Julio Baghy: Sonĝe sub Pomarbo (5)

Julio Baghy, Sonĝe sub Pomarbo: Triakta Lirika Komedio en Ses Fantaziaj Bildoj. La Laguna: J. Régulo [Stafeto], 1958. 221 p.

Jen anglalingva resumo de recenzoj en Esperanto.

Esperanto reviews of Julio Baghy's 1958 Esperanto verse drama Dreaming under an Apple Tree: Three-Act Comedy in Six Fantasy Scenes are summarized by Geoffrey Sutton in his entry on Baghy:

Geoffrey Sutton, Concise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto (New York: Mondial, 2008), pp. 98-99.

The previous installments of my review on this blog are written in Esperanto. I am interested in the linkage to Imre Madách's classic The Tragedy of Man and the contrast between Baghy and fellow Hungarian Esperantist writer Sándor Szathmári. Baghy uses the Adam & Eve theme as did Madách, but instead of carrying through the narrative through key historical periods, Baghy gives us only Adam and Eve (not the "originals" but a more contemporary pair) falling in love, encountering fabled creatures (nymph, fairy, etc.), eating the forbidden fruit, becoming trapped outside of time in lifeless Being, able only to observe without intervening, witnessing future scenes of Eve's grandparents being taken in by an opportunistic suitor, then technocrats of the distant future who have lost their humanity to their technology, finally a desolated Earth abandoned by humanity, after which the pair awaken underneath the apple tree in their present, vowing to struggle onward come what may, with their love to sustain them.

Baghy wrote this work as a refuge from the Stalinist repression of 1956-1957 following the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution. Madách's masterpiece followed upon the defeat of the 1848 revolution. Baghy's treatment of young love confronting a possible dehumanized future is anemic compared to Madách's work of a century earlier, and as Hungarian Esperantist critic Vilmos Benczik suggests, antiquated.