The Hungarian Quarterly, 1996 (46. évfolyam, 178. szám)

THEATRE AND FILM - Tamás Koltai: The Grotesque of Bygone Days (Mihály Csokonai Vitéz, Lajos Barta, Ernő Szép)

Tamás Kolfai The Grotesque of Bygone Days T H E A T R E & F I L M Mihály Csokonai Vitéz: Tempefői; Lajos Barta: Szerelem (Love); Ernő Szép: Vőlegény (The Bridegroom) T he most-performed Hungarian classics are tragedies. Pieces written in the grotesque or tragicomic vein went mostly unnoticed or were not much in demand. Their fate in theatrical history was often tragic, sometimes just grotesque. Mihály Csokonai Vitéz (1773-1805) was a prodigiously great poet of the Enlighten­ment. Blessed with an amazing talent and European in spirit, he would probably have had a very different life, had he not been born in the semi-feudal Hungary of his time. He was "far ahead of his age"—that cliché learnt by all schoolchildren in v Hungary could not be truer than in his case. His life was a drama of the absurd. He studied at the old and conservative college of his birthplace, Debrecen. Apart from Latin and Greek, he read and translated from Italian, French and German. (Among his translations was Schikaneder's libretto for Mozart's The Magic Flute.) At the age of seventeen or eighteen he was the greatest living Hungarian poet—only nobody was aware of it. Nor does anybody know what happened to the plays and translations he had submitted to the first theatrical compa­ny to perform in the Hungarian language, founded in 1792. In 1795 he left college— illegally—to go to Pest and find a publisher for his manuscripts, which were running to volumes by then. He found none. He ar­rived in Pest just at a time when members of an anti-Habsburg rebel group, the Hungarian Jacobins, were executed. There was no way back for him to the college. A "scholarly beggar", he tried to eke out a livelihood from legal work. For a time he taught temporarily at a school where he found some joy in putting on plays with his pupils. Disappointed in love more than once, he could gain no foothold for himself anywhere—and so he went home to die. He was thirty-two. He left volumes of manuscripts in varied genres. Only one of them got published, by virtue of an exceptional grant from an aristocratic patron. He lived in a milieu of incomprehension and stifling, bare loneli­ness. "This world, obscure and intent on persecution, will never see any of my works," he wrote in a letter towards the end of his life. "Even if I write, as I can now no longer keep on living without doing so, Tamás Koltai editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quaterly's regular theatre critic. 161 Theatre & Film

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