The Tragedy of Man Author:Imre Madach, George Szirtes (Translator) The Tragedy of Man is the most controversial work in the long history of Hungarian literature. When it was first published in 1862, it was hailed as a great achievement, but at the same time it gave rise to a multitude of question, both literary and philosophical, that have been fiercely debated ever since. It is also one of the most surprising ... more »works in Hungarian: it appeared suddenly from the pen of an unknown author and had no obvious antecedents in the Hungarian literary tradition. How did a Hungarian country gentleman who spent most of his short life at home and rarely traveled outside his native country come to write a dramatic poem that takes its place in a broad European tradition represented by such giant figures as Milton, Goethe, Byron and Ibsen?
In The Tragedy of Man Madach 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.« less