The kisses

This work of Csokonai is probably considered to be his most significant work of fine prose. It is mentioned in the history of literature as a pastoral play or a poem. Csokonai himself saw it as a work that had arbitrarily finished itself, and there was nothing to add. The protagonist of the work, after telling the hellish images of death and the prehistory of his love, falls into the purgatory of his sufferings, and finally reaches the heavenly images placed among the scenery of earthly paradise, the essence of which is ignorance, naivety, and the regaining of childhood. But the gentle nature appears, showing its most siblings, into which the protagonist enters and turns it into hell, and the longing for the unattainable upsets the serenity. We see: horrors are born in the human soul. Nature is the subject of two alternating fictions, the idealizing love and the dark melancholy. Csokonai plays with love as a representative life phenomenon that is particularly well studied in the definition of human existence. The protagonist, after exploring the landscape and turning it into hell by projecting his emotions, commits himself to action, realizing his imagination. And though he throws himself in a fabulous situation and finds himself among kisses and shepherdesses, it is almost a farewell scene. The end seems to be a happy development. After events full of almost surprising erotica, the young man acquires an important piece of the girl's attire and disappears into the thicket, finding only the fallen wreath of the virgin heated by the kisses. The recurring theme of Csokonai's entire life was his longing for bodily love, in this work he wrote his attraction to the general principle of women in kisses. The Kisses is Csokonai's only major work of fine prose, written in 1794 during perhaps the happiest period of his life, in Debrecen.