fered, should be given a bearing. Freud raises hackles because be ends up committing the Chernyshevskian fallacy. He relies on phrases like "I cannot alter facts," or "psychoanalytic experience has put these matters ... beyond the reach of doubt"-when in fact his scenarios themselves, in the opinion of this reviewer, are at best simple metaphors with a poor record of both diagnosis and "cure." No methodology with that track record should hold literature hostage. In short, it is not Freud's imagination that offends- imagination is not supposed to "account for," "simplify," or "cure"-it is the claim to science. Some (but by no means all) of the essays in this volume imitate Freud's error. Drop that, and we would have a book full of scholarly research, provocative speculation and inspired free association that even the uninitiated could learn from and enjoy. Caryl Emerson Princeton University Imre Madach. The Tragedy of Man. Translated by Thomas R. Mark. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1989. ix, 148pp. $14.00. Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York. Az ember trag6didja (The Tragedy of Man) occupies a unique and controversial place in the history of Hungarian literature. Ever since its publication in 1862, critics from JanosArany to Gyorgy Lukacs have engaged in spirited debate concern ingitsmerit, originality, and intended meaning. Is it a work of genius or a pale imitation of Goethe's Faust? Is it optimistic or pessimistic about the human condition? Was its author a Christian or a nihilist? Was he a friend of the people or an agent of the privileged classes? Difficult as it has been for Hungarians to answer these and other questions, it has been impossible for English readers, who have had to rely on unsatis- factory translations. No doubt George Szirtes's 1988 rendition, which I have not seen, represents an improvement. Certainly Thomas R. Mark's version makes possible an appreciation ofMadach's singular achievement; "singular" not only because it is so unlike other Hungarian masterpieces, but because it is vastly superior to anything else its author wrote. Only, it seems, when personal experience and a dramatic historical moment provided a focus, did Madach's creative imagination attain maturity. Born in 1823 to a Catholic family of the landed gentry, Madach lost his father when he was eleven and, as a result, formed a strong attachment to his mother. A student of philosophy and law, he began to publish lyric verse while still in his teens. By the time he reached twenty, he had also written historical dramas which, like much of his poetry, revolved around the relationship between the sexes. After passing his bar examination, he served N6grad County in various capacities until poor health forced him to resign. His weak constitution prevented him from playing an active role in Hungary's 1848-49 revolution, during which he lost his brother Pal and his sister Maria. Then, f , I I as a consequence of havinggiven shelter to Lajos Kossuth's fugitive secretary, he was imprisoned for almost a year. The loss of the revolutionary war and Vienna's subsequent abrogation of Hungary's historic rights spread gloom throughout the nation. Madach's sadness was all the deeper because of his disastrous marriage to Erzsebet Fráter. Although the couple's first years together were happy enough, she remained a spendthrift and flirt who betrayed him in private and embar- rassed him in public. Madach divorced her in 1854 and withdrew into a monastic seclusion. Oddly, he seems to haveknown what to expect even before he took his marriage vows. Referring to his fiancee, he asked a friend where he should "begin to write about this microcosm of everything attractive and everything insidious, of everything good and everything careless, of every- thing soulful and everything cynical?" It was Madach's wife, and to some degree his mother, who appeared in the Tragedy as Eve, the central character in this great dramatic poem/poetic drama. The woman's pivotal importance may not, to be sure, be immediately evident. In the first three scenes, Madach recoun ted Lucifer's rebellion, Adam and Eve's disobedience and expulsion from the Garden, and their first days in exile. Confident that they can create a new Eden, but impatient for the knowledge they sought when they ate of the forbidden tree, they ask Lucifer to show them the future that awaits their heirs. Sensing an opportunity to break their spirits, Lucifer casts a spell, and in the ensuing eleven scenes enables them to see themselves in various historical incarnations. By this method, Madach contrived to present a survey of mankind's strivings, and failures, through time. In the first scene Adam is a young pharaoh in ancient Egypt, in the last an old man in a desolate region populated by primitive Eskimos. In between he is Miltiades in Athens, a voluptuary in Rome, Tancred in Constantinople, Kepler in Prague, Danton during the French Revolution, a visitor to a nineteenth-century London fair, a visitor to a socialist phalanstery, and a traveler in outer space. In each successive scene he is older and more disillusioned by the world he and his fellow humans have made. Again and again, ideals--Christian and pagan-become corrupt when translated into reality. Indeed, the more "religious" or "rational" people become, the more pitiless and barren the world they inhabit. In Christian Constantinople church leaders burn heretics, while in revolutionary Paris Robespierre and St. Just guillotine innocent people. Even more chilling, perhaps, the scientist in the utopian commune tells Adam that "survival, mere survival is our great ideal." This was a bleak view of history when compared with the faith in progress that animated so many of Mad6ch's European contemporaries. Although melancholy by temperament, there can be little doubt that he arrived at his view as a result of Hungary's post-revolutionary plight and his own personal sorrows. As Kepler in the first Prague scene, for example, Adam speaks to his unfaithful wife Barbara/Eve of the hurt she causes him. And yet-he still loves her for the redemptive qualities he glimpses. .