Imre Madách

• Born: January 21, 1823
• Birthplace: Alsósztregova, Hungary
• Died: October 5, 1864
• Place of death: Alsósztregova, Hungary

Other Literary Forms

Imre Madách wrote numerous poems, most of which were published posthumously. Only a few, including one slim verse collection, Lantvirágok (1840; lyre blossoms), appeared in print during his lifetime. He wrote five prose tales of scant literary significance. His newspaper articles, essays, speeches, and parliamentary addresses give evidence of his broad educational background and impressive rhetorical ability.

Achievements

Most Hungarian critics consider Imre Madách their country’s greatest philosophical dramatist. This assessment is based almost exclusively on his most important play, The Tragedy of Man, frequently referred to as the “Hungarian Faust.” His other works are important mainly in their relation to his one masterpiece or as historical and biographical documents. The Tragedy of Man is rightly seen as the culmination of various trends of European Romanticism. The drama gives an overview of the history of humankind within a wider metaphysical framework. Madách’s work stands in the tradition of the poème d’humanité or Menschheitsdrama of the nineteenth century and shows the impact of various European writers and thinkers. Although the playwright chose a topic of universal significance and deliberately avoided specific references to his native culture, Hungarians have for many generations recognized the spirit of his drama as uniquely representative of their national experience. Since its first successful production at the Budapest National Theatre in 1883, it has remained a popular favorite on the Hungarian stage. Performances abroad as well as adaptations for radio and television in Europe and the United States, although frequently hampered by inadequate translations, have acquainted an international audience with Madách’s play. In 1981, it even stimulated an opera, Ein Menschentraum (a dream of man), by the West German composer Peter Michael Hamel, in which the playwright’s life and his drama are intertwined.

Biography

Imre Madách was born on January 21, 1823, at Alsósztregova in Northern Hungary. His family belonged to the landed gentry. Among his ancestors were warriors and poets, religious leaders and medical writers, legislators and lawyers. Madách’s father married Anna Majthényi, a wealthy young woman from another aristocratic family, intelligent, strong-willed, and deeply religious. She bore her husband five children for whose upbringing she had to assume sole responsibility when he died in 1834.

The young Madách and his brothers and sisters enjoyed an excellent private education. In 1837, he was sent to Pest to complete his schooling and earn a university degree. He was very bright, sensitive, and serious, with a keen interest in art, literature, and philosophy. When he was only sixteen, his first poem appeared in a national magazine. Madách’s constitution was weak: All through his life he would be plagued by health problems. His attachment to his mother was strong. In 1840, the seventeen-year-old author dedicated the slim volume of poetry he had printed to her, not to the girl for whom he had written it. Despite his interest in literature, he did not consider a writing career but intended to obtain a law degree. His formal studies in Pest came to an end in 1840, when he fell seriously ill, a condition possibly aggravated by psychological factors. He had fallen in love with a fourteen-year-old girl, and his mother insisted that she would never agree to their marriage. After a period of recuperation at home, he passed his bar examination in 1842 and then held a number of appointed and elected offices in his home county, but on several occasions, he had to resign for health reasons. He also became active in politics as a supporter of the “Centralist” movement of Baron József Eötvös and began contributing to a Pest newspaper. His first serious attempts at writing prose narratives and dramas also date to the period after 1842.

In 1845, Madách married Erzsébet (Erzsi) Fráter, a beautiful and vivacious seventeen-year-old girl, over the strong objections of his mother. The first years of their marriage were happy, but his mother’s concerns had not been without foundation. Soon Erzsi became dissatisfied with married life, and even their three children could not save their disintegrating relationship. His poor health prevented Madách from active participation in the 1848-1849 war against Austria, which claimed the lives of several of his family members. The sensitive and deeply patriotic poet was strongly affected by the national tragedy. Eventually, the war was to take an even more direct personal toll. In 1853, the Austrian authorities arrested him and imprisoned him for almost a year for having given shelter to a political fugitive. Erzsi’s unbecoming behavior during and after his incarceration led to their divorce in 1854. For the next few years, Madách lived the life of a recluse. Eventually he started writing again, and his bitter experiences led to some of his best poetry. His 1859 comedy, A civilizátor (the civilizer), is a satiric description of Austria’s attempts to “Germanize” Hungary. In 1860, he composed his masterpiece, The Tragedy of Man.

It was as if the writing of this play allowed him to break out of his self-imposed seclusion and to enter public life again. Madách won election as his county’s representative to the 1861 Diet in Pest, where he soon gained a reputation as an outstanding orator. János Arany, then considered Hungary’s greatest literary authority, agreed to review the manuscript of Madách’s drama, which he initially rejected as an inferior imitation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (pb. 1808, 1833; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823, 1838). Soon, however, he recognized the originality and importance of the work and became its most enthusiastic champion. The Kisfaludy Society, the country’s leading literary association, published the play in 1862 and elected Madách a member. Almost overnight, the virtually unknown poet had become the nation’s most famous playwright. To his disappointment, Mózes, completed in 1860, failed to meet with critical or popular acclaim. In 1863, he was made a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but his deteriorating health kept him from reading his inaugural address himself. His last dramatic attempt, Tündérálom (fairy dream), remained a fragment. On October 5, 1864, Madách succumbed to heart failure at his ancestral home.

Analysis

Imre Madách’s dramatic works testify to his keen interest in history and in social and political problems, to his acquaintance with traditional and contemporary trends in Western philosophy, to his concern with religious questions, and to his familiarity with world literature and with recent scientific discoveries and theories. His work is deeply personal and at the same time broadly universal. It reflects the culture of a country that had always considered itself part of the Western tradition while fiercely fighting any attempt from the outside to dominate or change its unique national character. The experience of a linguistically isolated people who over the centuries had continued to defend their political and cultural independence against overwhelming odds finds its philosophical expression in the ending of The Tragedy of Man: After a deeply pessimistic interpretation of world history, humankind is nevertheless encouraged to hope, to have faith, and to continue its struggle.

Madách’s first dramatic ventures re-create episodes from the history of Hungary, as in Mária királynő (Queen Mary) or Csák végnapjai (Csák’s last days); try to give a modern interpretation to an ancient myth, as in Férfi és nő (man and woman), his Heracles drama; or castigate the injustices and shortcomings he had observed in contemporary society, as in Csak tréfa (only a joke). The plays demonstrate the immaturity of a twenty-year-old writer with no stage experience, fascinated by the European Romantic movement. Yet they also give evidence of his ability to bring history to life in dramatic scenes and to focus on important human concerns. The relationship between the sexes is one of his prominent themes.

A civilizátor

A civilizátor is the first of Madách’s plays in which form and content blend well. Aristophanic satire is cleverly applied to Hungarian conditions. Stroom, the Hegel-spouting “civilizer,” trying to bring the blessings of Germanic culture and of Austrian-style bureaucracy to Uncle István, the small landowner who represents the Hungarian people, is ultimately defeated. His army of cockroaches is no match for the fury of István and his farmhands, symbolizing the various ethnic minorities in Hungary who had initially succumbed to Austrian attemps at dividing the nation. Madách’s talent for satire and irony, already apparent in some of his poetry, is given an appropriate dramatic vehicle in this play. Thus, A civilizátor is also important in view of the characterization of Lucifer in The Tragedy of Man.

The Tragedy of Man

In his most ambitious literary project, The Tragedy of Man, Madách attempted to present in fifteen dramatic scenes an overview of the history of humankind from the creation to the final days of the human race. Madách’s iambic pentameter flows fairly easily, in part as a result of stylistic and metric corrections by Arany, and the drama’s structure is clear and logical.

The exposition of the play appears to have been inspired by the biblical Book of Job and by the “Prologue in Heaven” of Goethe’s Faust: The Lord has completed the noble task of creation and now accepts the praise of his angels. Only Lucifer refuses to join in. Instead, he mocks the Creator who made humankind as an act of self-admiration. Lucifer defiantly demands his share of the world that he helped create through his negativity. The two trees in Eden, scornfully granted him, will become his foothold in the effort to bring down the divine order just established. By persuading Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, he begins to realize his plan. The first human beings lose their happy state of oneness with God. Outside Paradise, they will build their own world. In order to demonstrate his power, Lucifer conjures up the Earth Spirit but proves incapable of controlling the positive forces of nature that the spirit symbolizes. When Adam wants to know the future of the race whose founder he is to be, Lucifer shows him, in ten dream visions, selected phases from the history of humankind. Each one is designed to emphasize that all human progress is only an illusion, that all great ideals are bound to fail. In this way, Lucifer hopes to lead Adam into despair and to a renunciation of God.

Madách’s ingenious idea to make Adam, the Faustian seeker for knowledge, the protagonist in each of the historic scenes gives the dramatic poem a unity and consistency lacking in another work written at almost exactly the same time and closely paralleling the aims of Madách’s play: La Légende des siècles (1859-1883; The Legend of the Centuries, 1894), Victor Hugo’s five-volume poème d’humanité. In each scene, Adam encounters Eve, Woman Eternal, in a different disguise, either inspiring him to reach for new ideals or attempting to pull him down into the dust. During his journey through history, he is accompanied by Lucifer, whose sarcastic comments provide a striking contrast to Adam’s naïve idealism. Despite his devastating experiences, Adam continues to believe in a better future, spurred on by hope which is, quite in agreement with Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, a gift of the Devil.

The historical periods depicted are arranged in a dialectic pattern that appears to echo Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s view of the development of humanity. Adam as Pharaoh represents despotic one-man rule. Through the encounter with Eve, he is persuaded to set his slaves free, and he moves into an era in which common interest supersedes the will of the individual. As Miltiades in Athens, however, he falls victim to the excesses of a degenerating democracy. Madách’s political experiences and his encounters with corruption and demagoguery are thus translated into a critical look at ancient Greece. In decadent Rome, Adam then tries to enjoy a life of leisure and luxury at the side of Eve, a beautiful courtesan. He remains dissatisfied until an encounter with Saint Peter inspires him to pursue a new ideal. He hopes for a better future in a world where all people see their noblest task in loving and serving their fellows. Yet the Christian era he enters in Constantinople at the time of the Crusades is not the age of love and brotherhood that he had envisaged. As Tancred, the Crusader, he enters a city torn by sectarian strife. Innocent people are killed for their beliefs. Eve as Isaura, in her innocent first love perhaps reminiscent of Madách’s childhood sweetheart, has to renounce her natural inclinations because she has been pledged to a convent. Adam asks his shield bearer, Lucifer, to take him to more restful times so that he may take a detached look at his surroundings from the peace of an ivory tower.

His wish is fulfilled: He finds himself as Johannes Kepler at the Imperial Court in Prague. He cannot reach inner peace, however, realizing that it is impossible to live outside society. His capricious and unfaithful wife, Barbara, another reincarnation of Eve, obviously modeled after Erzsi, has no understanding of his intellectual accomplishments and forces him to waste his time on horoscopes. Once again, Lucifer leads him into the future. Adam longs for an era that no longer hampers free intellectual pursuit through tradition and prejudice. As Georges-Jacques Danton in Revolutionary France, he soon discovers the darker aspects of this period. Eventually Maximilien Robespierre’s jealousy as well as his own increasing doubts about the justness of his cause lead him to the guillotine. In this scene, Eve appears in two different roles, representing the dual aspect of womanhood as Madách outlines it in the drama. As a young aristocrat, condemned to die, she inspires respect as she points to higher goals. As a coarse and bloodthirsty “woman of the people,” she embodies everything Danton has come to loathe in the movement he is heading. Adam awakens from his dream once more as Kepler in Prague, where he has a conversation with a student seeking his advice. Although this dialogue is obviously patterned after a similar encounter in Goethe’s Faust, the intent is quite different, and Adam’s warnings against obstructing one’s view through theory and prejudice have nothing in common with the devilish advice of Mephistopheles. Lucifer leads Adam into an age in which humankind’s high ideals supposedly are rightly understood, and thoughts may be freely expressed.

With nineteenth century London, Madách is moving into his own period. Significantly, Adam is no longer one of Hegel’s “World-Historical Personalities,” a mover of history; hereafter, he is merely a spectator. The dog-eat-dog atmosphere of early capitalism, with its unfettered individualism, disgusts him. Eve appears as a typical representative of her age, quite willing to surrender for material gains. What ties her to her times falls off like a cloak, however, in the danse macabre with which the scene concludes. Adam recognizes woman’s role as the inspiration of searching man. The next station, the “Phalanstery,” Charles Fourier’s socialist utopian state, no longer has individuals fighting one another. Instead, government takes care of everyone and makes all decisions. Science has solved many important problems, but the attempt to create life in a test tube fails as the Earth Spirit proclaims that humankind will never cross that threshold. Poetry, artistic creativity, family bonds, indeed, any remnants of individualism are banned or have already disappeared. Adam, a bemused visitor, witnesses the punishment of a few stubborn individuals who appear in the guise of great artists, thinkers, and fighters of the past. Lucifer leads him quickly away when, assuming an anachronistic stance of chivalry, Adam tries to come to the rescue of Eve, a mother whose child is to be taken away from her by the state.

The following brief scene marks a breach in the clear structure of Madách’s drama. Adam and his diabolical companion fly through the vastness of space. Realizing that humankind’s stubborn faith in a better future may foil his plans, Lucifer tries to push Adam out into emptiness. The Earth Spirit intervenes; humankind’s ties to its natural abode are stronger than the negativity and cold intellectuality of Lucifer. The earth to which Adam returns, however, is not the hospitable environment that he had known. The sun has lost its power, and the few surviving human beings are reduced to the state of animals, fighting over what little food remains in their icy wasteland. When Adam recognizes his beloved Eve behind the coarse features of an Eskimo woman, he does not want to see any more and asks Lucifer to take him back from the future into the present. He is filled with despair, convinced that all human efforts will eventually lead into nothingness. Lucifer suggests suicide as the way out; thus, Adam can stop humankind’s arduous and ultimately futile march through time before it has even started. That desperate step is made meaningless when Eve tells him that she is with child: Lucifer is defeated. Adam bows before the Lord, who restores his grace to the human race, points to woman as man’s companion and inspiration, and even assigns an essentially positive role in the divine order to Lucifer: The Devil’s continuing efforts to seduce and destroy will keep humankind from becoming idle and self-satisfied. Yet despite Adam’s pleas, the Lord refuses to tell him whether Lucifer’s presentation of human history is satanic distortion or objective truth. All he will say is that humankind ought to have faith and continue to struggle.

Much of the voluminous Madách scholarship of the last hundred years has—in addition to discussing the author’s sources and possible influences—tried to pinpoint his philosophical position. Is the drama pessimistic, and the final scene merely a meaningless conventional gesture or an attempt to pacify critics who might object to the basic nihilism expressed in the historical overview? Because much of what Madách depicted in the individual scenes was based on his own reading of history and because he appeared impressed by the theories about the impending death of the earth, one cannot simply dismiss the main body of the drama as Lucifer’s willful falsification of reality. Yet Madách seems to say that humankind knows only one aspect of that reality. In a sphere beyond human knowledge and comprehension, the fate of humankind may have been decided long ago. Neither Job nor Goethe’s Faust nor Madách’s Adam is aware of the fact that he may be only a pawn in a metaphysical struggle. Tertullian’s paradoxical affirmation of faith, “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe as it is unreasonable”), is what is demanded of Adam in the end, the same illogical faith that had sustained Hungarians over the centuries.

Madách’s drama combines the concept of Goethe’s Faustian hero with the melancholy of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Romantic loner and the universality of Victor Hugo. It owes much to the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer. It deals with the claims and aspirations of the naïve materialists and the social utopists of the nineteenth century. In the details of the historical scenes, in his insights into economic and social conditions, Madách leans in the direction of the emerging realist movement in Europe. Still, The Tragedy of Man is essentially a Romantic work. Madách is a true Romantic in his use of literature as the vehicle to express his own feelings and record his struggles. His play depicts his efforts to overcome his bitterness and to arrive at a new assessment of womanhood. It is significant, though, that it is woman as mother, not as lover, who eventually foils the designs of the spirit of negation. The drama also shows Madách’s attempt to define his religious position, moving from the Manichaean dualism of the first scene through a pantheism of sorts to the monotheistic concept of an almighty and omniscient God. This basically Christian, albeit nondogmatic, view has been overlooked by his many Catholic critics, who object not only to details in his description of Church history but also to the Kantian ethics of the final scene.

Mózes and Tündérálom

The thematic richness and philosophical depth of The Tragedy of Man could not be duplicated in Mózes. Despite recent successful attempts to bring the play to life on the Hungarian stage, despite skillful characterizations, some adroit dialogue, and the tackling of important questions, particularly that of the relationship of the great heroic individual to the masses who do not understand him, Mózes seems little more than a vastly expanded scene from the previous drama. Tündérálom, Madách’s last work, is very different. This fantasy, reminiscent of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595-1596) and Mihály Vörösmarty’s Csongor és Tünde (1831), combines a satiric look at the present with the Romantic longing for the past. The play, which demonstrates Madách’s masterful handling of poetic language, was never completed. In the annals of world literature, Madách is and will remain the author of The Tragedy of Man.

Bibliography

Lotze, Dieter P. Imre Madách. Boston: Twayne, 1981. A basic examination of the life and works of Madách. Includes bibliography and index.

Madách, Imre. The Tragedy of Man: Essays About the Ideas and the Directing of the Drama. Budapest: Hungarian Centre of the International Theatre Institute, 1985. In addition to a translation by Joseph Grosz of The Tragedy of Man, this work contains a set of essays analyzing the play, discussing its reception, and describing and criticizing productions of the work. Contains bibliography.