A civilizátor

A civilizátor (The Civilizer) was written in 1859, during the decade of neo-absolutist rule that followed the crushing of the 1848–49 Hungarian revolution. Its target is unmistakable: the so-called Bach System, the centralizing bureaucratic regime imposed on Hungary by the Austrian interior minister Alexander von Bach in the 1850s. Under it, the historic Hungarian constitution was suspended, the country was redrawn into administrative districts, and a vast apparatus of German-speaking officials, taxes, stamps, and paperwork descended on a land that had governed its own affairs for centuries. Madách, a county magistrate who had himself been imprisoned for sheltering a fugitive of the revolution, knew this machinery from the inside. The play renders it as farce: Stroom, the “civilizer,” arrives on a dog-drawn cart heaped with documents, promising paradise and delivering only forms, fees, and confiscations.

Madách subtitles the piece “a comedy in the manner of Aristophanes,” and the debt is structural, not decorative. The play keeps the Aristophanic machinery intact: a chorus (here, memorably, of cockroaches), the formal strophe and antistrophe of choral song, the agon or contest of arguments between Stroom and the farmer István, and a thinly veiled parabasis in which the chorus addresses the audience over the playwright’s own shoulder. The allegory is transparent. Uncle István’s farmyard is Hungary; his quarrelsome but contented servants—a Slovak, a Serb, a Wallachian, an Italian, a German, a Magyar—are the nationalities of the Habsburg lands, living under a rough patriarchal order that Stroom proposes to “improve” into universal equality and ends by reducing to universal subjection. The cockroaches are the swarming petty officialdom that follows every conquest. Stroom’s grotesque misuse of Hegelian vocabulary—positive and negative, the I and the not-I, the concrete subject— satirizes the German philosophical pretensions behind the regime’s claim to carry “civilization” eastward.

The reader should watch for the play’s central reversal. Stroom’s promise of equality and rights is the bait; the hook is total administration—the income tax that applies to all, the patents and permits without which one “cannot even exist,” the constitution replaced by the imperially octroyed charter, and the small wooden clogs handed out in the name of progress. What finally unites the squabbling servants is not Stroom’s idea but their shared humiliation: the amulets he distributes, opened at last, turn out to carry sneers in each man’s own language. The closing note is characteristically Hungarian and characteristically wry—driven out, Stroom takes up his barrel-organ and tries cosmopolitanism instead, and István concludes that the occupation left behind exactly two things of value: a new word for a scoundrel, and the concord that resisting a common oppressor forged among people who had been at each other’s throats.

A note on the comedy’s frankness: the satire is broad and its language at moments deliberately coarse, in the Aristophanic vein—the obscenity is part of the deflation, the puncturing of a regime that styled itself the bearer of refinement. The play was not staged in Madách’s lifetime; its first performance came only in 1938, in Budapest. It stands apart from his philosophical verse dramas as his one sustained political-satirical work, and it shows a sharpness of comic timing and topical bite that the meditative Tragedy of Man, written two years later, largely sets aside.