Two Name‐day Greetings and the ’’aura Poems’ by Mihály Vörösmarty

Abstract

In the early 1840s Vörösmarty wrote two greeting poems, Névnapi köszöntés [Name‐day Greeting] and Névnapra [For a Name‐day], for the name‐day of his future wife Laura Csajághy. Both poems have come down for us in fair copies on white paper, signed by the author. He gave them to Laura when her name‐day was celebrated in a small circle of friends. Both poems were published, too, and have been considered ever since as ’Laura poems’, in the love poems segment of the oeuvre. But inside that group they get less attention since topical, celebratory poems are regarded as inferior genres in the 1840s, and especially in the oeuvre of Vörösmarty. The paper attempts to re‐think the formation history of some of the Laura poems, examining the differences detected in names, in language and content, in the private and public usage of the two greeting poems. It also adds data to Vörösmarty’s biography in the pre‐marriage years.