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The need to create the institutional framework for a bourgeois public was a cardinal tenet of the self-conscious and fast-paced modernizing aspirations of the 19th century which had especially high hopes of cultural institutions. Conservatives and reformers alike expected their establishment to lead directly to the creation and strengthening of a Hungarian national consciousness. Nonetheless, from the first efforts of Ferenc Kazinczy and László Kelemen in 1790, to the August 1837 opening of the Pesti Magyar Színház, which may be regarded as the final point in the process of institutional consolidation, the movement to create a playhouse in Pest had to wait half a century.
Imre Nagy singles out the second decade of the 1800s from this process. The theoretical reason for his choice is that this period saw the birth of an outstanding number of plays, and an overwhelming part of the activity of five significant dramatists falls within this time-frame: Sándor Kisfaludy, Károly Kisfaludy, Imre Gombos, Farkas Bolyai and József Katona. This is an important decade for the historian of ideas, too, due to the crisis of consciousness, to use the author's term, which occured when the tension between old and new elements in national consciousness led to a clash. The individual chapters analyze variations on the problem of nation and individual, primarily through historical works by the above-mentioned authors.
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