Géza Gyóni (25 June 1884 – 25 June 1917) was a Hungarian war poet. He died in a Russian prisoner of war camp during the First World War. His many verse contributions to Hungarian literature are considered to be both immortal and the Hungarian language's equivalent to the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg.
Born Géza Áchim to a "crusading Lutheran family" in the small village of Gyón, near Dabas, in Austria-Hungary, Gyóni was one of the seven children of a pastor of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Hungary.
After his younger brother died, Gyóni's mother became mentally ill and the future poet was sent to live with his uncle, who was also a Lutheran minister.
After he graduated from the high school in Békéscsaba, the future poet began studying in the Lutheran seminary at Pozsony. But he was also drawn to writing and also became a newspaper correspondent and adopted the name of his birthplace as a pseudonym.
Gyóni had to leave the seminary after he was injured while playing Russian roulette with a rival reporter. In the aftermath, he edited a rural newspaper for a time and then moved to Budapest to study economics.
His first collection of poetry, named simply Versek (Poems) was published in the same year, 1903. This marked a very low period in his life, in which Gyóni sought to free himself from his father's demands and even attempted suicide, before being transferred to an administrative course which led to a job in Budapest. In the city he was increasingly drawn to journalists and poets, contributing to the literary journal Nyugat and beginning a long rivalry with the contemporary leading poet of Hungary Endre Ady, who he criticized in his second collection, Szomorú szemmel (With sorrowful eyes) in 1909.
In November 1907, Gyóni was called up to the Austro-Hungarian Army, and spent eighteen months breaking rocks and building railway lines in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which he did not at all enjoy and which bred a very strong streak of pacifism in him. The "exercise" was finally called off in 1908.
In Szabadka, Gyóni met and fell in love with the woman whose memory and infidelity were to taunt him in the POW camps in Siberia.
During this time and the following two years he continued working on his poetry in Budapest, until he was recalled to active service during the Balkan Wars in 1912. In response, Gyóni wrote the great pacifist poem, Cézar, én nem megyek ("Caesar, I Will Not Go").
His works in this period were later collected following his death, and posthumously published in 1917 as Élet szeretője (Lover of Life).
In June 1914, police interrogation of the teenaged conspirators responsible for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, all of whom were members of the Unification or Death paramilitary organization, exposed that the pistols and bombs used, as well as cyanide capsules for use in the event of capture, had been covertly supplied by the Kingdom of Serbia's military intelligence chief Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević. In response, Gyóni, like many other Austro-Hungarians, accepted the Government's description of, "a plot against us," by a Russo-Serbian military alliance and the need to fight, "a defensive war." Some Hungarian intellectuals, quite ironically, felt that World War I provided an excellent opportunity for revenge against the House of Romanov for Tsar Nicholas I's pivotal role in the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.
Unlike his previous term of enlistment, Gyóni seemed to initially enjoy the soldier's life, regularly writing poetry which was sent back home from the front for publication.
According to Peter Sherwood, "Gyóni's first, still elated, poems from the Polish Front recall the 16th-century Hungarian poet Bálint Balassi's soldiers' songs of the marches, written during the campaign against the Turks."
During the Siege of Przemyśl, which has since been dubbed, "The Stalingrad of World War I", Gyóni wrote poems to encourage the city's defenders and these verses were published there, under the title, Lengyel mezőkön, tábortűz melett (By Campfire on the Fields of Poland). A copy reached Budapest by aeroplane, which was an unusual feat in those days.
In Hungary, the politician Jenő Rákosi, used the popularity of Gyóni's collection to set up Gyóni as a brave soldier-poet and as the paragon of the Hungarian poetic ideal, as opposed to the Symbolist poet Endre Ady, who was a pacifist. Meanwhile, Gyóni's poetry took an increasingly depressive turn.
According to Erika Papp Faber, "His leaning toward Socialism and his anti-militarist attitude were, for a brief time, suspended, as he was caught up in the general patriotic fervor at the outbreak of World War I. But once he experienced the horrors of war first hand, he soon lost his romantic notions, and returned to the more radical positions of his youth, as it evident in his further volumes."
One of his poems from this period, Csak egy éjszakára (For Just One Night), in which he calls for Hungary's war profiteers, industrialists, and armchair patriots to come and spend just one night in the trenches, became a prominent anti-war poem and its popularity has lasted well beyond the end of the First World War.
In March 1915, Gyóni was taken prisoner when the Austro-Hungarian Army surrendered Przemyśl to the Imperial Russian Army, who celebrated by immediately launching a pogrom against the city's Jewish population. Regular outbreaks of anti-semitic violence, as well as the religious persecution of Rusins and Ukrainians who belonged to the Eastern Catholic Churches, were to continue until the Imperial Russian Army was humiliatingly driven out of the region by the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive and into the Great Retreat of 1915.