of the well they have dug in their house and settle down to a life of permanence. In fact, their life above is shifting underground: they have stockpiled everything they need to survive the nuclear attack (and until then). (And they even have three test rabbits with them – Mister Winston, Mister Dönci and Továris Józsi.) The Old Man builds all sorts of quirky gadgets that allow the Old Woman to go up to the upper world every now and then to replenish their reserves and justify their existence to their environment. Their time is spent nagging, waiting and exercising. At the end of the drama, however, the Old Woman makes a wrong move and destroys the exit, closing the bunker on them, leaving them with only eighty buckets of air, and no help.
The author calls the play a tragicomedy, the core of the story is indeed tragic, but it is less comic than grotesque. Gábor Mórocz likens it to the Becketian absurd, to A játszma vége (Game Over). There as well as here, dystopia, a negative vision of the future, and a doomsday mood define the characters' world view. In Páskándi's terminology, the play is rather absurdist. According to Páskándi, the story that is absurd and nonsensical in the West is not composed of existential anxiety in our country, but of a set of concrete historical and social causes. The Old Man's agitated monologue towards the end of Act I is the climax of the drama: from it we can understand his confusion, his mania for persecution, his terror of disaster. His persecution, his vulnerability, his silenced, unresolved, unprocessed past, all condense into a single surreal, terrifying event, and his personal experiences, as filtered through the radio news, can only lead him to the conclusion that destruction and fleeing is inevitable. They had fled to Hungary from across the border, fleeing deportation, with small children. “Did we find peace and calmness? We were banished! Yes, we were banished! And then the Council officers! Where did they hide the fat? How can you feed these four children, Aunt Mari?... What radio do you listen to, Aunt Mari? Where's your husband, Aunt Mari? We've hung a lot of spies lately, Aunt Mari!... And then the State Protection Authority officers... Why did your husband leave Stalin's town, Aunt Mari? Then a year and a half in the quarry! Barbed wire! Without a judgment!... And then 1956! We kept order! There was order here! We collected food... Then three years in prison for taking potatoes to Pest!... We can only trust ourselves! We must defend ourselves!”
On the other hand, the drama can be related to the grotesque of Örkény. Grotesque humour is a collision of very different qualities. Here, the routine of everyday life in a completely different situation becomes pathetically, grotesquely comic, because although what the drama presents cannot happen in reality, in the logic of things it could happen in reality. (Although, bizarre survivals such as the escape into the well were revealed in the years just after the regime change.) And of course, the Old Man's tyrannically egotistical commanding attitude towards his wife inevitably evokes the mad Major, and, far from it, the unfortunate Tót family's mindlessly senseless series of actions, boxing.
The censors of the time understood the message of the play perfectly – people are stuck in the unprocessed, unresolved past, in an unfair, humiliated life, going mad. Perhaps this was the message of the play received by the audience at its 1989 premiere, but subsequent performances have reinforced the universal message: the fear of man's destructibility at the hands of man: political, economic, military power, or a terrorist, or a madman with access to a gun.
Can man escape the horrors of the world, is there private happiness, individual redemption? – the drama asks the question. Old Man has become obsessed with the belief that only individual escape, individual redemption can exist in an anti-human age. But “fear eats the soul” (Fassbinder), and so he can no longer ask the obvious question: what is the point of survival if everything and everyone is destroyed? There is no individual salvation, the play confesses, the catastrophe they dread will, in the end, happen. The drama “presents an extremely reduced human world, the framework of which is defined in a biological sense by old age, in a social context by isolation, and in a psychological sense by obsessive thinking” (Gábor Mórocz, Sándor Lezsák: Nyolcvan vödör levegő (Eighty buckets of air). In: Magyar irodalmi művek (Hungarian Literary Works) 1956-2016. 2020, MMA Kiadó).
The other important plane of the play, which also testifies to the author's deep knowledge of human nature, is the socio-psychological plane of old age, with very real, human gestures. A couple live out their lives, they have raised their children, sometimes grandchildren appear, they have grown old, they are left alone. Old grievances are torn up and new grievances are born, isolation tests the marriage, the marriage's resilience is weakened, the Old Woman almost leaves the Old Man, and yet she stays. All their obsessions and issues stem from a common destiny, from a life shared, and can only be regrounded here. “The melancholy of passing, the loneliness of old age pervades the play, but nothing can separate the elderly couple, because they know that there is only one way to love in a relationship: unconditionally... Not only is Sándor Lezsák's work, put to paper forty years ago, embarrassingly topical, but it is also, beyond its absurdity, about the secret of what holds a relationship together for decades. And that is none other than the common task. A beautiful metaphor for this is the bunker that will never be finished, but which together they make livable.” (Miklós Csejk: It is worth sticking together. Sándor Lezsák's Eighty Buckets of Air is embarrassingly topical. Magyar Nemzet, 14 Oct 2022)
Nagypapa a bőröndben (Grandfather in a Suitcase) * Almost forty years, and regime change, separate the two social dramas. The author has given the drama Grandfather in the Suitcase, published in 2019, a baroquely long, interpretative subtitle: Groteszk népszínmű két részben (Grotesque Folk Drama in Two Parts), or a dramatic course play, with a mixing and mingling comedy, some crossover, but a good ending is still to come. It takes place somewhere in the Carpathian Basin, in the shadow of great mountains, in a valley cut by streams, in the once more populous, more prosperous dead-end village, where nearly five hundred indigenous Hungarians live. Time: April 2018, after Easter.
The second part of the subtitle's genre definition, folk theatre play, suggests lightness, light-heartedness, playfulness, love intrigues, mistakes, lots of linguistic humour, light-hearted fun and, of course, a happy ending, in the style of the 19th century romantic genre. The grotesque adjective, however, just about suspends its lightness, in fact, the second part of the subtitle refers to serious social and national issues: the present, the future and the chances of preserving the identity of Hungarians living beyond the border. The timing of the story is important: after Easter. The sacred holiday's name is presumably symbolic: after the resurrection, but before Pentecost. Perhaps we are not wrong to draw a parallel between Easter, the greatest Christian holiday, as (also) the change of regime, which precedes Pentecost, the consummation of souls. The seriousness of the play is confirmed by the author's instructions: he does not offer Bartók's Allegro barbaro as a musical accompaniment, but rather as a spiritual umbrella, as “the beating heart of our play, its historical soul” and the melodies of Hungarian folk music that filter in. The relationship between folk music and Bartók enters into a powerful dialogue, the Bartók music that resounds repeatedly recalls the interweaving of folk and universal culture.
The story of the play takes place in a village on the Hungarian border, where Hungarian population is dwindling. The author believes that it could be anywhere in the Carpathian Basin beyond our borders, but the events of the past suggest a more likely setting in Transylvania. One half of the family has emigrated to Hungary, taking Grandmother with them to guard the grandson – but Grandfather dies at home, and at Grandmother's request her corpse is dug out of the submerged graveyard, packed in a suitcase, and smuggled across the border to be reburied in Hungary. The morbid story (partly based on a real event), the seizure of the suitcase and its adventurous journey form the comic thread of the play, but the local primitive, brutal policeman, the district chief Zsigeri, intervenes, and from here on the half-past slowly unfolds, serious, suppressed and silenced facts are revealed. The calvary of the Hungarians who were torn apart after Trianon is shaped by the persecution and fate of Grandfather, Gáspár Fogarasy, a former secondary school teacher: the 1950s, deportation, the Gulag system, a brutal prison as part of the post-56 reprisals, prison again in '79 with many beatings, and then prison again after 1990 (i.e. the regime change), but Grandfather does not survive this. The past is not past – it was the fierce supporter and servant of the communist regime, the old Colonel Zsigeri, who denounced and took Grandpa away, leaving the hatred to his son: “the seeds of their hatred must be eradicated or they must be persecuted.” His son, the district chief, is worthy of his father even in peacetime, but at the very end of the play all the lies and falsehoods are exposed. A key character on this plane of the play is the deranged Palika, the “madman” who was dragged off to prison with Grandpa in 1990. “Here is a young historian's study, backed up by witnesses and facts, Colonel Zsigeri feared accountability and covered up the traces of his torture and interrogation of people by murdering those who would testify against him. That's why he beat Grandfather to death... I was beaten up, because I refused to trip up my fellow prisoner.” At the end of the play, Palika steps out of his role as a 'fool', dons a white cloak, behaves as if he were a doctor in a mental hospital (creating a broad intertext with works of world literature), no longer only speaks the truth, but has authority over nurses and patients.
The bravura of the play is that all the horror that would develop into tragedy or drama in a conventional play does not occur here. The author goes beyond the tragedy by combining the aforementioned comedy (grandfather in the suitcase) with a fairy tale from Áron Tamási, suspending the tragedy, and in fact this fairy tale – reminiscent of Énekes madár (The Singing Bird) - becomes the main message of the play: love, love of the homeland, the faith, promise and will of a new life are stronger than anything. On this plane of the play, a love is born between Máté, who has moved to Hungary, and Kiskató, who is loyal to his homeland and stays at home. The attraction has a heavy stake, the dilemma of Hungarians living beyond the border: to leave the perceived fate of the minority, which they saw as unfulfilling, or to return and start living, as Máté does. In fact, Grandmother also moves back, because only in one's homeland can one feel at home.
Lajos Szakolczay calls the play “a pathology of the Carpathian Basin”, “full of very realistic settings (village destruction, emigration, the horror of informers, etc.). Sándor Lezsák travelled the Carpathian Basin as a young man, researching and questioning the lives, fates and opportunities of Hungarians everywhere. In the dialogues of the play, he also incorporated his personal experience: in the figure of Grandfather, he also paid tribute to his own grandfather, and in Máté we can also discover his youthful folkloristic and community organiser self (between 1970 and 1985 he led a theatre group in Lakitelek, and Tamási's play The Singing Bird was performed several times). Grandfather in the Suitcase is a unique genre of play: it combines elements of dark tragedy, fairground comedy with a rich linguistic humour, folk theatre and fairy play in such a way that the poetics of everyday life and the realism of everyday fates are transformed into an exceptionally beautiful play.
Theatrical works about the old Hungarian history
Already several pieces of his first poetry collection showed Sándor Lezsák's fascination for the old Hungarian history, the historical past – and the archaic layers of the historical Hungarian language. After the repressed 1980s, his stage works, which deal with the great memories of the national past, took off in an elementary way. In 1993, he wrote the script of the rock opera Atila Isten Kardja (Atilla, Sword of God), he presents the romantic folk theatre play using István Nemeskürty's script in 2018, Atilla fia, Csaba királyfi (Atilla's Son, Prince Csaba), and in 2022 his oratorio (musical) play Az Ég tartja a Földet (The Sky Holds the Earth), based on Tünde Zsuffán's historical biography of St. Elisabeth of Árpádháza of the same title, is presented.
The premier of Atilla, Sword of God Atilla was in 1993 at the Margitszigeti Szabadtéri Színpad(Margaret Island Open-Air Stage) – its unparalleled audience success is indicated by the fact that instead of the planned four, sixteen performances took place during the season. According to a later interpretation, Atilla... was combined with István, a király (Stephen, the King) (1983) and Veled, Uram (With You, My Lord) (2000) to form a trilogy of historical rock operas, all three works with music composed by Levente Szörényi.
In the years following the change of regime, the need to revise the national past and national history, which had been falsified during the communist era, surfaced. The rock opera Atilla... brings the Hun-Hungarian legend back from the world of myths and legends to the real events of Hungarian history. In his introduction to the performance, Nemeskürty confirms that the Hun-Hungarian kinship of Hungarian folk tales is also historically real and authentic: “According to recent research, Attila sought to create the unity of Europe and sometimes collaborated with the military leaders of the Roman Empire. He did not attack Rome, because the pope paid him a visit and begged him to turn back… The basis and background of these legends is the fact that Attila's court included Christian priests, Byzantine Greek and Roman officials. Until the 19th century, Hungarian chroniclers began Hungarian history with Attila. The Attila myth is as much a part of German myths as it is of Icelandic myths. In Hungarian culture, the most vivid legends are Csaba and the Sword of God... In the Hungarian royal court, even in the times of Béla IV and Stephen V, the sword of Attila was still counted among the treasures.” (The ideological struggle of the time is well illustrated by the harsh criticism of the play's Hun-Hungarian relations in the Színház (Theatre) journal.)
The rock opera is set in the last years of Atilla's reign. The Hun Empire stretches from the Rhine to the Great Wall of China. Atilla no longer wants to go to war, but he still clashes with the Roman leader Aetius, and makes a pact with Rome, but he is surrounded by disloyalty, intrigue and treachery, there is strife between his women at home – he returns to his land, and after his death there is an internal war between his sons, only Csaba survives, he takes the sword and repeats Atilla's vow: “I live for my country and my people. / All my will: / To do good to my country / And to my people until my last breath.”
The poet published the work in a volume of collected poems, indicating the co-authorship (Szörényi, Nemeskürty, Lezsák) on the inner (cycle) title page. It is a joint undertaking, a joint work, the concept, the structure, the main characters are given, but the poems of the rock opera were written exclusively by Lezsák, so it is justified that he included them among his poems, as a kind of separate book. Accepting the author's genre designation, we should have reflected on it in the poems in the present writing, but it belongs closely to the stage work Son of Atilla, Prince Csaba, both thematically and in its manner.
The plot of Prince Csaba picks up where Atilla ended. After the collapse of the Hun Empire, Csaba takes refuge with the king of Koresmia around the Aral Sea and marries his daughter. In 478, he sets off west with one of his grown-up sons to prepare the land of the Carpathians, the former empire of Atilla, inhabited by Hungarians and Székelys, for his return. But everywhere he finds misery, treachery and the treacherous Western powers, and can only leave hope for his brothers and sisters in arms. Yet the framed piece ends with a bright serenity, a hymn to life, a hymn to the future. He fights Ady, Hungarians are not a people to be scattered, but worthy of rebirth, of finding one another. “Fish is in the Vistula and children / Are given by Polish women” Ady wrote, in the vision of the Lezsák play, the family and the unborn child are the greatest sacrament: “Attila's people, our nation is pregnant, it is in a blessed state, it has life, it has many little lives.”
Around the turn of the millennium, contemporary Hungarian writers came up with a series of historical novels. The novels of István Szilágyi, László Márton and János Háy dealt with the crisis of a country divided into three parts, and only exceptionally did contemporary writers turn to the period before the founding of the state, as Róbert Hász did in A künde (The Künde). Hász combined postmodern playfulness with (as far as possible) historical verisimilitude. In the absence of reliable sources, Lezsák also strives for plausible authenticity in his main lines (Atilla), but in the case of the Csaba play, in addition to prehistoric research, he relies on the Hungarian saga, the memory of the national soul that has been shaped over the centuries (the Székely people's expectation of the return of the leader Csaba is still a living saga). Csaba is a sumptuous retelling of history and myth with the greatest creative freedom, a poetic vision that speaks to the present with the parable of the past.
The subtitle of Prince Csaba is Romantikus népszínmű 12 tételben (Romantic folk play in 12 movements). In his choice of genre, Lezsák distances himself from classical drama and theatre, and this time too he revives the romantic, folk tradition. The search for the old homeland, for the Hungarians who remained in the Carpathian Basin, is carried out in parallel. One plane is the profane, comic, and foolishly conversational duo of two fairground characters, Bönge and Mezge, who are both fooling around with the Hungarian language. The other plane is a tableau with many characters, befitting the king and his entourage, and a serious dignity. The alternation of these two story planes makes the epic plot more dramatic, imbued with strong lyricism.
One of the most significant contributions and most exciting components of the pieces is the joyful immersion in the beauty of the Hungarian language by incorporating old elements, and the renewal of old verse forms. Atilla – a verse script, a drama in verse. The poet uses a sophisticated, somewhat solemnised vernacular to tell the story, but the work 'speaks' in verse throughout. Lezsák uses the archaic poetic forms with almost encyclopaedic completeness: rhymes, charmers, heroic songs, nature songs, shamanic and táltos songs, old Hungarian folk poetry, Csángó songs, archaic prayers – his language-abundance and language-creating power are akin to the language creation of István Bella and Ferenc Buda.
The language of Csaba is a slightly lyricised spoken language that is accessible to today's living vernacular. Here, the atmosphere of antiquity is built on the meticulous incorporation of the nomadic culture of the conquest/pre-conquest period, enriched by archaic poetic interpolations. He imitates archaic forms while at the same time reinventing their genesis, as in the táltos song of Turbolya: “Kauka, kauka, stone mountains. / I'm going up to the top. / Mistress Réka in the castle tree, / every stone is a blessing. // Kauka, kauka, sun stones, / Lady tells our future: / When our souls meet, / My son Csaba returns home!” The verse insertion is not an end in itself, not a decoration, it has a function, a “useful” role in the community, here it is performed as part of a pagan sacral rite.
Sándor Lezsák shows the beauty, dignity, truth and lovability of the national historical past by presenting the mythological heroes of the Hun-Hungarian mythological world, the ancient language and songs. However, his works also directly translate into the parable of the present through his exhortations and allusions. Atilla's empire fell apart, Prince Csaba could not return, but our losses and failures cannot break us: “Only those who know how to lose can win. We have lost our Father, the ancient land of our father Nimrud has been cut in pieces, the armies of the conquering fathers are coming to take the field, but our souls and our faith cannot be cut down.” (Prince Csaba)
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“An extraordinary career, an extraordinary lifestyle.” (Szakolczay) Sándor Lezsák's life's work as a poet, playwright and children's poet is inextricably intertwined with his presence as an organiser of intellectual forces. With his deep commitment to his country, his nation, his language, his spiritual heritage and social solidarity, the Republic of the Self has raised the most important questions of our past and present and given valid, authentic ethical and aesthetic answers. His multifaceted, value-preserving and value-creating work has become an inescapable oeuvre at the turn of the millennium.
In an interview with Péter Spengler, Sándor Lezsák said that the situation of his poem Társai elmentek Megváltót nézni… (His Companions Went to See the Saviour…)” is the one he feels most his own. While the others celebrate the Saviour, the biblical shepherd of the poem watches over the flock left behind: 'Terrible suspicion / settles in me, / the flock is destroyed, / while there is rejoicing in Bethlehem. [...] Such was my life, / I was always the remnant, / the last hope of my mind, / that you find salvation in Bethlehem.”
[2022]