“Be Mindful of Your Unleashed Desires”

About the Performance of Dorottya at the Csokonai National Theatre

Abstract

”Csokonai guffaws to avoid crying. He creates relentless comedy, to drive away the lurking shadows of destruction that circle around him with loud merriment. He throws himself into the bustle of the masked ball to forget Lilla, to forget his failures, his humiliating search for patronage, the judgments of the foolish louts who considered him a good-for-nothing slacker, a histrion, even when they laughed at his stunts” – wrote Béla Horgas in the Dorottya chapter of his book on Mihály Csokonai Vitéz. In doing so, he put his finger on the tragedy buried deep in the soul of the Debrecen poet, who was described as a “poet of a cheerful nature”. It seems that the best way to conceal this tragedy was indeed to write a comic epic through which he could immerse himself in a “carnivalesque” state of being.