János Kodolányi
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János Kodolányi (Kodolányi János; Telki, March 13, 1899 – Budapest, August 10, 1969) Hungarian writer of short stories, dramas, novels and sociographies.
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[edit] His life
He was born in Telki, Hungary. His father was a forestry counsellor. Kodolányi attended gymnasium (high school) in Pécs and Székesfehérvár. His childhood was full of family and individual tragedies. One of his legs became lame because of Achilles ligament atrophy.
He married Matild Csősz in 1921. His family wasn't pleased with this marriage. He opposed his family's middle-class views and left home for Budapest in 1922. For many years he led very a difficult life in pursuit of his ideals and literary career. He was a member of a Communist writers’ group between 1922-1923 (later, during World War II, he gave up Socialism and Communism), and worked as a staff member of many periodicals and as a chief editor for some of them.
He was secretary of the Writers’ Economical Fellowship (IGE, Írók Gazdasági Egyesülete) between 1932 and 1944; in 1944 he became its general secretary.
Kodolányi made study tours to Finland in 1936, 1937 and 1938. He was a friend and joint labourer of the Finnish writer Arvi Järventaus. Kodolányi became co-president of the Janus Pannonius Society in 1941, and chief editor of Tiszántúl in Debrecen, in the same year.
When the power of the Communists rose (Hungarian Workers Party, MDP) he was considered persona non grata in cultural life because of his Christian faith, independent thinking and writings. He was forbidden to publish from 1946 until the late fifties.
[edit] Prose and politics
He became famous as a sociographic and fictive short-story writer (in his early times, he identificated himself as radical leftist, e.g. he sympathized with illegal communist movement). His prose fiction often draws on autobiographical materials. He was considered to be a populist author seeking reform in imaginative and sociographic writings, socialistic but highly independent. A great deal of his influences came from Marxism and Freudism.
Between 1930-1945, he turned to Hungarian past as subject for historical novels, in which he seeks to discover lasting characteristics of Hungarian people. Julianus barát (Frater Julian) has been translated into Italian, and some of his short stories were published in English, French, German, Italian, and Serbian.
In this time he changed some of his views. He thought that Socialism could solve global but not local problems. He oriented himself to the right side more and more. He wrote to nationalist papers, but he opposed Nazism, Fascism and was against Hitler. He joined to the group of the anti-Nazi resistant Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky (a representative in the Parliament of the Independent Smallholders' Party) and a group of writers, the "Folk Writers" (népi írók), along with László Németh, Gyula Illyés, Géza Féja, Zsigmond Móricz and others. He agreed with the political views of László Németh, which he called the „The Third Way for Hungary” (neither Nazism, nor Communism).
He was both ridden during fascism and communism. By writing a memorandum to Miklós Horthy jr.'s Secession Office, he got involved into anti-Nazi activities and that's why he had to escape from Balatonakarattya to Budapest in 1944. After Nazis been defeated, an anti-Nazi witch-hunt started by some bourgeois newspapers. Some of the folk writers (like József Erdélyi) really collaborated with Nazis more or less, but men (like Kodolányi or Lőrinc Szabó) were mired too despite they weren't related at all with them. After Géza Féja had been arrested, Kodolányi had to escape from Budapest to Pécs, where he was safer, but he was prohibited to publish anything. He retreated to his house in Balatonakarattya. He wrote his greatest mythic, magic realistic novels there (Vízöntő [Aquarius], Új ég, új föld [New sky, new land], Égő csipkebokor [Flaming thorn]), Én vagyok (I am). He found his way back to the great myths of mankind, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible and the stories of Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh, Moses, Jesus and Judas.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- János Kodolányi in Hunlit, the on-line multilingual database of Hungarian Book Foundation on Hungarian literature
- Bibliographical Handbook of Hungarian Authors by Albert Tezla; online var. Orig. vers. published at The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, 1970
