Darvas, József

Born Feb. 8, 1912, in Orosháza. Hungarian writer. Became a member of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party in 1956. Chairman of the Union of Hungarian Writers since 1959. The son of a farm laborer.

Until World War II Darvas belonged to the democratic wing of the so-called popular writers. In his realistic novels Black Bread (1934), From Epiphany to St. Sylvester (1935), and others, Darvas portrayed the life and social struggle of the peasantry. In the historical novel Conqueror of the Turks (1938) the role of the people in the struggle for independence is depicted. The novel In September He Set Out on the Road (1940; Russian translation, 1960) and the play The Precipice (1942) are devoted to the relations between the people and the intelligentsia in Horthy’s Hungary. His lyrical journalistic book City in a Quagmire (1945) exposed the crimes of the ruling classes. Darvas recounted the events of the counterrevolutionary mutiny of 1956 in the play Heaven in the Soot (1959) and in the novel Drunken Rain (1963; Russian translation, 1967), the heroes of which come to a realization of their responsibility for the fate of socialism. Darvas’ plays Fire at Dawn (1961) and Not Shown on the Map (performed 1969) touch on conflicts associated with the socialist transformation of the countryside. He was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1956 and 1960.