Endre Ady

He met and fell in love with a 20-year-old girl, Berta Boncza, in 1914 and proposed to her. However the girl’s father did not consent to this marriage so the couple married without his permission in 1915.

He was known to consume alcohol in the excess and also suffered from syphilis. He became very ill in the late 1910s and died on 27 January 1919. He was just 41.

He was born on 22 November 1877 in Érmindszent Szilágy County, Kingdom of Hungary. His mother Mária Pásztor came of a long line of Calvinist ministers. His father’s name was Lőrinc Ady. Endre was one of the three children born to his parents.

He was born with six fingers on each hand; the extra two fingers were cut off by the midwife. He used to call the scars his “wizard marks”.

He went to the Calvinist school until he was about nine. Then he attended a Catholic school and then went to a Catholic gymnasium at the town of Nagykároly.

Eventually he moved to a Calvinist college at Zilah. Many of his classmates there went on to become famous personalities such as, radical thinkers and politicians.

He was a voracious reader and was greatly influenced by the works of Arthur Schopenhauer.

During his student years he started writing seriously but also became an alcoholic. He abandoned his studies to take up a job with a newspaper in Debrecen.

His first book of poetry, ‘Versek’ was published in 1899. Even though this volume largely went unnoticed, it instilled in him a deep love for writing.

Starting from 1900 he worked as a journalist, a profession he would follow for the rest of his life. However, he would never have a stable career because of his drinking habit and would drift from one newspaper to another.

He went to Nagyvárad, a hub of intellectual activities where he lived for four years. Even though it was a very enriching experience for him, it was also the time when he contracted syphilis.

He published another book of poetry, ‘Még egyszer’, in which his literary skills became apparent, but this volume too was not much successful commercially.

His book 'Uj versek' breathed new life into the dormant Hungarian literary scene. The poems in the book were revolutionary in form, language and content.