Memoir as Motherly Word: Processing Trauma in Biographies of Attila Jozsef by Judit Szanto, Flora Kozmutza and Marto Vago

This article analyses biographical memoirs written about Attila Jozsef by three women, Judit Szanto, Marta Vago, and Flora Kozmutza, each also a lover of the poet at some point in their lives. These works have hitherto been primarily used only as source material for research on Attila Jozsef. This article provides close readings of these biographies for the first time, highlighting their main themes and looking at them in light of the notion of mirror autobiography within the framework of women's writing. Developing the key concept of the 'motherly word' (the phrase taken from Attila Jozsef's poem 'I Might Disappear Suddenly'), the essay focuses on how the authors work through their trauma and loss by creating mother-images of themselves in their texts, referring, on the one hand, to the mother-child relationship that all three memoirs stage retrospectively in the narratives, and, on the other hand, to the mirror-effect in the speech of the mother. The article draws here on Winnicott's theory of the mirroring mother and on the developmental psychology of Stern. Touching upon the widely analysed issue of the childhood trauma of Attila Jozsef, the article offers new insights for psychoanalytically oriented Attila Jozsef-criticism.