The Uses of Biblical Narrative: Gyula Illyés and the Making of a National Poet

Gyula Illyés (1902-83) has often been called the national poet in twentiethcentury Hungary. The familiar master narrative about his life maintains that he was born on a humble Transdanubian farmstead, and after the vicissitudes of childhood he moved to Budapest, got involved with the 1919 revolution, had to leave the country, and by 1922 he was in Paris where he could have chosen the glossy career of a chic, elegant, Frenchified or international poet, but instead he returned to his own people and became their committed spokesman in his works, living up to the example of his role-model Sándor Petőfi, the great nineteenth-century national poet. But focusing on a poem Illyés wrote in 1931, "The Prophet," one can realize how inadequate such a narrative can be. Written five years after Illyés came home from Paris, the poem recalls memories of a childhood event and reveals that Illyés adopted the role of the Petőfi-style national poet by adapting it to an ancient prophetic model, that of his namesake, the biblical prophet Elijah. It is in the light of poems like "The Prophet" that the Central-Eastern-European tradition of the national poet (the poet as a spiritual leader, a spokesman of the people when addressing God, or that of God when talking to the people) should be reconsidered. Some fractions in Hungarian literature applaud this role as the most vital part of their heritage, others deplore it as embarrassingly obsolete, and the fierce debate indicates one of the deepest schisms in Hungarian culture. Illyés's oeuvre, however, is a fine example of how efficiently the emblematic figure of the national poet could integrate prophetic traditions.