Tematikus lapszámunk a 2023. június 15–16-án tartott debreceni tudományos konferencia anyagán alapul. Petőfi életműve és kultusza (Szövegek, városok, történetek, 1823–2023) címmel rendezett bicentenáriumi tanácskozásunkat a Déri Múzeum–Debreceni Irodalom Háza, a Debreceni Egyetem Magyar Irodalom- és Kultúratudományi Intézetének Magyar Emlékezethelyek Kutatócsoportja, valamint a Debreceni Református Kollégium Nagykönyvtára és Múzeuma készítette elő és rendezte meg, jelen lapszám szerkesztői, illetve Lakner Lajos irányításával – a fentieken túl a Nemzeti Kulturális Alap, a Debreceni Egyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kara, a Tiszántúli Református Egyházkerület, valamint Debrecen Megyei Jogú Város Önkormányzata támogatásával.

The term of Biedermeier – which was used to describe the interior style of the middle class at first and then it was connected to some of the literary phenomena in the first half of the 19th century – made it possible to interpret the culture of the modern city and the urban middle class – o’en creating an opposition between the city and its antithesis, the country. The questions connected to urbanitas were o’ften discussed in the most important space of the culture of modernity: the press. They published articles and reports on foreign cities as well as the forming middle class culture of Buda and Pest in the fast-spreading metropolitan journals. The city and the country are recurring themes in the poetry of Sándor Petőfi along with the different lifestyles and identities connected to them. The first collection of Petőfi, which was published on 10 November 1844, caught people’s attention because of the way the poet’s role was represented in it: Petőfi’s poetic identity is the innocent and moral child of the nation – he is the one who has just arrived in the city, showing what the people are really like. However, the collection entitled Poems 1842-44 does not represent the culture that could by described by sociological or ethnographic terms, but rather the folk culture seen through the lenses of a Biedermeier (urban) culture: Petőfi therefore constructed the image of the country for the city.

This paper analyses Petőfi’s Travel Notes which documents his travels in Upper Hungary. It examines Petőfi’s work as a source of identity construction, focusing on the texts creating his own sense of being Hungarian. They show us that taking possession of the national landscape and past comes with the appropriation of some parts of the aristocratic identity.

The poem collecting notebooks had an important role from the beginning in the history of Petőfi editions – especially in terms of philology. This paper, however, does not focus on the philological importance of these manuscripts, but examines their function instead: why is it important that Petőfi created an autographical collection of texts for archival purposes? Petőfi started this method as early as the beginning of his career and the publishing agreements made it even clearer that his poems have market value not only as separate items, but also as a whole. Therefore, it was worth keeping the notebooks in order to establish the basics of a future collection.

Romantic poetry can be described with the conflicting terms of tradition and originality: its essence is not originality in the strict sense, but rather the deformation of tradition. The sovereignty of the Romantic poet does not come from the negation of tradition, but from acquiring and using it consciously. The paper discusses two poems of Petőfi which anticipate the unity of experience and representation, but they both end with arguing for the impossibility of such union. In What Shall I Call You? metaphorical expression becomes a questionable method, while in A Time of Fear narrative sense-making connected to temporal experiences turns out to be impossible. Both poems face the limits of expression, although in different ways: What Shall I Call You? deals with the impossibility of verbalising individual experiences, while A Time of Fear comes to the same conclusion regarding collective experiences. The two poems demonstrate it well how Petőfi initiated a phenomenon representative of the late Romantic period.

Sándor Petőfi’s novel, The Hangman’s Rope, published in 1846, has been a source of controversy for researchers since its publication, its position within Petőfi’s oeuvre and in the literature of the period has not been stabilised. ŸThis study attempts to discuss Petőfi’s novel not in isolation, but as an integral part of the period’s burgeoning prose literature, primarily by grouping together texts in which the concept of revenge is the main thematic component and its elaboration and its mode of execution may have prose-poetic significance. In this analysis, Petőfi’s short novel will be compared exclusively with prose works, and precisely because of its specificity in terms of length, I have tried to collect and analyse both thematically similar novels and short prose published in journals or volumes.

The oeuvre of Sándor Petőfi is one of the most well-researched one, still it has parts which are – paradoxically – lesser-known in the literary consciousness. The prose of Petőfi can be seen as a “blind spot” which has not been integrated into the curriculum of public education and it was hardly ever discussed in the professional discourse as this corpus was considered to have a marginal status. Petőfi, who oŸen declared his versatility in the 1840s, translated prose and experimented with different narrative techniques in his novel and short stories. Petőfi’s short stories are strongly connected to the financial aspects of publishing, however, they should not be viewed simply as “fillers” since these texts can be analysed from a literary perspective, considering the variation of genre conventions, narrative styles and tones in these experimental short stories which interact with the other texts of the oeuvre, as well. This paper reviews Petőfi’s latest published short story regarding the reality effects of the text.

Th›is paper examines the role of Petőfi and Kossuth – two important figures in the Hungarian historical memory – in the events of 1848 which was a turning point in history, and it led to changing the existing structures. Moreover, the paper discusses how Petőfi and Kossuth tried to interpret recent historical events and the ways they tried to make the public accept these interpretations.

ThŠe history of Sándor Petőfi’s visual representations can be examined with the concept of the true image of Hans Belting which makes a connection between faith and picture: the existence of Christ is confirmed by portraits for Christian worshipers and pictures have their devotional function for Christian communities. ŠThere are many portraits and genre paintings made during Petőfi’s life, but thanks to his cult there were many pictures painted of him even after his death. It is known to posterity that his portrait was recorded in a daguerreotype in the 1840s, but its status in his cult is still uncertain, because it was only found in 1868 in the legacy of her wife Júlia Szendrey, meaning that his depictions right after his death were based above all on the painting tradition and the personal practice of remembrance. In the 1870’s, after the presentation of the daguerreotype to the larger public, there was a debate in the press about the true image of Petőfi, which shows a rivalry between artistic and technical portraits. In my paper, I review the changing relationship between Petőfi’s pictorial representations and the concept of the true image in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Petőfi not only became (remained) an extremely popular figure in the literary, journalistic, and critical discourses of the 1850s, but his figure and literary heritage – in addition to national pantheonization and widespread popularization – also became a competition for the appropriation of competing memory constructions and commemorative communities. The dilemma arises: how could personal grief be given a public voice in this communication dumping? Were the media, discursive and genre frameworks of the era at all suitable for the literary representation of the depths of grief? Or do media noise and public forms necessarily empty private dimensions? If we ask these questions, perhaps the seemingly suffocating atmosphere of Hungary in the middle of the 19th century does not seem so distant and foreign.

Th›e study examines two articles published simultaneously by Kornél Tábori which contain a detailed description of Sándor Petőfi’s visit to Mezőtúr and record the circumstances of the creation of two poems purportedly written by Petőfi. ›e research takes an account of contemporary sources to uncover the sequence of events that form the basis of the two articles. While the available data suggests that the texts record fictitious events, they are nevertheless of an academic interest when examined as legends from the perspective of folklore literature. Th›e essay also uncovers the parallels between the legend and the tropes connected to the story recorded by Tábori. Tábori’s two texts are included in the study as appendices.

•The concept of freedom plays a central role not only in Petőfi’s reception, but also in constructing the poet’s own image and it is the base of the cults of Petőfi as well. His poem, •The Plains is of central importance in this process: the metaphorization and the semantization of the concept of freedom happens through this poem in public education. It is also responsible for the specifically national image of freedom which facilitates the process of making the national images of the 19-20th literature a factor in forming a collective identity. However, the central metaphor for freedom in •The Plains is very specific: it expresses negation rather than standing up for values – freedom from something rather than freedom to do something. In this paper I would argue that this metaphor can be used effectively in different kinds of cults. Even though the metaphor seemingly serves its purpose well in constructing the collective identity and it can have a strong emotional-mobilizational aspect, it also poses a lot of problems for further analysis.

The Apostle is the most elusive work of Petőfi and its reception is just as telling as the work itself. —The homogenous consensus on Petőfi’s poetry was challenged by The Apostle as it is significantly different from the rest of the oeuvre both in terms of content and poetics. That is why this work was underrated or simply was not mentioned in the early reception; later it was merely interpreted as an ideological and poetical statement without taking into consideration the poetic inventions of the text. Moreover, the whole text was published 25 years aŠfter it had been written, therefore it could not be integrated into the image of Petőfi. —This paper focuses on the presence of the text in the hidden canon of the 19th century, emphasizing that the influential folk-national style could not have come into existence without recognising The Apostle: the text (could have) had the potential of an alternative canonical development because of its irregularities and the obvious ignorance of the categories ’folk’ and ’national’.

Szilágyi Márton: A magyar romantika ikercsillagai: Jókai Mór és Petőfi Sándor, Budapest, Osiris, 2021.