Reform Era, love and poetry: Júlia Szendrey and Sándor Petőfi

In 1847, Júlia Szendrey married Sándor Petőfi, the most important Hungarian poet of the era, who, a few months later, in March 1848, played a key role in the outbreak of the Hungarian revolution demanding bourgeois transformation and freedom of the press. Petőfi took an active part both as a poet and as a soldier in the revolution and the following War of Independence of 1848-1849 (separation from the Habsburg Empire) until he disappeared in one of the last battles.

Júlia Szendrey, left alone with their common child, searched for him unsuccessfully for a long time in the following months. In July 1850, she fled her desperate situation into a new marriage to Árpád Horvát, who worked as a university professor.

Most of her contemporaries deeply condemned her action, as they would have expected her to spend the rest of her life in the role of "the nation's widow". The new marriage was evaluated as a rejection of this, a betrayal of her husband and her country. Although by the 1860s she had become a recognized writer (the most significant female poet, writer and translator of the era), only the figure of the muse and the unfaithful wife who threw away the widow's veil was fixed in the cultural memory. Her image until the turn of the century was almost unanimously negative, taking a new direction only then.

Why and how did Júlia Szendrey, considered as a masculine personality in the 19th century, become a symbol of emancipated, modern femininity in the 20th century? Why did she become the "Hungarian George Sand"? The lecture seeks answers to these questions, researching how the great Hungarian and European female roles (muse, writer's wife, blue stockings, eccentric woman, revolutionary woman, femme fatale) are represented in the texts and works about Júlia Szendrey by the authors grouped around the magazine Nyugat, symbol of modernity.

Petőfi's oeuvre and cult become the origin of Hungarian national literature and even national consciousness, due to the fact that his oeuvre the most fully represents the essence of the change in the cultural model, which made a narrow elitist culture accessible to a wider range of people and thus became an identification base. It is not birth and wealth, but culture that identifies the individual in the larger community (meaning: nation).

Paradoxically, Petőfi's program achieved its unique success by spectacularly and radically violating the norms of the literary culture that prevailed until then. In this lecture, I will try to present some elements of Petőfi's norm-breaking by examining the Petőfi phenomenon itself.

We often look at the Reform Era from the perspective of the revolution and freedom fight of 1848-1849, thus the misconception sticks to it that its goal was to break away from the Habsburg ruling house. This is a mistake: this last idea only arose during the war of independence and was divisive even then. The real goal of the Reform Era was social reform, the modernization of the country, hand in hand with the elevation of national culture and the idea of liberalism and of freedom.

The concept of the nation acquires a new interpretation from the beginning of the 19th century. It no longer only applied to the elite, the nobility. From then on, the common culture and language formed a cohesive force, spanning denominational and religious boundaries. This is when the national cultural attributes are formed: the anthem, national cuisine, national music, etc.

However, the national idea also appeared among the nationalities that made up more than half of Hungary's population. Therefore, the outstanding thinkers of the Reform Era expected from liberalism and civil equality that the idea of freedom would be able to become more important than nationalism among the Slavs, for example. Unfortunately, this did not happen, and we saw where the dreams of nation-states led us later with the Trianon decision.

To sum up: in the Reform Era underdeveloped conditions prevailed in Hungary. The made it significant was precisely the idea of reform, homeland and progress made. The determined intention to change Hungary's conditions, to create a modern country, a state based on civil equality in which every member of the nation has equal rights. That is why it is called the Reform Era: the age of reforms, when we break away from the old and build a better, new one. The lecture presents these goals and the path leading to them.