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József Lengyel
Portrait from the anthology Körkép published in 1972.
Born	(1896-08-04)August 4, 1896 Marcali, Hungary
Died	(1975-07-14)July 14, 1975 Budapest
Nationality	Hungarian
Genre	short story, novel, poetry
Notable works	Igéző Oldás és kötés Hídépítők Szembesítés
Notable awards	Attila József Prize (1957) Kossuth Prize (1963)
Children	Lengyel Tatjána

József Lengyel (Marcali, August 4 1896 – Budapest, July 14. 1975) Hungarian writer and poet, winner of the Kossuth Prize and of the Attila József Prize. He attended university in his youth in Budapest and Pozsony (Bratislava). His first poems appeared in the journals edited by | Lajos Kassák. He joined the Communist Party of Hungary in 1918. Following the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he emigrated to Austria, where his first independently written book Ó Hit Jeruzsálem... Gábriel Lajos változásai, (Oh, Belief-Jerusalem … The Transformations of Lajos Gábriel). He joined the Communist Party of Austria, of which he was a member until 1921. In 1927, he moved to Germany and worked there as a journalist and translator for left-wing papers, and became a member of the Communist Party of Germany as well. His next move, in 1930, was to Moscow where he earned a living as a dramaturge and journal editor. This is where his work Visegrádi utca, “(Visegrad Street)” was published. That work describes his personal experiences during the events of 1918-1919. He was arrested and condemned in 1938 and served eight years in various work camps of the Gulag. He was freed in 1946, but arrested again and exiled to Siberia. He returned to Hungary in 1955 where he wrote about his experience in Russian camps. Towards the end of his life, he lived in inner emigration. He died in 1975. After his death, he was considered by the Hungarian political authorities to have been a devoted Communist but his papers were sealed and his works were not published for a long time.

“ ...he looks around hell with eyes as clear as Dante’s. ” — Géza Hegedüs

Life and Works

The beginning

His parents were Pál Lengyel (grain merchant) and Janka Vittmann He completed his four years of elementary school in Marcali and attended gymnasium for a year in Keszthely. As a child, he started writing poetry under the influence of Sándor Petőfi. In 1907, his father went bankrupt and moved his family to Pest. József continued his studies at Barcsay utcai gimnáziumban. In 1914, he enrolled in the humanities division of Budapesti Tudományegyetem, studying art history and in 1915, he began to study law at pozsonyi egyetem, but in 1916 he dropped out. His first two published poems appeared in 1916, in the journal of Kassák Lajos, A Tett. Several more poems, a short story and art criticism appeared in 1916–17 in A Tett, and in Ma. In 1917 he published in Új költök könyve. At the end of 1917, in response to the Bolshevik revolutionary in Russia, he, along with, Mátyás György, Aladár Komját and József Révai left the cirlce of the Ma and announced a program for a new literary journal Kilencszáztizenhét (Nineteen-seventeen), though it was banned by the censors before it could be published, its program appeared as a flyer.. In 1918, these writers formed the Group of Revolutionary Writers, and in stepped before the public with a shared volume 1918 Szabadulás (Liberation, 1918).

In the Currents of Revolutions

He became familiar with the views of Ervin Szabó, participated in the illegal anti-war movement, and joined the revolutionary faction of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary. After the victory of the Aster Revolution, this faction was active in agitation among workers dissatisfied with the middle-class revolution. At the end of November 1918 he, along with his group, joined the Hungarian Communist Party (KMP), after which he worked on the editorial staff of the Red News (Hungarian: Vörös Ujság. He was arrested on February 21, 1919, along with the leadership of the a KMP and was released on March 20th.

During the Hungarian Soviet Republic (March - August, 1919), he was the editor of the cultural column of the Vörös Ujság, and later, the editor of Ifjú Proletár (Young Proletarian). After the fall of the Soviet Republic, he hid in Pest and its surroundings. While hiding in the studio of his friend József Nemes-Lampérth, he wrote the novella Szegény Kovács Gábor tanulság nélküli élete (The Lessonless Life of Poor Gábor Kovács). On October 28, 1919, he fled to Austria. He was captured by Austrian guards at the border and after a hearing in Vienna was interned at the prison camp in Karlstein.

Emigration in Vienna

He lived in Vienna between 1920 and 1927 where he attended the University of Vienna in 1922 and 1923, taking courses in art history, English, photography and micro-photography. He survived on occasional work and unemployment assistance. He married Irén Kornhauser, a student of medicine. The marriage was short-lived. During his Viennese years, he traveled to Italy twice. From 1919–1921 he was a member of the Communist Party of Austria. He suffered a spiritual crisis in 1921–1924, left the Party, but rejoined it. He was an unpaid member of the foreign policy staff of Communist paper Die Rote Fahne. Some of his writings appeared in the emigre Hungarian journals. He also did translations. In 1923, his first novel, Ó Hit Jeruzsálem... Gábriel Lajos változásai) “(Oh, Belief-Jerusalem … The Transformations of Lajos Gábriel) appeared as the third volume in the series Írók könyvtára (Writers' Library), of which he was the editor. This volume also contained a poem, a children's book retelling the German folktales Sternekund und Reinekund and an earlier novella, Des armen Gábor Kovács Lebenslauf.

Emigration in Germany

In 1927, he moved to [Berlin]]. Between 1927 and 1930, he was a member of the German Communist Party. He worked as an archivist at the League against Imperialism and made translations from English to German at the journal of the a Profintern. Later, he was the editor of the Der drohende Krieg and Film und Volk, and the lead editor of the international column of the Welt am Abend. He also worked as a dramaturge at the film studios Prometheus Film and Weltfilm. It was in Berlin that he wrote Visegrádi utca in 1929, in which he presented his reminiscences of the revolutionary events of 1918-1919 in Hungary.

In the Home of the Proletariat. From Arrival to Arrest

At the end of April, 1930 he arrived in Moscow as the correspondent of Berlin am Morgen. From the fall, he worked at the Profintern. He was also a dramaturge at the German-Soviet firm Mezhrabpomfilm. In 1932, he married Nyina Szergejevna Kizevalter, a teacher of music and rhythmic movement. He became a Soviet citizen in 1936. He led the Hungarian section of the Moscow based Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the Soviet Union (VEGAAR) in 1932–34. He also published novellas and propaganda in the Hungarian language journal Sarló és Kalapács (Hammer and Sickle), and became its editor in between 1933-34. From the mid 1930s (either from 1935 or 1936) he was a freelancer.

His Visegrádi utcá was published in Hungarian and Russian. In 1936, it was republished in Hungarian in Canada. He also published some books in Russian that year. He started work on three novels: Föld és külföld (Land and Foreign Land), A moszkvai követ (The Ambassador to Moscow) and Prenn Ferenc hányatott élete (Тhe Storm-Tossed Life of Ferenc Prenn). Föld és külföld is about the lives of foreign skilled workers in the Soviet Union. Some chapters were published in Sarló és Kalapácsban, and, in Russian, in the journal Oktyabr. His novel A moszkvai követ about Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, the ambassador of the Weimar Republic to Moscow, remained unfinished (only two chapters were written). He wrote novellas, too: Szőlők, nóták, álmok, (Grapes, Songs, Dreams), Kulcs (The Key), Wengraf, A német (The German), Örökkévalóság (Eternity).

Exile in the Gulag

He was arrested on February 21, 1938. On April 23, 1939, the Extraordinary Commission of the Ministry of Interior (OSzO) sentenced him in absentia on the basis of paragraph 58 points (8), (10) to eight years of imprisonment in a correctional labor camp. He served his sentence in the Norilsk and Kansk camps. It was only after eight years and ten months that he was set free, on the last day of 1946. He described his journey of several weeks to the settlement where he was consigned after his release in Elejétől végig (From Beginning to End). In 1947–48, he was allowed to move close to Moscow, to a town called Alexandrov, which lies 113 km from Moscow He was employed as a lector/translator at the Publishing House for Foreign Languages. In the beginning, he traveled frequently to Moscow to spend a day or two with his family. He wrote two children's stories in Russian, as well as his short story, Alka.

In the spring of 1947, he applied for permission to return to Hungary. In the winter of 1948, an inspection by the authorities found him to be living without permission at his Moscow apartment and he was required to move back to his official residence in Alexandrov within 24 hours. It is there that he met his future life partner. Olga Sergeyevna Antsipo-Chikunskaya,. She was registered in the same house as Lengyel but until then lived with friends in Moscow. Some Hungarians succeeded in returning to Hungary but Lengyel's application was rejected in the spring of 1948, though he was not notified of this. In the fall, he was still hopeful of returning home. On November 22nd he was re-arrested and sent to the prison at Vladimir. On February 9, 1949, he was sent into permanent exile and in March, 1949, he was transported back to Siberia in a prison train. He was assigned to live in Makarovo , a village 50 km from Kansk. This is where he wrote nearly all parts of his later cycle of Igéző stories.”, as well as his film drama, Isten ostora (The Scourge of God). In Makarovo, he worked as a field warden, charcoal burner, and forest ranger in the local kolhoz. In the fall of 1949 Olga Szergejevna moved in with him without permission. On July 26, 1954 he was arrested in Kansk. On September 1, 1954, the Krasnoyarsk Regional Peoples' Court sentenced him to three years of imprisonment in a work camp.) On February 23, 1955 he was released and and returned to Moscow with Olga. He applied for rehabilitation in February, married Olga in May and on June 25, was rehabilitated in the absence of a criminal act.