Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Mária Kurdi: "Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain." On the Scholarly Heritage of Péter Egri (1932-2002)

and these may seem to be important ones on occasion. In this particular case John Millington Synge is such a missing author. His absence is all the more surprizing as William Butler Yeats, who made less direct impact on contemporary Irish drama than Synge, receives a comparatively lengthy treatment in the volume, despite the fact that a considerable bulk of his plays was written after 1917, beyond which date the book does not reach. The chapter on Yeats, however, has its own specific value in that it constitutes the first interpretative discussion of the poet-playwright's experimental dramatic oeuvre in Hungary. Referring to the late Ibsen as parallel as well as potential influence, Egri emphasizes the symbolism inherent in Yeats's work for the theatre. Thus a ground-breaking essay in its own right, it was soon followed by Csilla Bertha's comprehensive monographic study of Yeats the playwright, in the introductory chapter of which she quotes Egri's description of the Irish author as the writer of the "drama of possibility" in a future-oriented period characterized by the national and cultural revival of his native country (28). Another of Egri's isolated essays from 1987, called "Synge and O'Neill: Inspiration and Influence," may serve to compensate for the absence of Synge from the book mapping the history of modern European drama. Claiming that during their first tour of the United States in 1911 the Abbey Players presented works by Synge, Yeats, Augusta Gregory, T. C. Murray and Lennox Robinson, it describes how O'Neill, at that time a young man cherishing dreams of writing for the theatre, attended all of those performances, and started his own playwriting career with Synge as a haunting presence behind the works of especially his early period. According to Egri"s summary, the apparent influence can be detected "from typological convergence to parallels of theme, treatment, mood and motif," which constitute "so many good reasons to see the two dramatists' works in correlation" (268). Reading this well justified argument, one is invited to add that later in the twentieth century the direction of inspiration/influence between the drama of the two nations seems to have changed: a number of contemporary Irish playwrights engage in a refreshing dialogue with O'Neill, Tennessee Wiliams, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard and David Mamet. 21