István Eörsi Add a review

István Eörsi (Hungarian: [ˈiʃtvaːn ˈørʃi]; 16 June 1931, in Budapest – 13 October 2005, in Budapest) was a Hungarian writer, novelist, political essayist, poet and literature translator.

He was born in educated Jewish family. After completing English and German literature studies in Budapest he worked as a school teacher. Beginning in early youth, he wrote articles for communist newspaper, claimed to be a Marxist, and wrote a poem on the occasion of death of Joseph Stalin.

Eörsi was part of the Hungarian minority that welcomed the Red Army, when the Russians invaded his country. He was one of those who looked on the Russians as liberators and not enemies. Although most of these Russian supporters were disillusioned after the rise to power of Stalin, Eörsi found new opportunities in this time of uncertainty. Even as a schoolboy, Eörsi published poems that sang the praises of the communist government.

In later years, he was an opponent of the proletariat's dictatorship and an oppositionist. Because of his participation in 1956 uprising he was sentenced to eight years in prison, of which he served three and a half (until the 1960 amnesty). After his release he was banned from publication, because of which he concentrated on translating works of Goethe, Heine, Brecht, Shakespeare, Ginsberg, Shelley, Keats, Pushkin, Jandl and Lorca.

In 1983 and 1984 he lived in West Berlin on a DAAD (German for Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholarship. After the fall of communism in Hungary in 1989, Eörsi criticized the revival of nationalism. He was a founder member of SZDSZ, but left because of ideological differences.

Eörsi's literary style was marked by his ideological stance, and it often bore his political zeal in the form of sarcasm. His writings tended to be volatile as well as passionate, especially when he wrote on political issues. In later years, Eörsi's writing mellowed somewhat. But his work always bore the mark of two things: First, a revisionist form of Marxism he learned from his teacher, György Lukács; second, his experiences of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, which got him in jail.