The (Tragi)comedy of the Devil

The actual subject of this essay is the major 1955 review of Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man by György Lukács. The question is precisely whether Lukács „submitted” to Rákosi – who did not like Madách’s work – and whether his criticism contributed nt he temporary perception of Madách’s work. Or did Lukács, who had disliked Tragedy all his life, do nothing more than write the same review in 1955 as he had written in the decade before his Marxist turn. This problem is at once philosophical, political and moral. Was Lukács, who was himself persecuted by the Rákosi regime, driven by tactical or theoretical reasons to write a two-part essay on the politically sensitive issue of Tragedy for the Party’s newspaper, Népszabadság, a text that 90% of the paper’s readers could not possibly understand? The study deals with Lukács’s aesthetic judgement and the moral dilemmas of his behaviour at the same time. It is impossible to ignore the dictatorship of the time, Lukács’s views throughout his life, or the fact that the author of this essay largely shares Lukács’s criticism of Madách’s magisterial work.