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

completely free from self-bewailing provincialism. Both heroes of The Tragedy of Man represent the poet himself: Adam, the idealist, as well as Lucifer, the sober disenchanter.

Madách wrote his poem on Humanity, a favourite genre of romantic literature with which he was familiar. His library contained copies of Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred and Cain, and their influence on his work is undisputable. Madách’s Tragedy, Victor Hugo’s The Legend of Centuries and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt are not connected by the dates of their creation alone, but also by their common approach to the problem. Literary works dealing with the meaning of the acts of man and, raising the ultimate question of human existence had not been unknown in Hungary either. Romantic fairy-tales, dramas which took place in the Land of Nowhere and speculative poetry had dealt before Madách with moments of helplessness, moments which occur only in the life of men who are full of fervour and ready to act. All this was enhanced by a new trend in philosophy which, in the 1850’s, raised again the perennial question of the priority of matter over mind. In this period, new and more advanced scientific discoveries and arguments strengthened the position of materialism. Natural sciences and the philosophy of history, lyrical self-identification and positivistic ideology are fused together in Madách’s work. The Tragedy of Man - as we have tried to elucidate — has values closely linked with the given period, both in Hungarian national culture and world literature, a more detailed analysis of which is left to the scholars.

Here and now, however, we are intrigued by another paradox: which are those timeless, to be more precise, theatrical values of The Tragedy of Man which have preserved its place for a century on the Hungarian stage and for more than nine decades on the stages of the world? The content of the more than 4100 lines in the work will be analyzed from the same perspective. Madách wrote lyrical poems which reflect many thoughts expressed later on in The Tragedy of Man but, frankly speaking, as a poet he was quite mediocre. He, whose other dramas could be produced only after considerable re-writing, found in the Tragedy the literary genre which suited him perfectly. Both the possibilities of a play unrestricted by time and space, and the structure of the dramatic poen, were eminently suited to his thoughts and style.

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