By Lindsay Nash

Lindsay Nash is an American writer and marketing specialist living in Debrecen. Email her at lindsaynash@yahoo.com. 

While Hungary’s second-largest city is known for its religious history (even dubbed “the Calvinist Rome”), Debrecen also boasts a proud literary tradition, producing such prolific writers as poet Sándor Petőfi and the internationally acclaimed and translated Magda Szábo. 

Debrecen is the largest city in Hungary’s Great Plains, a flat and windswept landscape that has long been an important meeting point of cultures of Eastern and Western Europe. Agriculture began in the region as early as 6,000-5,500 B.C.E. and the Great Plains became the heartland of Eurasian nomads, serving as the base for Huns, Avars, Magyars, Cumans, Jasz people and other nomadic tribes from the Eurasian Steppe.

Compared to Hungary’s storied and vibrant capital of Budapest, Debrecen is indeed a quiet but historically important second city. The city was first documented in 1235, as Debrezun, deriving from the Turkic word debresin, which means ‘live’ or ‘move’ and is also a male-given name.

Another theory says the name is of Slavic origin and means ‘well-esteemed’, from Slavic Dьbricinъ or from dobre zliem (“good land”).

Debrecen was the largest Hungarian city in the 18th century and it remains one of Hungary’s most important cultural centres. Debrecen has served as the nation’s capital twice, once during the revolution in 1848–1849 when the dethronement of the Habsburg dynasty was declared in the Reformed Great Church in the city centre, and once again near the end of World War II in 1944-1945 when the Germans occupied Budapest. These days, Debrecen is the home of the beautiful and esteemed University of Debrecen, which attracts students from across the globe. In addition, the new BMW plant, and the many feeder businesses it supports, is bringing more and more people to Hungary’s second city. 

But, now, let’s talk about the city’s literary history. Meet some of the city’s most famous writers. These are not in order of importance, but rather geographical location, starting at Medgyessy Promenade in Nagyerdei (the Great Forest). This spot was frequented by talented poets, authors, and scientists, so serves as the perfect entrance to this literary tour. Strap on your walking shoes, get your reading glasses, and let’s go for a literary walk!

Stop #1: Árpád Tóth 

Location: Between the Aquaticum and Nagerdei Korut along Medgyessy Promenade

Árpád Tóth was born in Arad, in Southern Hungary on 15th April 1886. Soon after his family moved to Debrecen. He never completed his university studies; first, he worked as a journalist in Debrecen, and later in Budapest. His family inheritance of poverty and tubercolosis accompanied him all his life; and he died of the latter at the age of forty-two. Tóth was a sensitive and withdrawn man, whose awkwardness prevented his enjoying life; it was only in his poetry that he was able to cast off the limitations of his personality. His poetic career was very significant, and his poetry was characterized by the high-pitched expression of sadness, and grief. He is considered one of the greatest elegiac poets of the 20th century. 

Sample: 

Evening Ray Wreath (translated into English)

The road in front of us has become ashy

And a body of shadows fell through the park,

But still a delicate, soft ray of rays

Pound dark hair into the foliage at dusk:

Pale, gentle and serious glow,

Which was barely an earthly copy of lights,

And it filtered into semi-smell and silence

The evening migration of things.

To smell and to silence. The smell of secrets

Heavenly silence of peace in your shiny hair,

And it was good to live like never before,

And the light drew into my heart:

I didn’t know anymore if you were

Or blessed lace bush dear body,

In which a god descended to earth

Is his soul trembling from my foliage?

I stood enchanted, long, quietly,

And minutes passed, millennia came, –

You just took my hand at once,

And my lowered lashes slowly rose,

And I felt: return to my heart,

And it comes with pouring, deep music,

Like numb blood vessels my ways are blood,

The earthly feeling: how much I love you!

Stop #2: Mihály Fazekas

Location: Medgyessy Promenade in the Great Forest

Born and raised in Debrecen, Mihály Fazekas’ was a writer who served in the war but despised violence. His work highlighted the social injustice of the times.

He enrolled as a student at the Reformed College in Debrecen and, in 1781, began attending the Theological Academy. During this time, he was introduced to Enlightenment ideas, sparking a passion for the natural sciences and botany. By 1782, at just 16 years old, he embarked on a military career, serving in the Habsburg wars and later fighting against the Turks in Moldavia, where he lost a finger.

His poetry, mostly written later in life while living in Debrecen, reflects his disdain for violence and his critique of social inequality. Through his work, he highlighted the injustices of his time and gave voice to the oppressed.

His most famous work, Lúdas Matyi (Mattie the Goose-boy), was first published in 1789. The poem became widely celebrated for its themes of social justice, telling the story of a peasant boy who, despite facing the cruelty of a local squire’s servants, triumphs in the end.

This tale of the underdog’s revenge was groundbreaking, creating a folk hero for the poor and marginalized. Its rebellious spirit resonated with many, elevating the character to a symbol of resistance. In 1949, Lúdas Matyi was adapted into a film directed by Kálmán Nádasdy, starring Imre Soós and Éva Ruttkai.

Stop #3: Endre Ady 

Location: Medgyessy Promenade

Endre Ady (22 November 1877 – 27 January 1919) was a turn-of-the-century Hungarian poet and journalist. Regarded by many as the greatest Hungarian poet of the 20th century, he was noted for his steadfast belief in social progress and development and for his poetry’s exploration of fundamental questions of the modern European experience: love, temporality, faith, individuality, and patriotism. 

Ady, from a Calvinist family, was born with six fingers on each hand (the extras cut off by a midwife) in western Romania in an area once part of Austria/Hungary, but moved to Debrecen to study law at the Reformed College in Debrecen. He dropped out, and became a journalist. He published his first poems in a volume called Versek (Poems) in 1899. He soon grew tired of Debrecen (the town later became a symbol of backwardness in his poetry) and moved to Nagyvárad (today Oradea, Romania), a city with a rich cultural life. A turning point in his life came when he met Adél Brüll Diósy, a wealthy, married Jewish woman who was living in Paris at the time but was visiting her home in Nagyvárad. Léda (as he called her in his poems..notice the anagram of Adél) became his muse; his love for her and their time in Paris, helped him to develop his talent. He visited Paris seven times between 1904 and 1911. 

Ady became best-known for his daring works celebrating sensual love, but he also wrote religious and revolutionary poems. His expression was radical in form, language and content, mixing eroticism, politics, and biblical style and images with apocalyptic visions. Ady’s poems either scandalized people or were revered as standards of the revolution. No other Hungarian poet has been the subject of such fervent disputes as he. 

Ady’s language is not generally comprehensible, his poems point beyond themselves, full of secret meaning like a magic sign or rune. Of all Hungarian poets, his poems are the most untranslatable. It took time before the Hungarian public realized that behind the seemingly meaningless symbolism in his poems there lay a rich “Ady-world.”

His view of Hungary’s history is one of continuous misfortune and oppression. The Magyar fate is a tragic “must” which Hungarians have to face fully knowing the impossibility of the task. It is a curse to be Hungarian, although a blessed curse. (All Poetry)

The monument in Nagyerdei is Miklós Melocco’s suggestive work (1977) where the poet faces his own death mask. The work was inaugurated in honor of the 100th anniversary of Endre Ady’s birthday. The sculptural composition depicts a man with a hat wrapped in a giant coat, who is none other than Endre Ady, standing with his hands in his pockets and looking grimly at his death mask hanging on the opposite wall.

Sample

Life Terrifies Me

Holy ecstasy-swans on great glad Waters

Seize me, but in vain.

I hear the gaggling of sensible ganders,

Nothing can remain,

There is nothing to last.

I hear my future faltering sobs

When I’m still smiling,

And when dark ravens are cawing in my soul

A chirpy starling

Will cheerily chime in.

My longings frighten me. Fulfilment follows

And I’ll feel defiled.

I dread contentment. Behind it storms the steed

Of passion, the Wild.

Oh, life terrifies me.

Stop #4: Magda Szabó 

Location: City Centre, Debrecen

When one talks about writers in Hungary, one typically starts with Magda Szabó, the most translated Hungarian author in history.

Magda Szabó’s own life also echoes the trauma war brings into the lives of her characters. Born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen in 1917, she was raised by her literary-gifted parents, who created a fairy-tale world for her (which was the inspiration for her novels Islands and Lala the Fairy). 

She conversed with her father in Latin, German, English, and French, attended the University of Debrecen, studying Latin and Hungarian, then went on to work as a teacher throughout the German and Soviet occupations of Hungary in 1944 and 1945. 

Her close ties to her hometown, though severed by geographical distance when she moved to Budapest in 1944, were never really cut. As she later confessed: 

“There is only one place I never name, this is Debrecen. If I want to go to Debrecen, and when people are asking: where are you going just now, I answer: home. I have been teaching in Hódmezővásárhely since September 1942, I have been living in Pest since April 1945. Thirty-three years is a great amount of time, enough for Christ’s entire life story. It was not enough for me to recognize: I have moved. Homeland, of course, till death, is always Debrecen.”

Szabo’s literary break didn’t come until her 30th year. The awards came in two years later, but she soon found herself on the wrong side of the fence as far as the ruling communist party was concerned. Her work was heavily censored, but Szabó continued to write nonetheless, thrusting women’s issues to the fore through intelligent prose and a sense of timing that cannot be taught.

Her novels did not align with the accepted norms of Socialist Realism. In Fresco, for example, she writes about a painter who simply chooses the subject matter to work on instead of obeying what the newspapers tell her to do. She also introduces the first of her many (in her own word) “terrible” and unconventional woman character.. When questioned about the inspiration for her tough women characters she confessed: “This is the type of woman I kept coming in contact with, throughout my life. If I was near my mother, if I was near my family members, this was the case. No one could call me conventional, either.” (Read more at Hungarian Literature online)

The statue of Szabó on the bench was unveiled on the 100th Anniversary of her birth (2017) by Aranka Lakatos (bronze lifesize woman statue, sitting on grey granite bench with two bronze cats, bronze books, all of its on a two steps stone base).

Stop #5: Lőrinc Szabó 

Location: Kossuth Square in Debrecen’s city centre

Lőrinc Szabó (1900–1957) is among the most well-known and prolific of Hungarian poets of the 20th century, and was a member of the famous literary circle Nyugat. Szabó, who studied in Debrecen, translated works from English, French and Russian. He published his first book of poetry Earth, Forest, God [Föld, erdô, Isten] in 1922. He was heavily influenced by the German poet Stefan George (1868-1933) whose right hand in plaster form was kept by Szabó on his desk as a relic. 

After a revolutionary “Sturm und Drang” period of anarchistic revolt against the money- making ethics of society, Szabó made his ‘Private truce’ with reality, turning to philosophy and other less topical subjects. In 1944 he won the Baumgarten Prize, in 1954 he was given the Attila József Prize and in 1957 the Kossuth Prize.

Szabó’s literary style shows a unique blend of intellect and sensual experience. Few poets lived as passionately in the present as he did. Cricket Music [Tücsökzene], in which he told the story of his life in a brilliant sequence of poems, appeared shortly after World War II, in 1947. He devoted a major lyrical requiem to his dead lover in the volume entitled The Twenty-sixth Year [A huszonhatodik év], which appeared in 1957, shortly after his death and contained 120 sonnets. He developed the rhyming technique of the Hungarian language to an unprecedented degree; assonances and enjambments of a highly sophisticated nature became Szabó’s personal trademark and signature.

Sample

PRIVATE TRUCE

If I had always known what I’ve learnt
over the years,
if I had always known that life was
squalor and tears,

I wouldn’t be whistling now in the street,
walking so tall,

I would have surely hanged myself, to
finish it all.

With most other prodigal dreamers
I once believed
that the world and the human species
could be reprieved,

I thought that by force or by saying
a gentle word
many of us working together
could change the world.

Everything is much ghastlier than
I’ve thought before
but, thank God, I am not so squeamish,
not anymore,

I can face life’s abominations
with open eyes,
that time and apathy succeeded
to immunize.

I’ve seen through all the old disguises,
those flimsy veils,
at thirty three I cannot be fooled
by fairy tales:

I see now, life is much nastier
than I had guessed
when as a young man I was about
to leave the nest,

I see the suckers being cheated
day after day,
poor sucker can’t help being a sucker,
try as he may,

I see how reason becomes the whore
of interest,

how villains dress up as Galahads
on holy quest,

I see the noblest causes soiled by
the too-many,
I see that only death can bring us
true harmony, –

and since this isn’t a fact to despise
or to deplore,
and since the seed of all human things
is bloody war:

I look at life, with calm resolve
and patience steeled,
as a doomed leper colony, or
a battlefield.

If I had learned about these perils
all at a blow,
I would have certainly hanged myself,
some time ago.

But fate must have planned a part, it seems,
for me to play:
it taught me everything, but slowly,
the gentle way:

this is why I signed a one-man truce,
a private one,
and this is why I do dutifully
what must be done,

this is why I think there are moments
worth living for,
this is why I am writing poems,
in time of war,

so I whistle among the lepers,
and smile inside,
and I am growing very fond of
the simple child.

Stop #6: Mihály Csokonai Vitéz

Location: City Centre, next to Debrecen’s Great Church

Mihály Csokonai Vitéz was a pioneering Hungarian poet, born and raised in Debrecen. Although he gained recognition only after his death, his legacy has endured. Today, both a high school and a theater in Debrecen bear his name in honor of his contributions to Hungarian literature.

Csokonai was a rebellious spirit, as true artists often are. Born on November 17, 1773, in Debrecen, he came from a modest, lower middle-class background. He attended the Reformed College of Debrecen. While some of its professors were among Hungary’s finest minds, the administration and many scholars were notoriously conservative, often resistant to new ideas.

Csokonai’s talent for poetry emerged early. He mastered classical meters in both Latin and Hungarian with ease, earning a position as an assistant professor of poetics. However, his unconventional teaching style, which attracted large audiences, sparked jealousy among senior colleagues. His disregard for rigid academic authority led to his abrupt dismissal in July 1795, a time marked by the execution of Jacobin conspirators in Buda. Although Csokonai was not involved in the conspiracy and disapproved of the French Revolution’s violence, the general crackdown on intellectuals likely contributed to his fate.

After his dismissal, Csokonai never held a stable job again. He briefly considered studying law but abandoned the idea, choosing instead to survive solely through his poetry. He traveled extensively, spending time in Pest and Pozsony, where he launched a literary newspaper, Diétai Magyar Múzsa. He took on a temporary teaching role in a small Transdanubian town but, disillusioned and impoverished, eventually returned to Debrecen. Here, he spent his remaining years in dire poverty, growing weary of seeking patronage from aristocrats. His frustration found expression in one of his plays: “He who wants to be a poet in Hungary is a fool.”

Csokonai’s personal life was equally tumultuous. His love for Lilla, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, ended in heartbreak when she was married off to a richer suitor. This unrequited love inspired his famous Lilla Songs. By the time of his death on January 28, 1805, at just 31 years old, Csokonai was a broken man, both physically and emotionally. He succumbed to pneumonia after catching cold while delivering a poetic eulogy for an aristocrat’s wife.

Despite his hardships, Csokonai remained an optimist at heart. Even on his deathbed, he was said to have joked with visitors, refusing to succumb to despair. Though his life was short and fraught with struggle, his legacy endures as one of Hungary’s most innovative poets.

Sample

I am scorched by

The all-consuming fire of a mighty love.

Beautiful little tulip!

Only you can provide balm for my wound.

The lovely sparkle in your eyes

Is the lively fire of dawn;

The dew on your lips

Dispels a thousand worries.

Respond with angelic words

To your lover’s request:

I shall repay your response

With a thousand kisses of ambrosia.

(‘A Reticent Request’)

Additional tributes to Csokonai can be found at the literary sculpture park on Medgyessy Promenade and within the House of Literature & Medgyessy Ferenc Memorial Museum, part of the Déri Museum, where his influence on Hungarian culture is celebrated. I especially have enjoyed the Csokonai exhibit room in the Reformed College, where a guide recently admitted that the poet might be the most successful student to have ever been kicked out of the college.