Tündérálom (Dream of Fairies, 1863) survives only as the fragment printed here: two scenes and the opening of a third, breaking off mid-speech where the manuscript itself ends. Madách wrote it at Sztregova in the years after Az ember tragédiája (1861), and it stands among the last things he attempted before his death in 1864. The text follows the critical edition of the Madách Irodalmi Társaság (Bene Kálmán, 2015). What we have is enough to show the design: a “dramatic poem” in the manner of the Tragédia, but turned inward and homeward, staging the quarrel between the old world of enchantment and the new world of iron, steam, and newsprint.

The premise is a frame in Fairyland. Tündérszép Ilona — Fair Ilona, a queen drawn straight from Hungarian folk-romance — is bored: the age of king’s sons and roving knights is over, and the “coal-smoke civilization” (kőszén-civilizáció) of railways, telegraphs, and gaslamps has driven feeling out of men, who now “crawl into themselves like a tortoise” and grow old. The fairy of caprice, Csilla, owns the one exception — a poet, mocked as a good-for-nothing, who lies on the grass dreaming of overthrowing tyrants and still senses the fairies. Ilona demands him; the two queens contend; and Ámor, the last surviving Olympian, sleeping for want of work in a world of land-registries and marriage contracts, wakes to impose the wager that would have governed the play: the poet is Ilona’s, but his fate hinges on whether pride or humility wins out when a fairy’s love is laid on mortal clay. The second scene brings them down to a mill in a wild landscape, where the poet enters with his book, invoking the great shades — Achilleus, Marathon, Columbus, Fingal — and asking whether the present is truly so much baser than the past; and there the manuscript stops.

Read it as Madách’s coda to his great theme. The Tragédia sent Ádám across the whole arc of history to test the human spirit against successive ideals; Tündérálom narrows the lens to the poet in a disenchanted nineteenth century and asks the same question — whether imagination can still warm a cold age, or whether “the native present” must lend it the one ray by which we keep warm. The satire of modernity is sharper and more local here: the daily papers that “kill with paper,” the swill-fed factory, the market tip (tőzsdehír) that has replaced the fairy’s spark. Watch the Hungarian turn at the play’s heart, where Ilona guesses, without being told, that her poet’s homeland can only be the magyar haza — the one place where the old songs are still sung by the shepherd’s fire and “they still believe in him.” The fairy characters keep their Hungarian names (Ilona, Csilla, Dalár, Tünde, Délibáb), as does the half-Greek Ámor; the verse is Madách’s enjambed iambic line, rendered for stress rather than syllable-count, and the Latin tags he leaves standing (sub rosa, Maecenas) are kept in the body as he wrote them.