Város és biedermeier Petőfi költészetében

Abstract

The term of Biedermeier – which was used to describe the interior style of the middle class at first and then it was connected to some of the literary phenomena in the first half of the 19th century – made it possible to interpret the culture of the modern city and the urban middle class – o’en creating an opposition between the city and its antithesis, the country. The questions connected to urbanitas were o’ften discussed in the most important space of the culture of modernity: the press. They published articles and reports on foreign cities as well as the forming middle class culture of Buda and Pest in the fast-spreading metropolitan journals. The city and the country are recurring themes in the poetry of Sándor Petőfi along with the different lifestyles and identities connected to them. The first collection of Petőfi, which was published on 10 November 1844, caught people’s attention because of the way the poet’s role was represented in it: Petőfi’s poetic identity is the innocent and moral child of the nation – he is the one who has just arrived in the city, showing what the people are really like. However, the collection entitled Poems 1842-44 does not represent the culture that could by described by sociological or ethnographic terms, but rather the folk culture seen through the lenses of a Biedermeier (urban) culture: Petőfi therefore constructed the image of the country for the city.