[In the following essay, Radnóti outlines the evolution of Hungarian poet György Petri from a writer of official state publications to one of the samizdat, not because Petri was interested in making a political statement, but because he opposed artistic interference by the state of even the slightest detail.]

Many years ago, when Yevgeny Yevtushenko was in Budapest and, as it happened, he wanted to meet young Hungarian intellectuals, his interpreter brought him around. “Zhenia” did some clowning; he had a fool's cap with him and proceeded to tell us which world-famous movie queen had presented it to him; somewhat coquettishly he even let us guess on what occasion. The evening wore on; the poet, like those true conquering, narcissistic natures, wished to please: everyone, anyone. There was only one serious moment the whole evening. I wanted to know about Khrushchev, for I thought it was symbolic the way he—to make amends, as it were, for his reform plans—had exposed the then new Russian poetry to his henchman Ilychov's whip. Still quite lively, Yevtushenko told us that after Khrushchev's ouster, he befriended the old man and frequently visited him in his dacha. Indoors, they conversed; in the garden they talked. Once—the poet for the first and last time that evening turned somber—Khrushchev said something very strange to him. “You'll always write poems that'll get published. You'll also write some which will get you into trouble, and sometimes they'll publish them and sometimes not. And then you'll write some poems that will never see the light of day. And these will be your real poems.” “Why is this strange?” we asked. “Because it's true.”

The émigré Andrey Sinyavski would concur; according to him there exists but one Russian literature in our day—the literature of samizdat. It goes without saying that neither the celebrated poet's rare moment of honesty nor the exiled writer's bitter appraisal holds true for all of Russian literature. From that vast realm—and not only from the underground but also from its above-ground sector—a true work does reach us now and then: after the martyrology of the Gulag, a work like Poor Avrosimov. And although in the empire and in its satellites the word samizdat has the same denotation, wherever you go it means something different. The shared similarity, of course, is that in each of these countries a work that is permitted to be published is branded by that permission; the act of publication becomes a political act. Whatever the work expresses is rendered, politically and all but retroactively, expressible. Apparently free artistic expression becomes, in reality, officially sanctioned apology, or harmless whimsy. Still, while licensing is a political act, literary creation as such is not—not even if the product is a political poem. The outer and inner censor weighs sentences, sniffs allegories—to the whole he pays no heed. In samizdat literature the reverse is true; it is its illicit character, the risk its publication entails, that makes its appearance a political phenomenon. Samizdat expresses all that, in the political sense, is inexpressible. But it runs the risk of remaining a captive of this liberty, of becoming its own reciprocal censor; instead of searching out its own truth, it selects and regards as proper only that which may not be legally expressed. When this happens, licensed and non-licensed acts interlock, indistinguishably.

However, this is only one side of samizdat, the one shared by all of Europe's non-democratic societies. Its other aspects are determined by the traditions of the various national cultures and their relative freedom of action at any given time. In Hungary, where once upon a time culture was divided up under the triple slogan “suffer, censor, sponsor,” and where this principle was never actually abandoned, the watchword suffer has come to serve as a blanket over practically all of literature; sponsored, politically loyal writing has become shy and inert; and censored (i.e., outright banned) works are relatively few. But banning does exist, and this is the crux of the matter, this is why “suffering” is not patience, not tolerance, but rather a corrupting influence and, indirectly, a threat. The conditions it sets have either been internalized or consciously accepted. The former has a stupefying, the latter a debasing effect. But at the same time, in a climate of toleration, and in response to the combined influence of morality and talent, shrewd middle-class virtues: civil courage, civil disobedience made their appearance. Perhaps never before or since was Hungarian literary life so mindless and degraded as in the 1960s and 1970s, yet the general level of creative writing, as manifested in individual works, was not lower than during any previous era.

It would be interesting to examine what effect the testing of the limits of tolerance had upon literary standards. It's just possible that the secret of improved quality is to be sought in these tension-filled cat-and-mouse games. I am thinking not of censorship, but rather of working around the system; not of concealing hints and allegories in the text and between the lines—these, after all, are private remedies for soothing a troubled conscience, whose literary value is slight. But to breathe the intolerability of certain modes of tolerance into the text; to overhear it there, to make it the text's secret; to shape it so that it becomes unrecognizable and at the same time to feel out the possibilities of understanding; to feign innocence so convincingly that, were the censor to report the naked tendency of the text, he would commit an act tantamount to self-denunciation; and what's more, to build into the text the jest of this honi soit qui mal y pense, too—all this is quite a task for the serious artist. I will mention just two examples: György Spiró's outstanding novel, The X's (set in nineteenth-century Poland and dealing with theater and history), which has chosen silence as its theme and a working-into-the text of this silence; and Péter Esterházy's Production Novel and Agnes, in which the author shows himself to be such a master of subtle literary double-talk, wrapping false texts of a political, ideological nature into the tissue of such singularly graceful and surefooted prose style that the works demand a kind of quick-witted, running translation from the reader.

All this touches upon the genre of lyric poetry but from a distance, but it does quite closely concern György Petri's poetic works contained in his older, legally published volumes. (The poet, born in 1943, has published two poetry collections with official, state publishers: Explanations for M., 1971, reprinted in samizdat in 1981; and Plunging Described, 1974.) Both were warmly received by that segment of the literary public which in Hungary is extraordinarily responsive to lyric poetry. Petri studied philosophy, became a member of György Lukács's circle, and like other Lukács disciples was radicalized by the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia. More recently, he has become a leading figure of the so-called democratic opposition. At present he is one of the editors of the illegally published journal Beszélo (Speaker). In the above-mentioned volumes Petri was apparently reminded—by the sights and sounds and facts of his existence—of the unendurability of life. He could conceivably have explained why this was so; but it is by not opting to do this that he managed to penetrate the depths of his aesthetic problem. By somehow cutting off analysis, he rendered his poems enigmatic. At the same time, he was relentless, though not crudely insistent; he did not force his readers to assume his angle of vision—after all, he was interested in scrutinizing a single individual. His poem, “But One Person,” dating from this period, reads:

If for you I could be
but one person,
final, though contingent,
a rusty, bent nail
in warm dust.
As at the head of a shadow-covered stair
a single gleaming edge.
But one person's
unintended bathing in time.
If I could be for you
stopping in evanescence.
Your bleak estate—
only a split second!
If for you I could be
until the shadow reaches that degree
and the nail turns to dust
but one person.

But as far as this one person was concerned, the neat separation of emotional and intellectual realms did not last long—even love poetry turned into political verse, a statement of universal dissatisfaction. This was poetry of failure and frustration at its best, though its sense of deprivation, the profound existential gloom, derived not from existence itself but from the powers responsible for the deprivation. If hatred was inexpressible, so was love. It was this simple perception, this trap, that the poem tried to lock into focus; in the process, though, ways of going beyond the impasse were also discovered. One way out was through deeper resignation, masked by surface light-heartedness, suggestions of love and even tenderness—a switch from romantic hopelessness to more classically controlled forms of expression. The other possible solution was doing away with compromise, giving free reign to anger and loathing. Instead of hints, full articulation—a bold attempt to regenerate the emotional energies needed to confront the double danger of silence and inarticulate hate.

The volume entitled Eternal Monday (AB Független Kiadó [AB Independent Publishers], Budapest, 1981) documents this process of restoration. Petri did not set out to produce a samizdat poetry collection; it came about as a result of his gradual realization that for him to consent to the publication of an even slightly truncated legal volume had become artistically impossible. “They're not laying down any shady conditions for me any more,” he writes in one of his poems. But for his uncensored experiments, Petri needed an alternate public, and such a public, one with incomparably greater cultural than political force, did appear in Hungary in the 1970s. This oppositional subculture provoked the dominant culture, and although by its very nature it could not demand, even indirectly, that its path be followed, it did manage to undermine a few self-serving, self-justifying stereotypes.

Petri's poetry was deeply influenced by the fact that it became part of this subculture. His response to the changing readership became apparent not only in that he began to practice the art of occasional political poetry (for example, he wrote a poem on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution [“On the 24th Anniversary of the Little October Revolution”], or on the changes in Poland [“Andrzej and Wanda”], but also in that much of his poetry acquired an occasional character. In Eternal Monday the matter of occasionality becomes manifest in a more direct way. For example, a brief and simple meditation (the opening lines of a beautiful poem, “For Bálint Nagy”) does not differ in content from similar lines found in earlier works; but where it appears (both metaphorically and literally at a streetcar stop), makes all the difference:

As pines do into fog—
into fatigue, disgust
goodwill wraps itself.
If seven of us: then five.
If five: then three.
And if three: then preferably two.
The rest
are in the main unbearable.
Besides ourselves:
there are a few of us.
And besides themselves there are
just a few of them.
The air burns hisses
(fighter plane cuts through)
like the flesh of tart apples.
Who will follow the as-
tute politicians? Stupid
soldiers? New set of as-
tute politicians?
Loose reins?
Prisons? Clampdowns?
Is the country fleeing its own borders?
Here's your train.
Hurry. Take care.

Petri's older poetic outlook was determined by the antithesis of life and art (canonized in our century by the seemingly classical but in reality thoroughly romantic Thomas Mann). This has changed. The poem is not another world, or the absence of it; it is part of the world. From the point of view of his new poetic awareness, noting, recording is more important than perceiving absence. For this absence (someone's absence keenly felt; absence as opportunity, inspiration) is indeed very close, and this closeness is determined by the interplay of anxiety and poetry, by the fiction of the poem within the poem.

The visual element in these new verses is also more varied, poetic opportunities more numerous. Not only do we find inspired topical verses (a poem on the funeral of István Bibó, for example, who was minister of state in 1956 and an outstanding figure of democratic Hungarian political thought); there are also striking poems of ideas, and exquisite lyrical performances such as “Variations on the Female Breast,” quoted below:

1. I crumpled her shriveled breast
like an empty cigarette box.
Absent-mindedly I crushed it, pawed it—
You're walking in a beautiful park,
in your hand some sort of crumpled,
          superfluous
paper,
in front of you a long, gleaming
promenade. Nowhere a trash bin.
You're kept from throwing it away by the
place and the moment's commanding
          cleanliness.
Wrinkles and squirming, in a sweaty
          palm.
In your eyes, fear
and above you, the park's
long, deep, happy sighs—
2. And after that, you took from the
          refrigerator
milk that comes in a polyethylene bag,
with reverence you took into your palms
the undulating, dense, cool.
Breast of a dead, young mother—

Yes, in this poetry we can think of anything we like. Weighing the aesthetic advantages and disadvantages of Petri's new, uncensored and unself-censored lyrical attitude, we must not forget that the solemn, elevated character of even very good Hungarian literature can be reduced to rather ordinary expedients: one may not think and say just anything. Public utterance is forever threatened by coordinated conformity. A fair portion of the intelligentsia's private discourse cannot be aired publicly, for it is “impolitic” to do so, which in the Hungarian context invariably means: not opportune. And the number of taboo topics is by no means small, considering that the Hungarian intellectual community is thoroughly politicized and depoliticized; it speaks and at the same time keeps silent about politics, and does this to a far greater extent than people accustomed to sunnier political climes. In fact, the word political, though constantly used, has turned into its own negation. Petri, however, transmutes this private speech into poetic discourse, thereby lending lyric diction an imitative function, and at the same time abolishing the private nature of this diction. Petri sounds off on things which other intellectuals discuss only in private. He writes of 1956 and its victims, of 1968, of the Polish grassroots revolution, of the Soviet military presence in Hungary, of poverty. Nor is he averse to naming names; he refers to János Kádár, for example, as “Father John.” And he writes of that inevitable, dreaded favorite of intellectual get-togethers: The Ministry of Interior [i.e., the secret police], and he writes about “E. European Intellectuals” themselves. In other words, he writes about things everybody else only talks about—things which plainly contradict that mythical Hungarian national consensus János Kádár likes to refer to, things which—because the topics are still taboo—do not really contradict some sort of Hungarian consensus that has come about as a consequence of that much-heralded consolidation, though this is nothing more than the consensus of silence and forgetting, of aphasia and amnesia.

Outspokenness, however, is only a precondition of the new poetic attitude; it can be neither its fulfillment nor its justification. If it were that, we would be dealing with the kind of censorship in reverse mentioned at the beginning; speaking out would be no more than adolescent bravado, on par with a teenager dropping obscenities. Petri's enterprise is not of this kind. His poetry refrains from standing out and calling attention to itself; his brand of occasional poetry aspires to no special poetic status. For Petri, the historical situation in which he finds himself is not special, either:

Why do we think there has never
been such a putrid age? Why not?
Let's just answer for ourselves.

—Mirror, Sunny Side Up

For him moral strength is as unworthy of distinction as its opposite:

Self-loathing pursued in
moderation is a good spur to the good,
only let's not overdo it.
Just say: I'm a turd. What am I to do?
Turn away from me,
hold your nose,
walk out.
But let's not over(be)rate ourselves:
Have a look at this!
Have you ever seen such unadorned shit?
Befitting a princess:
24-crap crown jewel! Gross Mogul!
Koh-inoor shitdiamond!
Southern Pollutionstar!
—(A poem starts out toward
the adored lady but gets
sidetracked on an ethical
detour and cannot find
its way back)

The attitude expressed in the above-quoted lines contrasts sharply with the somber, morally distinguished tone of Petri's first volume. His voice, however, at once raw and tender, has not wavered, despite the change. Life has not become more bearable in this poetic world, but it has changed. Things are alive and look as if they want to go on living.