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Hungarian
dramatist Imre Madách was born at Alsó-Sztregova
in 1829. He’ took part in the great revolution of 1848-49
and was imprisoned; on his return to his small estate in the
county of Nógrád, he found that his family life
had meanwhile been completely wrecked. This only increased his
natural tendency to melancholy, and he withdrew from public life
till 1861, devoting his time mainly to the composition of his
chief work, Az ember tragoediája (“The Tragedy
of Man “). John Arany, then at the height of his fame as
a poet, at once recognized the great merits of that peculiar
drama, and Madách enjoyed a short spell of fame before
his untimely death of heart disease in 1864. In The Tragedy
of Man Madách takes us from the hour when Adam and
Eve were innocently walking in the Garden of Eden to the times
of the Pharaohs; then to the Athens of Miltiades; to declining
Rome; to the period of the crusades; into the study of the astronomer
Kepler; thence into the horrors of the French Revolution; into
greed-eaten and commerce-ridden modern London; nay, into thc
ultra-Socialist state of the future, when all the former ideals
of man will by scientific formulae be shown up in their hollowness;
still further, the poet shows the future of ice-clad earth when
man will be reduced to a degraded brute dragging on the
misery of his existence in a cave. In all
these scenes, or rather anticipatory dreams, Adam, Eve and the
arch-fiend Lucifer are the chief and constantly recurring personae
dramatis. In the end, Adam, despairing of his race, wants to
commit suicide, when at the critical moment Eve tells him that
she is going to be a mother. Adam then prostrates himself before
God, who encourages him to hope and trust. The diction of the
drama is elevated and pure, and although not meant for the stage,
it has proved very effective at several public performances.
Concerning Madách there is an ample
literature, consisting mostly of elaborate articles by Charles
Szász (1862), Augustus Greguss (1872), B. Alexander (1871),
M. Pahigyi (1890), and others.
This article was originally
published in Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition.
Cambridge: University Press, 1911.
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