Sándor Petöfi(1823-1849)
- Writer
Though he died very young, Petôfi is the best nown Hungarian poet and
is something of a national institution. He was born as the son of
butcher István Petrovics and Mária Hrúz, a Slovak maid, in the Great
Hungarian plains. As a young man, he became an actor and joined several
theater companies but was not successful in this job and stayed quite
poor. His fame began to rise when he started to publish his poems in
Pest (now Budapest) newspapers. They became an immediate success due to
their fresh and seemingly "simple" tone. His life's legend became even
more romantic when he fell in love with a rich girl, Júlia Szendrey,
and married her in 1847 in spite of her parents' disapproval. When the
1848 revolution broke out, Petôfi was enthusiastic about it and wrote a
series of still well-known revolutionary poems. But his enthusiasm was
not taken seriously politically. So he joined the army fighting against
the Hapsburg rule and he disappeared (and probably died) in the lost
Segesvár battle in 1849.