Sándor Petőfi (Kiskőrös 1822 – ?, probably c.1849), the most celebrated Hungarian literary icon of the 19th century, was born under the name Alexander Petrovits as the first child of a Slovakian mother and father. His birthplace, in the western part of the Hungarian Lowlands, became a matter of debate, because it was of ideological importance to decide whether he happened to be born in a settlement inhabited by Slovaks or by Hungarians in the ethnically mixed region of Kiskunság. Petőfi’s parents spoke fluent though broken Hungarian. It was also a matter of controversy whether what later recollections referred to as a “characteristic Highland pronunciation” on his parents’ side was due to a Hungarian dialect or to a Slovakian accent. The boy was encouraged to use Hungarian with a view towards future career opportunities; as an adult Petőfi also spoke fluent Slovakian, albeit with increasing reluctance. His Lutheran background – although Petőfi later abandoned religion, Lutheranism was concentrated in Hungary’s Slovak population – also set him apart to some extent. When his fame as a poet started to rise, his non-Hungarian background gave occasion for malicious hints from his critics; posthumously, such inconveniences in the biography of the acknowledged national poet posed an ongoing challenge to late-19th- and 20th-century Hungarian literary histories. As János Horváth concluded his immense monograph on Petőfi (published in 1922 as part of the state-organized centenary): “Let us bless the cradle that rocked him Hungarian.”

During Petőfi’s school time, his father’s business declined and he was shifted through changing institutions, mostly within the Lutheran educational system (he also attended, among several others, the Piarist, that is, Catholic, gymnasium in Pest and the Calvinist gymnasium in Pápa); he never attended university. In the Lutheran middle school of Pest he was the pupil (and even the confirmee) of Jan Kollár, but neither of them has left any (documented) remembrance of the connection. Amidst his wanderings, acting was his enduring passion: he made use of his skills when reciting his poetry at public occasions, or, as in 1848, at political rallies.

Petőfi’s public career as a poet lasted for a mere seven years: from 1842 (when he published his A borozó, “The wine-drinker”, still under the name Sándor Petrovics, in the leading Romantic periodical of the time, Athenaeum) until 1849 (when he was “lost in action” during a battle in the Hungarian war for independence). His figure invites us to imagine a Körner-type of martyr-poet fighting the nation’s enemies with one hand and writing poetry with the other, but, as a matter of fact, while during 1848-49 Petőfi was present at several battles, he most probably never took part in actual combat.

His prose output is not insignificant: a handful of short stories and a novel, A hóhér kötele (“The hangman’s rope”, written in the sensationalist French manner), drama, travel notes, and translations (including a few pieces from Schiller, Shelley, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus); but Petőfi’s fame rests on an oeuvre of almost 1,000 pieces of lyrical poetry. His trademark genre, the Romantic Lied (dal), drew in equal parts on Hungarian folklore sources familiar to him from his youth and on contemporaries like Béranger and Heine. It was mainly through his poetry that his birth region (the puszta) came to be canonized as Hungary’s national landscape, but the world of untameable village scoundrels (the hard-drinking, womanizing, and occasionally thieving betyár or the csikós) that many of his early poems portrayed also had affiliations with the Romantic ethnotype of Hungary in Austrian Biedermeier poetry (Nikolaus Lenau, Karl Beck). Petőfi’s poetry was, therefore, also able to appeal to the Austrian literary scene; it appeared in comprehensive volumes of German translations from the late 1840s. His heroic death inspired Bettina von Armin to write her 1851 ode Petőfi dem Sonnengott, and his work even reached the young Nietzsche, who composed music for three of his songs.

Both in conservative and (equally nationalistic) Marxist-communist literary histories, Petőfi was celebrated as the ultimate synthesis of genuine folk poetry and high art. Nowadays his work is seen to be rooted rather in the tradition of public poetry: occasional lyrical pieces written and publicly recited at social and political events. In a non-professional literary field cultivated by college students, village vicars, and countryside schoolteachers, pieces of public poetry circulated in handwritten copies and anonymously edited collections, often accompanied by musical notes. As they worked along a similar social and textual dynamic (no authors designated, texts exist in constant rewriting, collections circulate as permutations of one another) and their stock genres, topics, and forms largely overlapped, folk and public poetry were indistinguishable even in the eyes of contemporaries: following the public call for collecting Hungarian folk poetry in the 1840s, most pieces forwarded by amateur collectors to the Hungarian Academy belonged to the field of public poetry rather than traditional folk poetry. However, as public poetry collections were usually multilingual (reflecting the diverse traditions of the different ethnicities in the Hungarian kingdom), this stood at odds with the Romantic notion of folk art being the authentic poetic expression of a nation’s ethnic identity and experience.

The main readership and breeding ground of public poetry, the rural lower/middle-class intelligentsia, also constituted the basis of the immense popularity Petőfi achieved by the mid-1840s, Burns-style. Petőfi, on his many walking tours of the country, was keen to meet and impress this audience face-to-face. Accordingly, the parallel between his popular affiliations and his artistic ambitions unfolded in a peculiar dynamic: through the media of public poetry his own poems themselves already started to be (re)folklorized during his lifetime. They appeared in handwritten collections without author attributions, and many of them were sent in to the official collectors as examples of genuine folk poetry.

Petőfi cultivated his image as a naive people’s poet (witness his A természet vadvirága, “Nature’s wildflower”), but also made deliberate use of the modern infrastructure of literary life, both urban and rural. He built a nationwide network of supporters and propagators, and very consciously designed (and constantly redesigned) his public image. When in 1844 he took up employment at a literary weekly in Pest, he swaggered around the city centre in a simulacrum of rustic dress so as to capitalize on the publicity value of the image of the folk poet; yet in 1847 he was the first living poet in Hungarian literary history to have his poetry published in a sumptuous complete edition. As the head of the “Society of Ten” (a group of young Romantics also including the novelist Mór Jókai, whose venue at the Café Pilvax would become the headquarters of the revolutionary activities of March 1848), Petőfi strenuously fought for the due legal and aesthetic acknowledgement and remuneration of literature as a form of labour. In 1847 he organized the first literary strike in Hungary, when he and the Ten refused to publish in certain literary weeklies. After marrying the proto-feminist (and aspiring poet) Júlia Szendrey in 1847, Petőfi became the first in Hungarian literature to achieve a middle-class living standard solely from his literary revenues.

Petőfi’s experiences as a would-be actor might also have contributed to his image-consciousness. Though later he came to be praised for the “poetical sincerity” with which he documented his real-life events in lyrical pieces on an almost daily basis, allegedly achieving a perfect convergence of life and art, his poetry involves constant lyrical role-playing. He launched his career as a celebrated poet of drinking songs while remaining abstinent all his life. From 1847 he fervently studied the history of the 1789 French Revolution (foremost Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins), in which he found a stock of characters and roles and events he intended to re-enact or replicate during 1848-49. Petőfi used several pen names – “Petőfi” (a Hungarian patronymic calqued on the Slovak “son of Peter” original) was actually one of them: adopted from 1842 on as a declaration of his Hungarian (cultural) identity, he never officially changed his birth name. The various signature forms (Petrovits > Petrovich > Petrovics) signal a growing conformity to Hungarian orthography.

Reportedly a man of irascible temper, Petőfi was also a man of deep contradictions. A stubborn propagator of subversive political ideas on the one hand; a poet of Biedermeier love-songs and marriage idylls (sometimes banal, sometimes sexually overheated) on the other. In his revolutionary poetry he urged for republican “world liberty” – but also evinced fanatically nationalistic intolerance of all those ethnic minorities (including Slovaks) who failed to make common cause with the Magyar-dominated Hungarian state of 1848-49. Petőfi was no traditionalist or historicist. In the summer of 1848 his poem A nemzetgyűléshez (“To the National Assembly”) called for the construction of a “new fatherland” by discarding every crumbling stone from the “old building” of the historical constitution. Although he set great store by “sacred memories”, he was scathingly dismissive of the poetry of his immediate Hungarian predecessors, both classicist and Romantic, and had a very limited interest in the history of Hungarian literature altogether. What he envisaged instead was a new Hungarian literature by and for the people, accompanied by their elevation to political power through a French-inspired republican constitution.

His most influential poem was Nemzeti dal (“National song”). Calling for action (“Rise, Hungarians, the fatherland calls”), it was publicly recited at least four times in the streets of Pest on the revolutionary day of 15 March 1848. After the triumph of the revolution he felt he had instigated, Petőfi threw himself into politics, but was disappointed by his non-election to the new parliament for his native Kiskunság (mainly due to his radicalism and republicanism). This incident triggered his novel in verse “The apostle” (unpublished until the 1870s), which portrays the failed life of a revolutionary who turns into an anarcho-terrorist and faces the hatred of the very people to whose service he had dedicated his life. Despite his declining political popularity, he continued to write propaganda poetry (battle songs published by government journals and prints) in order to raise the military spirit, urging popular resistance in an apocalyptic tone.

After his mysterious disappearance/death in 1849, which itself contributed to the Romantic myth around his figure, Petőfi continued to have a huge impact on literary and public life. In the early 1850s his spirit lived on not only through his many literary followers, or indeed the dozens of fake-Petőfis (most of them spies of the Austrian police) presenting themselves at country estates seeking shelter, but also in what was quite literally an “afterlife”. After the defeat of the revolution, the Hungarian public engaged in a variety of spiritual practices such as table-rapping, either to seek contact with missing relatives or to get political guidance from the spectral world. In these séances, Petőfi proved to be the most commonly manifested apparition (besides the executed prime minister, Count Lajos Batthyány). When his spectre was successfully summoned, he even dictated some of his posthumous poetry to the medium. What fuelled the myth around his death was that his corpse was never recovered. The legend of him having been taken hostage by Russian troops and deported to Siberia (where he allegedly remarried and continued writing poetry both in Hungarian and Russian) inspired a privately funded archeological mission even in the 1990s, amid harsh public debates and the official disapproval of the Hungarian Academy.

Despite his ambivalent ethnic background and harsh critical debates about the aesthetic quality of his work, Petőfi was already raised to the status of the national poet in his lifetime. In this respect he took the place formerly occupied by Mihály Vörösmarty, the author of the 1825 verse epic Zalán futása (“Zalán’s flight”, depicting the 9th-century conquest of the Carpathian Basin by the Hungarian tribes, in a stylistic combination of Ossianic sentiment and Virgil-style hexameters). It was the novelist József Eötvös who in 1847 first stressed that Petőfi is “above all, Hungarian; even his most trifling work bears the stamp of nationhood, and that is why not only his words but the feelings they express are understood by every Hungarian”. Following this line of thought, in his later cult Petőfi was raised up not only as the pre-eminent national poet, but also the proper embodiment of everything Hungarian (mentality, landscape, poetic form), that is, the manifestation of the Hungarian spirit itself. After choosing to be a Hungarian, Petőfi grew to be the incarnation of Hungarian-ness.

His first statue was erected in 1882 in the centre of Budapest. At the unveiling ceremony Mór Jókai insisted that Petőfi must be delighted to see that what he had fought for (liberty, national revival, prosperity) had finally been achieved and the nation had finally found a beloved king – the same Franz Joseph whose execution Petőfi wished to bring about, volunteering to pull the rope… (thus in his poem “Hang the Kings!”, December 1848). Every regime since then has embraced and utilized the Petőfi cult, as has each political movement, from nationalism to the early socialists. His legacy has in equal measure been instrumentalized to fuel dissident thought or to underpin official state ideologies – be it conservative, communist, or liberal.

What is striking in his treatment in Hungarian literary histories is that in parallel with the raising of his figure to unprecedented and unsurpassed heights in the national cultural pantheon, his critical appraisal was based on a very restricted view of his oeuvre. His 1846 volume Felhők (“Clouds”, a cycle of short and deliberately fragmented pieces of German-style philosophical poetry), which definitely failed to suit the image of the folk poet, was considered a detour or a “temporary crisis” in his poetical development well into the late 20th century. In his immediate afterlife those elements of his folklore affiliations that seemed to lack artistic touch (“uncouthly rustic” or “coarse”) were carefully dismissed, as were the poems awaiting revolutionary terror in 1848-49. These neglected pieces came to constitute the core of his oeuvre during the communist era. In these attempts to tame his legacy, even his Romanticism was reluctantly acknowledged. Literary historians from various critical and ideological stances attempted to save him from the label “Romantic” and elevate his legacy to “national classicism” or “lyrical realism” – conservatives considering Romanticism an “alien” and “cosmopolitan” movement, unable, in its excessive individualism or irrationalism, to mirror the Hungarian psyche; communists seeing Romanticism as a “reactionary art-form” inconsistent with Petőfi’s “revolutionary realism”.