The study is a psychobiography that focuses on understanding Seress — as an interpretive, reflective agent — (Ponterotto, 2025, p. 7), whose life ended tragically: within a short period, he made two suicide attempts. Seress is a subject from a non-WEIRD (i.e., not Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultural context (Mayer et al., 2023), whose career does not fall among traditionally successful life paths. Moreover, since the phenomenon and meaning of suicide are complex issues, we created an integrated theoretical framework (Fekete, 2002; Fekete & Kelemen, 1991, p. 55; Fekete & Osváth, 2004; Kézdi, 1995, p. 38; McLean & Syed, 2015): Kézdi’s theory of the negative code (Kézdi, 1995), Wallerstein’s world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 2010), and McAdams’s theory of narrative identity (McAdams, 1993). Guided by this framework, the study seeks to examine Seress’s meaning-making through his linguistic–cultural and semiperipheral structural embeddedness. In addition, through Seress’s life course and his self-destructive act, it also attempts to identify collective experiences such as suffering, loss, and marginality. Finally, to uncover Seress’s identity and interpret his suicide, it attempts to resolve the paradox arising from the tensions between his protest against the label “the song of suicides” and his own suicide.

This psychobiography is fundamentally idiographic, examining Seress’s oeuvre, songs, and self-narratives within a specific cultural and historical embeddedness. It is also partly nomothetic — that is, generalizing — regarding the systemic absence of a redemptive narrative and the structural patterns of Central and Eastern European identity. The interaction between idiographic and nomothetic levels is enabled by investigating the interplay among three theoretical frameworks: Kézdi’s theory of the negative code, Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis, and McAdams’s theory of narrative identity. This triangulation allows us to explore identity patterns that reflect both personal and structurally conditioned characteristics. We begin with the assumption that Seress’s suicide can be understood only within cultural, linguistic, social, and historical contexts (Fekete & Kelemen, 1991; Fekete & Osváth, 2004; Kézdi, 1995). Furthermore, Hungary — at the semiperiphery, where political, economic, and social instability are persistent — contributes to the meaning of Seress’s tragic fate and explicitly self-destructive act (Wallerstein, 2010, pp. 88, 144). Therefore, it is not sufficient to search for the objective causes of Seress’s actions; we must also apprehend the narratives, linguistic codes, and metaphors that his cultural milieu employed as interpretive frameworks (Fekete & Kelemen, 1991; Fekete & Osváth, 2004; Kézdi, 1995). Rather than relying solely on the idiographic/nomothetic dichotomy, Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis offers a distinct epistemic frame for knowing social reality (Wallerstein, 2010).

Although Seress’s relationship with his mother was loving — he remained emotionally attached to her throughout his life — this maternal figure, representing emotional stability, was only partially accessible due to the cultural pressures imposed by semiperipheral norms. This, too, may have evoked ambivalent emotions in the young Seress.

Rezső maintained a lifelong and close relationship with his sister Klára (1905–1980) (Gál, 2010, p. 12). Alongside his mother, Klára served as a stable emotional anchor, which significantly shaped Seress’s narrative self.

When Rezső was nine, his mother married Béla Purgesz, a master baker from Komárom, who was a widower and had a son named Kálmán (Gál, 2010, pp. 20–21). Although their relationship was good, the stepfather did not replace the absent father figure in Seress’s life. As an adult, Seress never had children — he never became a father — meaning that the absence of the paternal role remained unresolved.

His mother’s marriage marked a completely new phase in the family’s life — one into which Seress could not fully integrate. One reason was that Klára, his sister, was allowed to remain in the family only until the age of seven, after which she was entrusted to the care of their aunt Irma, who also lived in Budapest. For Seress, this represented a renewed experience of marginality. He may have also felt that his situation was unstable, and his trust in the permanence of a safe home and his mother’s love could have been shaken. He may even have begun to doubt his own self-worth.

Klára began school in Budapest and became a student of István Tomka, a renowned music teacher. Years later, she would be the one to transcribe Seress’s compositions (Gál, 2010, p. 24). For Seress, his sister’s continuous professional support may have offered a path out of marginality — yet at the same time, it also underscored the cultural gap between them. He sensed that music, which had always been close to him, might offer a solution, a way out of marginality. At the same time, he was acutely aware of the cultural gap between his sister and himself.

Due to his lack of formal music education, Seress relied throughout his life on others to write down his songs. This created a persistent sense of unpredictability — characteristic of life on the semiperiphery — and instilled in him the inner conviction that stability is never guaranteed.

Working together with his sister may have been a positive experience of family collaboration. At the same time, he also came to realize that his constant efforts to adapt did not result in advancement, but merely in catching up — specifically, in compensating for his lack of theoretical musical knowledge. The ongoing pressure to compensate for deficiencies is itself a collective experience typical of the semiperiphery (Wallerstein, 2010).

Rezső attended a local school in Komárom, the boys' secondary school on Majláth Street (Gál, 2010, p. 25). According to the recollections of his best friend, Imre Székely Molnár, he was not a good student, but he had a good voice and ear for music, read a great deal, and was a skilled writer (Gál, 2010, pp. 26, 28; Gál, 2025). At music school, his piano teacher did not predict a great future for him (Gál, 2010, p. 29). Overall, his experiences within formal education were not positive. On the semiperiphery, talent alone was not enough.

His passion for reading and creative writing pointed to an inner world he had begun to build — still under the protective wing of his family. In his free time, he frequently went to the cinema with Imre Székely Molnár — his lifelong friend — during their school years. Cinema was one of the defining modern cultural institutions of the time. His favorite actress became Pola Negri, of Polish origin, who was nearly his contemporary. Later, Seress would accompany silent films on the piano — evidence of his particularly sensitive cultural sensibility: he improvised music that matched the mood and visual rhythm of the scenes, and he was able to align it with the audience’s reactions as well.

For the student Seress, playing the piano brought pocket money — and thus a certain degree of autonomy and freedom. He experienced that, even if he could not achieve success through formal channels in the field of music, he could still do so on his own path.

After finishing school, he found work at the nearby shipyard but soon made a spontaneous decision: at the age of 17, he joined the Benneweis Circus, which was performing in Komárom at the time (Gál, 2010, pp. 33–36; Gál, 2025). He was drawn to the glamour of the circus and the free life of the performers. For him, the circus represented a kind of escape from an average life. Based on the research of Voigt (2016), it may also have offered Seress a form of legitimacy and recognition at the time.

This becomes particularly significant when we consider the genre he chose: he became a trapeze artist, a role that enjoyed especially high prestige among audiences. Seress, in this sense, “aimed high” — he desired outstanding recognition, and understood that this would require risk-taking and courage.

However, three years later, at the age of 20, he suffered an accident: he fell from the trapeze and was seriously injured. The accident occurred in Vecsés, near Budapest — the longed-for center — which he could not reach with the traveling circus. Actually, he was also forced to abandon the dream of a career he had envisioned.

This fall he experienced the threshold moment of transformation: his life story took a new direction — not only did he have to choose a new path, but he also had to build a new identity. He never spoke about his time as a circus performer in later interviews. He experienced it as a failure, one that marks the origin point of the tragic semiperipheral self: his personal narrative had to be rewritten once again. He was once more confronted with the fact that on the semiperiphery, there is neither a secure path nor any guarantee of success.

After the end of the traveling circus period, Seress returned to Komárom in 1919 and soon moved to Budapest to live with his sister who was then living with her husband, Gyula Sztopa, at Rákóczi Street 65, on the second floor. Although moving to the capital was a significant step, it was also a cautious one, as Seress initially lived in a small room within the safety of the family environment, from where he sought his next opportunity for a breakthrough. (Fifteen years later, at the time of his marriage, he was still living at this address.) On the other hand, this room represented a small, marginal space within the large city, so Seress’s scope of movement remained limited. He was also physically constrained, as he walked with a crutch — a constant symbolic reminder of his bodily limitations.

In his early twenties, following the suggestion of Grawatsch (Bilicsi) Tivadar, who was also applying, he enrolled in Szidi Rákosi’s actors’ school (Gál, 2010, pp. 39–40). At that point, Seress was still struggling with inner uncertainty and needed external affirmation. Although enrollment in acting school was not the result of an entirely autonomous decision, it can still be considered a new identity experiment — reinforced by the fact that he registered there under the name Seress (Gál, 2025). He wanted to prove himself. Precisely because of this, it was a major disappointment that, after obtaining his acting diploma, he was assigned humiliatingly small roles at the Városliget Theatre. He experienced this, like his earlier acrobat career, as a failure (Gál, 2010, p. 47). He remained in marginality and invisibility. The tragic semiperipheral self was reinforced. He terminated his contract.

His experiences — those of cultural exclusion and restricted mobility — were intensified by the antisemitic legislation introduced in the early Horthy era, in the first years of the 1920s (Karsai, 2005).

His first success came relatively late, at the age of 25, when his song Just One More Night (1924) was published by the Nádor Kálmán Music Publishing House. This marked the beginning of his musical career, even though he had never received formal training in music. While in Komárom he had been a member of the local male choir, and had played in several venues in Pest, his first serious pianist job (at the later Kulacs restaurant) was obtained for him by Nádor József, the son of the music publisher’s owner, who continued to support him later on (Gál, 2010, p. 48).

This was the first time he received both institutional and professional recognition — for a work that stemmed solely from his autodidactic learning and persistence. In addition, through Nádor (as a mentor), he also gained social capital, which remained essential for his success. The venue was located just behind the immensely popular New York Café and was colloquially known as “Little New York” (from 1932, officially named Kulacs). In its grand hall, Seress was employed as a pianist and composer in his late twenties (Gál, 2010, p. 118). He found music — his own mode of self-expression — through which he could also hope for a livelihood. This experience was identity-forming, but did not result in an absolutely stable status, so the tragic semiperipheral self likely continued to strengthen.

One More Night, as a form of self-narrative, reflects an identity without support, whose earlier dreams had collapsed. As a tragic semiperipheral self motif, it symbolically evokes a death wish as well (“Then I shall leave forever”). He uses words such as pain and beggar, which are classic markers of the negative code.

A true breakthrough in songwriting came for Seress in the early 1930s, that is, in his early thirties (Gál, 2010, p. 66). In 1930, at the age of 31, he composed both the lyrics and music for the song No One Has Ever Loved Me (Engem még nem szeretett senki), rich in linguistic negations. In 1932, he wrote the lyrics to Come, My Dog Bodri (Gyere Bodri kutyám). During the Great Depression, the revenues at Kulacs plummeted, and the owner, Béla Vágó, tried to compensate by “commissioning” Seress to write a more positive song. The result was the seemingly positive Let’s Love Each Other, Children (Szeressük egymást, gyerekek, 1932).

Unusually, Gloomy Sunday (Szomorú vasárnap) was not released by Nádor, but by the publishers Csárdás and Marnitz in 1933, who held both domestic and international distribution rights. The lyrics were written by László Jávor, a police radio reporter for the 8 Órai Újság, who asked Seress to set them to music. The orchestration was done by Kornél Arányi, a trained musician who had studied at the Academy of Music (Gál, 2010, p. 69). This marked a step toward professionalization, as up until that point, it had been Seress’s sister who helped transcribe his music. This time, Seress was also able to translate the success into financial gain. With the advance payment for Gloomy Sunday, he had a fashionable suit and a new tuxedo made. This was, in his own words, “the first luxury” of his life (Gál, 2010, p. 73) — a visible marker of success that also shaped his identity. “This is my spring,” as he called March and April of 1933 (Gál, 2010, p. 75; Gál, 2025).

The contemporary media played a major role in the unprecedentedly rapid spread and international resonance of the song (Patakfalvi-Czirják, 2017). Seress himself gained widespread media attention only after the first suicides were publicly linked to Gloomy Sunday. A feature article in A Mai Nap (1935, p. 7) quoted a line from their interview with him as a subtitle: “Whoever dies with a song must have a beautiful soul, but I never wanted this kind of publicity”. The interview revisited his earlier career. He spoke positively about his transition from acting to songwriting and listed his successful songs, concluding that “these songs are known by everyone — even abroad”. This statement reflects a kind of strengthened cultural self-confidence — an important element of his narrative self-understanding. He had come to recognize that what he created had value in the eyes of others, and that this recognition extended beyond the listeners who personally connected with his music.

The subject of financial recognition also came up in relation to international success: “A fashionable songwriter like me could easily earn three to four thousand pengő a month abroad just from royalties, without needing to perform publicly — I’m just happy I can live in peace like this”. This reflects a typically semiperipheral narrative: comparing one’s own situation with that of artists living in the Western center. According to Barna (2025), this is a typical pattern in the music industry among semiperipheral creators — the lack of stable livelihood and visibility often translates into existential experiences different from those in the global center. This moment also reveals a tone of resignation — an acceptance of limitations.

Seress reflects on the center–semiperiphery relationship, economic and technological inequalities, and the vulnerability of the semiperiphery from the perspective of Hungarian composers:

Then, addressing the consequences, he states:

When asked in A Mai Nap whether he enjoyed playing music, Seress drew an equal sign between his life and music. Music was everything to him; he emphasized that he didn’t sing songs but spoke or performed them, and that he often cried while doing so. This indicated a total identification with the song — performance was part of his identity. This made him emotionally authentic and compelling to his audience.

Regarding the suicides, he rejected the accusations. Using the phrase “deadly publicity,” he suggested that what was being circulated was a myth (see Patakfalvi-Czirják, 2017; Stack et al., 2008). Although Gloomy Sunday made him famous — through the myth of the “killer song” that lured listeners to their deaths — this myth also trapped him in a particular interpretation. He became, irrevocably, “the composer of the suicide song,” a role he could never escape.

His rising fame and popularity clashed more and more starkly with the political rightward shift of the late 1930s, marked by antisemitic laws and open support for Hitler. The conditions for pursuing the kind of career Seress had imagined for himself were increasingly undermined.

In 1934, at the age of 35, Seress married Hani (Helén) Nádler, the waitress at the Kulacs Restaurant (Budapest District VII Civil Marriage Register, 1934). It was around the time they met that he composed the song When Everything Ends (Ha minden véget ér). This song explicitly deals with finality and the inevitability of loss. Themes of death and transience also appear implicitly through metaphors such as “silent path,” “quiet passing,” and even hints at the closure of the narrative self: “we can no longer think about the past”. In this song, Seress addresses the woman he hopes to win over in the language of the negative code with an unusually dense pattern of implicit negations — a mode of communication that had previously brought him emotional validation and success and did so once again. By this point, the tragic semiperipheral self had become fully internalized. Paradoxically, his goal — winning another person’s love — was achieved through a song that emphasized endings. The newlyweds moved into a dark, courtyard-facing apartment above the Kulacs, physically merging the spaces of work and private life. From that point on, these domains were no longer separate.

In the summer of 1935, Seress returned home to Komárom, and the local press covered his visit; he was also interviewed in Pozsony (Híradó, 1936, p. 4). This marked the peak of his career, yet the recognition he received remained characteristic of the semiperiphery: it was limited to local and regional attention rather than emanating from the cultural center — Budapest or the West. The spotlight remained fixed on his homeland.

Around the same time, he was also involved in a plagiarism lawsuit (filed by another composer who had written a similarly titled and themed song), concerning his work If I Were God (Ha én lennék az Isten). The case deeply affected Seress, as it cast doubt on his artistic authenticity. Since he was so intimately identified with his works, the challenge seemed to threaten his very identity. Although the Curia ultimately ruled in his favor in 1936, declaring him innocent (Gál, 2010, pp. 85, 87), the ordeal took an emotional toll. Meanwhile, his operetta Love All Along the Line (Szerelem az egész vonalon) failed. It simply could not enter the elite musical space dominated by major operetta composers such as Ferenc Lehár, Imre Kálmán, and Szabolcs Fényes. Once again, Seress found himself reliving the experience of marginality.

He may have found some consolation in the fact that several of his songs became real hits during the mid-1930s, including The Wheel Turns Up and Down (Egyszer fent és egyszer lent a kerék) and She Became Everyone’s Woman (Mindenki asszonya lett). The former expressed the instability and unpredictability of life on the semiperiphery. To this body of work we can also add The World Has Ended! (Vége a világnak!), a text that responded to the historical context — war and suffering — and was set to the same melody as Gloomy Sunday. This song will be discussed in greater detail later.

A profound rupture — and the culmination of the tragic semiperipheral self — came when Helén, his wife of Jewish faith (Budapest District VII Civil Marriage Register, 1934), left him. Sometime after the Anschluss (March 1938) and amid the increasingly frequent enactment of antisemitic laws, she disappeared — we do not know where — and urged her husband to flee as well. Seress, however, chose to stay. It was during this time (1940) that he composed the music for Just Drink, Drink (Csak inni, inni), a song about coping with pain through self-destruction. By this point, nearly everyone had vanished from his life — even his closest friend, Imre Székely Molnár, who had emigrated to Canada. In response to this new loss, he composed the ironically entitled Hello, You Old Rake (Szervusz, te vén kujon, 1938), in which he again turned to alcohol to numb the emotional pain of losing a friend. From then on, Seress gradually — and eventually completely — withdrew into isolation.

Despite the increasingly strong antisemitism, Seress remained in Hungary even when the country joined World War II on Hitler's side. In the spring of 1942, he was conscripted into Labor Service. According to Act XIV of 1942, this was how Jews were required to fulfil their military obligations. Jewish labor servicemen were treated like prisoners of war. They were not regarded as human beings, and they were forced to carry out life-threatening tasks: they were made to bury live mines and were kept in inhumane conditions. Many perished due to the cruelty, and even those who survived suffered lasting physical and psychological injuries (Braham, 1997, pp. 317–325). There is little reliable information available regarding this period in Seress’s life. What is certain is that Seress experienced dehumanization and the immediate proximity of death. He internalized the most severe experiences of the semiperiphery and of historical cataclysm. He lost weight, his health declined, and his deteriorated condition was accompanied by hopelessness. In April 1945, upon the arrival of the first Russian tanks, he composed the song Fizetek főúr (“Waiter, the bill, please”), in which he spoke about having ruined his life. He returned home at the end of April, when the war was over. His sister’s family survived as well, but their parents, who were deported, died on the train en route to Auschwitz. In the reviving capital, one of the rooms of the Kulacs restaurant reopened by the end of April. Everything in the apartment above the Kulacs had remained in place, and Seress moved back there. For a long time, he only felt safe in the apartment and did not leave it (Gál, 2010, p. 112). At that time, he was dejected, melancholic, slow, and lacked willpower — he was depressed. His sister pulled him out of this state. His mood improved, and what also helped him rebuild his life was that Frigyes Marnitz, the publisher of Gloomy Sunday, informed him that a Gloomy Sunday Club operated overseas and that a Budapest-based ceramic artist was making a bust of Rezső Seress for them (Gál, 2010, p. 113). In other words, the myth was reborn, and Seress became a cult figure in the distant center. What was most important for him, however, was that Helén, his wife, unexpectedly returned to him. It was also at this time that the famous quote from Otto Klemperer, the chief music director of the Budapest Opera House, was entered into the well-known Seress guestbook: “Er ist kein Musiker — er ist nur ein Genie” (“He is not a musician — he is only a genius”), which, alongside being a compliment, also reinforced the feeling that had always tormented Seress: that without institutional background or formal studies, he stood outside the circle of professional musicians. Furthermore, following World War II, his songs evoking the atmosphere of the Horthy era (1920–1944) were not tolerated by the new Sovietized regime. His identity was under threat from all sides: on January 19, 1949, Szabad Nép published an article by Miklós Molnár launching an ideological campaign against artists evoking the past, and Seress Rezső’s songs were blacklisted. His network of connections also suffered a serious blow when Béla Vágó, the former owner of the Kulacs Restaurant and Seress’s benefactor and supporter, died by suicide on September 18, 1951 (Gál, 2010, p. 127).

At the height of the communist dictatorship, Seress played the piano at the Kispipa restaurant, and it was from there that he eventually retired. He did nothing but make music. “He barely slept and barely ate. He drank coffee by the liter.” (Gál, 2010, p. 130; Gál, 2025) He was afraid, and his dejection became chronic. The experiences he had during the labor service and the persecution of Jews caused symptoms consistent with trauma-related distress (Gál, 2025). At this time, his wife had become emotionally distant from him (Gál, 2010, p. 132). By living solely for his work, he became even more marginalized and even more vulnerable. He was not deeply embedded in any social network — his only living relatives were his sister Klára’s son and his wife, though they were genuinely close to him.

In December 1967, the elderly (68-year-old) Seress was forced into retirement (after an ill-considered and unfortunate decision left him without a contract) (Gál, 2010, p. 138). Having played music continuously for approximately 40 years, being stripped of his vocation plunged Seress into deep depression.

At that time, he and Helén were already living near the Kispipa restaurant (Dob Street 46b). It was during this period that the song In My Life I Only Loved Two Women (Életemben csak két nőt szerettem) was composed. As the song itself suggests — referring to his mother and his estranged wife — he and his wife had, to his regret, already grown very distant from each other. Near the end of his life, he shared the following reflections with Gyuláné Sztopa (Klára’s daughter-in-law), who was close to him:

“After my death, they’ll write beautiful things about me in the obituaries. That’s how it goes here. That more people know my songs than the man who wrote them. That I was a small, unnoticed little man, a schlemiel, in a small Budapest restaurant… I was little Seress, Rudi, to my close friends Dudi.” (Gál, 2010, p. 152)

Let us juxtapose this confession with the interview excerpt chosen as the study’s motto. His interview was marked by the tone of the negative code and the tragic semiperipheral self, conveying two important messages. First, complete identification with his works. Second, the notion that composing music was a kind of fated internal compulsion — something that aligns with what Jung also described:

“Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than an observer of events. The work in progress becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe.” (Jung, 1966)

That was the case in 1935, but in the final years before his death, Seress had written nothing further. As he told to Klára’s daughter-in-law, his songs (which were known) and he himself (who was not) were not truly one and the same. The tragic semiperipheral self had reached its conclusion — Seress knew he would never again play a leading role in life, and thus his marginalization on the semiperiphery had become final. As long as he worked, he was a “little man” in a little restaurant. And once he lost his job, he wasn't even that anymore.

His life, perhaps unsurprisingly, ended in suicide. On January 12, 1968, Seress Rezső, who had been hospitalized with severe injuries, hanged himself (Budapest District VIII Civil Death Register, 1968). A few days earlier, he had jumped from the window of his third-floor apartment, but that suicide attempt had not ended in death. The sources do not clearly indicate whether this first attempt occurred on Sunday the 7^th (perhaps as a reflection on the Gloomy Sunday myth) or Thursday the 11^th.

In the case of the tragic semiperipheral self, the interaction between person and context shows a characteristic pattern. On the semiperiphery, the negative code offers narrative schemata characterized by a persistently negative tone, which makes it more likely that the narrative will not be redemptive and narrows the room for agency and communion; that is, it results in low and defensive agency and communion framed as loss and lack, ultimately producing a finalistic self-narration. The possibility of an alternative self-interpretation becomes smaller the more strongly cultural and structural markers operate in the individual’s life.

The key motifs of Seress’s songs were fate, destiny, and rejection, which may have been connected with his historically and structurally rooted isolation and marginalization. As a self-taught composer of Jewish origin who could not read sheet music, he suffered from the lack of recognition and from not being able to step out of the role of the “little man”. This image already appears in contemporary sources: “…and who could possibly list how many nationally popular songs he composed — yet night after night he plays the piano here, providing the music in this few-square-meter, dimly lit tavern… his fee: a few pengő and a small serving of stew for dinner,” they wrote about him in Gong in 1935 (as quoted in Müller, 1983, p. 8). Memoirs decades later reflect the same image back to Seress: “a small, inconspicuous little man” (Népszabadság, 1968, p. 12), “a strongly localized figure” who “almost never crossed the boundaries of District VII” and who lived and created within the inner world of the Jewish petit bourgeoisie of Pest. It was Seress’s choice to identify with this position: in this way he could authentically express the feelings of the “average person,” which was an advantage especially during socialism, but could also elicit the audience’s sympathy in times of crisis. According to Merton’s (1948) theory of the self-fulfilling prophecy, a false definition of a situation can elicit behaviors that make the false situation come true. The legend woven around Gloomy Sunday — the “song of suicides” — as a stigma shaped Seress’s self-image and may even have contributed to Seress’s suicide.

Through a multi-perspectival reading of Seress’s inner development and suicide — starting from cultural, structural, and personal narrative — lessons can also be articulated that may be relevant even today. Our examples reflect on the connections between cultural and structural codes and the personal narrative; our aim is to develop cultural and structural code-awareness, particularly in higher education.

Kézdi’s negative-code theory points out that negation — especially multiple negations — can signal the absence of possibilities and the restriction of alternatives, which may appear as finality in the personal narrative. Members of the cultural–linguistic community may, by decoding these signs, experience their scope for action as limited. A thorough knowledge of the codes, however, opens space for reflection and reframing.

Similarly, insight into resource scarcity arising from a semiperipheral position, the background of vulnerability, and the operation of the capitalist world-system can also affect the shaping of personal narratives. In both examples, useful strategies may include: expanding the time horizon, practicing an active agency-language, and strengthening relational embeddedness. These strategies can also be applied in educational institutions through already proven tools (e.g., reflective journals, relational maps, etc.). In the Hungarian educational environment, the application of code-awareness, knowledge of the relationship between agency and language, and the support of relational embeddedness are also warranted because they promote resilience.

Language, by shaping what and how we reflect on the world, imposes limits on agency.

Our aim in this study was to interpret Seress’s suicide by integrating Kézdi’s negative code, Wallerstein’s semiperipheral framework, and McAdams’s theory of narrative identity — reading the song lyrics as self-narration. We examined the relations between the “suicide song” myth and Seress’s personal narrative, with particular attention to the tension between his aversion to the stigma of the suicide song and his own suicide. Based on Table 2, negation density peaks in two songs (Engem még nem szeretett senki, 1930; Csak inni, inni, 1940), which have a finalistic narrative tone. According to Table 3, in these texts the markers of agency are minimal/defensive, while communion is consistently framed as absence. Both songs are linked to life events in which historical and personal crises are simultaneously present. Contemporary reception consistently fixed Seress in the position of the “little man”; the continuous performance of Gloomy Sunday turned the myth into a lasting interpretive frame that fed back into his self-narration (internalization), while negotiation was possible only in limited ways.

Within the integrated framework, we identified the co-occurrence of multiple negation (negative code), a finalistic plot, and limited/defensive agency (in the McAdamsian sense). Following Wallerstein, semiperipheral resource scarcity and gatekeeping explain the persistence of institutional marginality; from McLean & Syed’s perspective, in encounters with master narratives internalization appears to dominate negotiation. These processes almost invisibly incorporated not only the Gloomy Sunday myth but also the losing national perspective, which further narrowed the structure of opportunities (opportunity structure). On this basis we proposed the analytic concept of the tragic semiperipheral self (TSS) as a strongly context-bound self-type.

According to our results, although Seress strives to distance himself from the “suicide song” label, he cannot durably detach himself from it. The room for maneuver is narrow: cultural and social constraints are further narrowed by contemporary ideology and politics (antisemitic legislation, the Holocaust). Agency thus appears mostly in defensive form and moving on a narrow track. Methodologically, we combined a qualitative hermeneutic approach with a negation-density analysis, supported by an audit trail and reflexive memos; in this way we contributed to the literature on non-WEIRD psychobiography from an integrative (cultural–semiperipheral–narrative) point of departure. In the future, it would be worthwhile to expand the text corpus (additional song lyrics and press interviews), and — examining other semiperipheral artists — to compare redemptive and tragic patterns.

Seress’s case shows that under the pressure of a semiperipheral master narrative and the negative code — where agency is defensive and communion is written mostly as absence — the songs become at once mirror and shaping force: they give voice to collective suffering while reinforcing a narrative that closes meaning-making in a finalistic manner.