Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man) is the work on which Madách’s whole reputation rests, and one of the central texts of Hungarian literature. He wrote it in relative isolation at Sztregova between 1859 and 1860, in the aftermath of personal catastrophe — a broken marriage, imprisonment for sheltering a fugitive of the 1848 revolution, the collapse of the political hopes of his generation — and finished it early in 1860. The poet János Arany, to whom the manuscript was sent unsolicited, recognized its stature at once, made a number of metrical and textual corrections, and shepherded it into print; it was first performed in 1883 and has held the stage ever since. The text translated here follows the Arany-approved version that underlies the 1862 first edition.

The poem is a dramatic cycle in fifteen scenes (színek). Three frame scenes — Heaven, Eden, and the expulsion — open and close the work; between them, Lucifer leads Ádám through a dream in which he lives a succession of historical and imagined epochs: pharaonic Egypt, the Athens of Miltiades, decadent Rome, the Constantinople of the Crusades, Kepler’s Prague, the Paris of the Terror (staged as a vision-within-a-vision inside the Prague scene), commercial London, a regimented socialist phalanstery, the frozen end of the Earth, and the icy waste of a dying sun. In each, an ideal that drove the previous age is carried to its internal contradiction and collapses; Lucifer supplies the Mephistophelean counter-argument, and Éva — appearing in a different role in every scene — supplies the human counterweight that keeps Ádám from despair. The architecture is deliberately dialectical: each scene is a thesis worked out to its ruin, and the contradictions are the argument. They are not to be smoothed away.

What the cycle stages is the perennial Madáchian question of whether human striving has any worth if every ideal is doomed to corruption. The work refuses an easy answer. Ádám, shown the whole bleak sequence, stands at the edge of suicide; what holds him back is at once the smallest and the largest of facts. The Lord’s closing injunction — küzdj és bízva bízzál, "strive and trust while trusting" — is the crux on which every reading of the poem turns, and it is left pointedly open: an exhortation, not a guarantee. Readers should watch for the recurring motifs that bind the scenes together — the line "milljók egy miatt" ("millions for the sake of one"), the tension between the free individual and the mass, and Lucifer’s running claim that the spirit of negation is coeval with creation itself.