József Attila emberképének két változata = Two Versions of József Attila’s Human Portrait

Tverdota, György (2024) József Attila emberképének két változata = Two Versions of József Attila’s Human Portrait. IRODALOMTÖRTÉNETI KÖZLEMÉNYEK : A BÖLCSÉSZETTUDOMÁNYI KUTATÓKÖZPONT IRODALOMTUDOMÁNYI INTÉZETÉNEK FOLYÓIRATA, 128 (2). pp. 164-180. ISSN 0021-1486 (nyomtatott); 1588-0834 (elektronikus)

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Abstract

The study connects the analysis of two poems by József Attila, “Tell me, what ripens…” and “The Seventh”. Both poems first appeared in the volume entitled Night on the Outskirts and reflect developments in the poet’s thinking following the events of 1932. The two works shed light on changes in the poet’s portrayal of humanity from different aspects. Written at the beginning of the year, “Tell me, what ripens…” presents humanity as a sum of social conditions, depicting from a certain distance the poet himself as one type of an exploited individuals. Renewing the Villon ballad structure, this masterpiece of style imitation formulates a cross-section of society composed of existentially troubled human beings of the era. “The Seventh”, which follows the editing style of Villon’s “ballad of small pictures” and can be dated to the summer of 1932, does not build a societal mosaic but rather carves out a single individual, the first-person singular (or, as it is a self-addressing poem, the second-person singular), from the whole community. Developing the Marxist human portrait somewhat further, dynamizing it in the manner of Bergson, it presents the individual journeying from birth to death as a social process and depicts it in six sections of stanzas. The fact that, in the self-assuring “The Seventh”, the subject has returned to the center of world-building can be seen as a result of a deep psychological orientation. However, the image of human personality and behavior was formed before the poet’s instinctual turn, and can therefore not be credited to Freud’s well-known model of mental structure. Instead, this image is broken down into small, one-dimensional sections that then follow the process of gathering these images back to the first person while reserving the “seventh” place for the “empty” ego-function in the process of being realized.

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