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Barcsay Ábrahám: A’ Kávéra

Absztrakt

A Cup of Sin – Ábrahám Barcsay: On Coffee (A’ Kávéra)

Ábrahám Barcsay’s poem On Coffee (A’ Kávéra) is one of the best-known works in the literature of the Hungarian Enlightenment. The short, only eight lines long poem deals with a subject that rarely appears in 18th century Hungarian literature: the connection between the consumption of coffee and sugar and the system of colonial slavery that produced these commodities. The text brings to the fore one of the most controversial phenomena of the Enlightenment, the tension between the firm rejection of the institution of slavery in terms of the humane moral ideals of the time and the acceptance of the economic interests involved in its maintenance. Ábrahám Barcsay’s work is particularly interesting because it seems that, through the representation of consumption of these two luxury items, coffee and sugar, he wanted to emphasise the responsibility (or complicity) of the consumer in maintaining the inhumane system of slavery. A Cup of Sin attempts to reinterpret the most problematic parts of the text in the context of economic history, the history of ideas and the contemporary events. As it is not known when Barcsay wrote his poem, the paper (based on the above-mentioned contexts) also attempts to answer the question of the date of its composition.