A forgotten Romantic dramatic poem

Bodor Lajos: Álmos, the homecoming poet. Fairy tale

Abstract

The highly educated author from Kolozsvár/Cluj, Bodor Lajos, who was a friend of Kemény Zsigmond and Kriza János, died young. Bodor wrote a very special dramatic poem in 1842, in which he described the events preceding the Hungarian conquest, and indeed the entire subsequent history of Hungary, as a rare visionary, mythological and fairy-tale vision. Based on serious research into religious history and his own idiosyncratic ideas, he created a strange new mythology around historical events, and edited his vision with an “irregular” dramaturgy and inventive, almost indecipherable language (his language can be considered both archaic and innovative); this is probably why his work disappeared without a trace. The work’s view of history is also unique: the history of the future is revealed primarily as a tragic series of catastrophes, and the protagonist prepares to commit suicide after dreaming through the future, from which he is saved only by the love of the ideal woman. Bodor’s work is strongly influenced by Csongor and Tünde by Vörösmarty Mihály, but strong allusions to Shakespeare can also be found in it, and it is even likely that certain scenes in the work were inspired by the second part of Goethe’s Faust (a work that few people knew at the time, but which Bodor had already read). This paper aims to draw attention to the fact that the visionary structure of the work, which is based on a dream of the historical future, means that we can find the antecedents of Madách Imre’s great historical vision in it.