Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)
József Ruszt: Notes on Putting on the Tragedy
JÓZSEF RUSZT NOTES ON PUTTING ON THE TRAGEDY Interpretation and the Age The state of the world is tragic today, but this does not really interfere with the mechanism of everyday living... It seems as if the man of today registered this information in a single domain of his consciousness „reserved for tragedy”, lest this tiny convolution in the brain disturbs the operation of the rest of the vital needed for survival. This was probably always the case. Man generally existed in a basically tragic stituation even though he refused to think about it. This in spite of the fact that as the Greeks of antiquity said, life is dangerous, for everyone dies of it... In the course of history Man perceives this tragic basic situation when he is suddenly touched by the thought that it is not indifferent „how and for what purpose I live”. A tragedy is then a decision prompted by the consciousness, a decision valid for the entire personality, the precise qualification of the dilemma involved in choosing a given course of action — out of several alternatives - and this is not merely a matter of genre. The Aim is Decision — Striving is Only the Method What has all this go to do with The Tragedy — that is, with Madách’s The Tragedy of Man? The drama formulates and qualifies a decision, namely Adam’s realization, through the interplay of freedom and inevitability, that, if life becomes senseless, Man is still free to throw it away when he wants to, and need not wait for the time when the manifestation of existence in his being will determine the end. This is the germ of the Madáchian thought as expressed in the play, and not the „Struggle and trust” motif. Decision is the aim, striving the method... 67
