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

which passes judgement, as relentlessly as the mystery plays of the Middle Ages, on all characters of the „Vanity Fair” but Eve:

Why are you, whirling depth, before my feet?

Your night can frightenme to no retreat;

Mere dust, the earth-born falls into this pit,

And I, in glory, saunter over it.

One of the unique features of this poem on humanity is that in Scenes XII-XIV Madách extended the patterns of the past into the future. For today’s readers this future has become the present. The text of the Tragedy is given, but the combination of the past and the present can lead to new and exciting possibilities and problems for directors, actors and stage-designers alike. In Scene XIII Madách depicts the model of technical society, based on the ideas of F.M.Ch. Fourier, well-known also in Hungary. Disillusioned with this world as well, in Scene XIII Adam again attempts to escape — this time into space. Once more Madách goes beyond the great romantic visions of flight speaking through the Earth’s Spirit, he formulates the earth-bound nature of all human problems:

For your every concept,

Your sensation are mere radiations

Of that same mass of matter that you call

Your earth. Yet, if the earth were something else,

Then it could not exist - neither could you.

In Scene XIV Adam returns to the Earth and finds a frozen almost totally depopulated world of ice. The anihilation of the liberty-equality-fratemity ideological trinity, which had started with the ruthless free competition in the London scene and which had continued in the Phalanstery that mocked equality by destroying the individual, is achieved with the appearance of the last men on Earth: eskimos debased to an almost subhuman level. This is the final bitter blow aimed at the ideal of fraternity. It is unnecessary to point out that Madách could depict the future only through the poetic reformulation and systematization of theories

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