Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)
dr. Ferenc Kerényi: A Dramatic Poem from Hungary to the Theaters of the World
Madách lived among these enthusiastic reformers, shared their feelings and ideas. Like the other members of his generation, he also tried his hand at poetry and romantic historical drama and applauded the performances of the National Theatre. After his graduation as a lawyer, Madách experienced the difficulties of introducing into practice in local politics the liberal and radical ideas he had encountered as a university student. The members of this generation prepared themselves consciously for the great historical task of de-feudalization; they tried to shape their roles by imitating the heroes of antiquity and of the French Revolution and Lord Byron, who had died for the cause of freedom. In 1848, at the „Spring-time of Nations”, it was they who formed the Hungarian vanguard of the European revolutions, it was they who fought the battles of the Hungarian bourgeois revolution and of the National War of Independence. In vain did Victor Hugo’s, Heinrich Heine’s and Henrik Ibsen’s poems greet their struggle with enthusiasm, in vain did they enjoy the sympathy of the European people and of the American public opinion: the two great military powers of Europe at that time — the Emperor of Austria and the „Tsar of all Russians” - nipped the young Hungarian republic in the bud by their joint military force. Hungary became temporarily part and parcel of the powerful Habsburg Empire. After 1849 Madách’s liberal generation saw its very incentive to live collapse. The Madáches — like almost every other family in Hungary — mourned their sons who had fallen on the battlefields, been carried of to captivity or been forced to emigrate. Those who remained had to cope hidden among the walls of their manor-houses, with an other, internal but no less painful task: they had to confront the recent past, pondering over their seemingly defeated ideals, almost masochistically analysing the reasons for their failure, at times casting doubt on the very judiciousness of these ideals. In Hungary, as in all of Europe, the era of romantic enthusiasm was followed by a decade of doubts. Without this short historical survey it would be difficult to understand how a poem on Mankind could have taken shape at the writing desk of Madách, a poem, Hungarian to its very core, albeit none of the scenes depicted takes place in Hungary and the work is 10
