’Midst the Wild Carpathians

’Midst the Wild Carpathians

By Mór Jókai.

Translated by Robert Nisbet Bain.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Introduction
4. ’Midst the Wild Carpathians
   1. Book I: By Command of the Padishah
      1. I: A Hunt in the Year 1666
      2. II: The House at Ebesfalva
      3. III: A Prince in His Own Despite
      4. IV: A Banquet with the Prince of Transylvania
      5. V: Bodola
      6. VI: The Battle of Nagy Szöllös
      7. VII: The Princess
      8. VIII: The Peri
      9. IX: The Prince and His Minister
   2. Book II: The Devil’s Garden
      1. I: The Patrol
      2. II: Sange Moarte
      3. III: An Hungarian Magnate in the Sixteenth Century
      4. IV: The Midnight Battle
      5. V: The Banquet Tribunal
      6. VI: The Diet of Karoly-Fehervár
      7. VII: The Jus Ligatum
      8. VIII: Death for a Kiss
      9. IX: Consort and Concubine
      10. X: The Sentence
5. Endnotes
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Introduction

Hungarians regard Az Érdély arány kora as, on the whole, the best of Jókai’s great historical romances, and, to judge from the numerous existing versions of it, foreigners are of the same opinion as Hungarians. Few of Jókai’s other tales have been translated so often, and the book is as great a favourite in Poland as it is in Germany. And certainly it fully deserves its great reputation, for it displays to the best advantage the author’s three characteristic qualities⁠—his powers of description, especially of nature, his dramatic intensity, and his peculiar humour.

The scene of the story is laid among the virgin forests and inaccessible mountains of seventeenth-century Transylvania, where a proud and valiant feudal nobility still maintained a precarious independence long after the parent state of Hungary had become a Turkish province. We are transported into a semi-heroic, semi-barbarous borderland between the Past and the Present, where Medievalism has found a last retreat, and the civilizations of the East and West contend or coalesce. Bizarre, gorgeous, and picturesque forms flit before us⁠—rude feudal magnates and refined Machiavellian intriguers; superb Turkish pashas and ferocious Moorish bandits; noble, high-minded ladies and tigrish odalisques; saturnine Hungarian heydukes, superstitious Wallachian peasants, savage Szeklers, and scarcely human Tartars. The plot too is in keeping with the vivid colouring and magnificent scenery of the story. The whole history of Transylvania, indeed, reads like a chapter from the Arabian Nights, but there are no more dramatic episodes in that history than those on which this novel is based⁠—the sudden elevation of a country squire (Michael Apafi) to the throne of Transylvania against his will by order of the Padishah, and the dark conspiracy whereby Denis Banfi, the last of the great Transylvanian magnates, was so foully done to death.

In none of Jókai’s other novels, moreover, is the individuality of the characters so distinct and consistent. The gluttonous Kemeny, who sacrificed a kingdom for a dinner; the well-meaning, easygoing Apafi, who would have made a model squire, but was irretrievably ruined by a princely diadem; his consort, the wise and generous Anna, always at hand to stop her husband from committing follies, or to save him from their consequences; the crafty Teleki, the Richelieu of Transylvania, with wide views and lofty aims, but sticking at nothing to compass his ends; his rival Banfi, rough, masterful, recklessly selfish, yet a patriot at heart, with a vein of true nobility running through his coarser nature; his tender and sensitive wife, clinging desperately to a brutal husband, who learnt her worth too late; the timeserving Csaky, as mean a rascal as ever truckled to the great or trampled on the fallen; Ali Pasha and Corsar Beg, excellent types of the official and the unofficial Turkish freebooter respectively; Kucsuk Pasha, the chivalrous Mussulman with a conscience above his creed; the renegade spy Zülfikar, groping in slippery places after illicit gains, and always falling on his feet with catlike agility; and, last of all, that marvellous creation, Azrael, the demoniacal Turkish odalisque, blasting all who fall within the influence of her irresistible glamour, a Circe as sinuously beautiful and as utterly soulless as her own pet panther⁠—all these personages of a, happily, bygone age are depicted as vividly as if the author had known each one of them personally.

Finally, the book contains some of Jókai’s happiest descriptions, and in this department it is generally admitted that the master, at his best, is unsurpassable. The description of the burning coal-mine in Fekete Gyemantok, of the Neva floods in A szabadság a hó alatt, of the plague in Szomoru napok, or of the Danube in all its varying moods in Az arány