Marginalia on Casanova, the first volume of the St. Orpheus
Breviary, is Miklos Szentkuthy's synthesis of 2,000 years of
European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthy's Virgil, an
omniscient, poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of
recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined
as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints,
tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and
Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and
mankind in one supra-person and veil, an endless series of masks
and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always
changing function of discourse, text, myth, & mentalite.
Through St. Orpheus' method, disparate moments of history become
synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, their mutual
difference and essential similarity. "Orpheus wandering in the
infernal regions," says Szentkuthy, "is the perennial symbol of the
mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on
the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost
possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the
mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of
contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of
philosophical systems." Marginalia on Casanova relives the
despiritualization of the main protagonist's sensual adventures,
though it is less his sex life & more his intellectual mission,
the sole determinant of his being, which is the focus of this
mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly
spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th
century and its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the
20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one
of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary on Casanova's
memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy's very own philosophy of love.
Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean
metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work
in which readers will experience both profundity and a taking to
wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and which is
as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.
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