The “Giant Role Model”: the “Serbian” Petőfi

The reception of Sándor Petőfi’s poems and the critical discourse on them in German by bilingual German poets and publicists in Hungary began during the poet’s lifetime and ran parallel to the development of his career. In the same period, however, from the mid-1840s, a very intense interest in his person and his poetry, which was even deeper and more diverse than in German, was awakened in southern Slavic, especially Serbian, literature. This paper explores the possible reasons for his integration in Serbian poetry and public poetry. Among the most important factors is the fact that in the 18th and 19th centuries, strong centres of Serbian culture developed in Hungary, including Buda, and that in the northern part of present-day Serbia, in Vojvodina, the population had for centuries been of mixed nationality, including Serbs, Hungarians and Germans. As a result, a large part of the Serbian intelligentsia spoke Hungarian, and many of the Hungarians in Vojvodina had spoken Serbian since the last century, so they could read each other’s literature in the original. Petőfi’s poetry, like much of 19th century Hungarian literature, was translated by renowned authors, sometimes of European quality, and his poetry was an inspiration for Serbian Romanticism in terms of form, theme and poetics (Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, Đura Jakšić). Finally, it is worth mentioning the historical circumstances, the fact that, although the two peoples were on opposite political sides in the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848 and several times later, Petőfi’s figure transcended political differences and his reception remained unbroken even in the most difficult periods. The belief that Petőfi, who originally went by the name Petrovics, was of Serbian origin – a belief that is difficult to verify biographically – and which dates back to Petőfi’s own time, has contributed to this. The layers and trends in the history of Petőfi’s reception in Serbia also shed light on the mechanisms of intellectual relations in the common cultural space of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans.