Attila József

Biography

Attila József was born in Ferencváros, a poor district of Budapest, in 1905 to Áron József, a soap factory worker of Székely and Romanian origin from Banat, and Borbála Pőcze, a Hungarian peasant girl with Cuman ancestry; he had two elder sisters, Eta and Jolán. When Attila was three years old, he was sent to live with foster parents after his father abandoned the family and his mother became ill. At the time of his birth, Attila was not a well known name; because of this, his foster parents called him Pista, a nickname for the Hungarian version of Stephen.

From ages seven to fourteen, Attila returned to living with his mother until she died of cancer in 1919, aged only 43. While also attending school, he worked many odd jobs and was a self-described street urchin. After the death of his mother, the teenage Attila was looked after by his brother-in-law, Ödön Makai, who was relatively wealthy and could pay for his education in a good secondary school.

In 1924, Attila entered Franz Joseph University to study Hungarian and French literature, with the intention of becoming a secondary school teacher. He was expelled from the university, deemed unfit to be a teacher, after he wrote the provocative and revolutionary poem, Tiszta szívvel ("With a pure heart" or "With all my heart"). With his manuscripts, he traveled to Vienna in 1925 where he made a living by selling newspapers and cleaning dormitories, and then to Paris for the following two years, where he studied at the Sorbonne. During this period he read Hegel and Karl Marx, whose call for revolution appealed to him as well as the work of François Villon, the famous poet and thief from the 15th century. Financially, József was supported by the little money he earned by publishing his poems as well as by his patron, Lajos Hatvany. He returned to Hungary and studied at Pest University for a year. József then worked for the Foreign Trade Institute as a French correspondent and, later, was the editor of the literary journal Szép Szó (Beautiful Word.)

A supporter of the working class, Attila joined the illegal Communist Party of Hungary (KMP) in 1930. His 1931 work Döntsd a tőkét (Blow down the block/capital) was confiscated by the public prosecutor. József's later essay "Literature and Socialism" (Irodalom és szocializmus) led to indictment. In 1936, he was expelled from the Hungarian Communist Party due to his independence and interest in Freud.

Beginning in childhood, Attila began showing signs of mental illness and was treated by psychiatrists for depression and schizophrenia. In adulthood, he was sent by the state to a sanatorium and was diagnosed with "neurasthenia gravis." Modern scholars believe that he likely had borderline personality disorder. He never married and only had a small number of affairs, but frequently fell in love with the women who were treating him.

Attila József died on 3 December 1937, aged 32, in Balatonszárszó. At the time, he was staying at the house of his sister and brother-in-law. He was killed while crawling through railway tracks where he was crushed by a starting train. There is a memorial to him not far from the location where he died. The most widely accepted view is that he committed suicide, which he had previously attempted; he wrote five farewell letters that day.