nije evidentirano

Orpheus és Hercules: Francis Bacon, Zrínyi Miklós és a magyar felvilágosodás

The paper analyzes the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting the past, i.e. the appropriation of traditions in the intellectual history of the Hungarian Enlightenment. The example is the literary reception of the poetic oeuvre of the greatest Hungarian Baroque poet, Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664). The two volume edition of his works, published by Ferenc Kazinczy in 1817 shows a definitive change in taste and literary canon, wich had taken place in the preceding three decades in Hungarian literary and intellectual circles: the previously neglected Zrínyi became the representative of the most valuable poetic tradition to be followed and renewed in the times of late Classicism and early Romanticism. The paper explores in details the ways the stoic and neo-stoic philosophy determined the poetical ideology of The Syren of the Adriatic Sea, the volume of Zrínyi’s poetry, published in 1651. The two most important coordinates of the lirycal narrative are the mythological figures of Orpheus and Hercules. Besides the Senecan dramas (Hercules furens, Hercules Oetaeus, Medea) there are Francis Bacon’s mythographic essays to have a decisive role in shaping the poetical program of the Syrena volume. In Bacon’s very popular interpretations od classical fables (De veterum sapientia [1609], Zrínyi read it in italian translation in a 1639 Venetian edition) both Orpheus and Hercules are significant references to allegorical meanings (esp. the three essays on Orpheus or the Philosophy, Prometheus or the Human Condition, and The Sirens or Pleasure). On the title engraving of the Syrena volume the author himself is sailing on the open sea, sorrunded by seductive sirens: the emblem remembers both Orpheus outbreasting the sirens during his voyage with the Argonauts (i. e. the coercive and corrective force of poetry), and Hercules shipping in a cup over the sea, to rescue Promethus (i. e. the stoic constancy and force which liberate human minds of its anxieties and disbilief). It seems a strange but necessary paradox that leading figures of the Hungarian Enlightenment developed and pursued their literary civilizing program by way of poetical philosophy (which owed a lot to Bacon’s mythography, e. g. Kazinczy entitled his literary periodical „Orpheus” in 1789), without knowing anything about the relevancy of the same thinker and the same ideas in the oeuvre of their favorite precursor, Miklós Zrínyi. Anyway, the difference between the early modern and the enlightened cult of Bacon in Hungary is more than conspicuous and significant: the enlightened poetical pilosophy lacks the Hercules figure (i. e. the force component of the heroic stoicism). Poetically speaking: the energeia (energy, poetical forcefulness) leaves the enargeia (evidence, vividness) – Orpheus is left alone.

korai felvilágosodás, Zrínyi Miklós, Francis Bacon, sztoa

nije evidentirano