'MIDST THE WILD CARPATHIANS
("AZ ÉRDÉLY ARÁNY KÓRA")
BY
MAURUS JÓKAI
TRANSLATED BY
R. NISBET BAIN
FROM
THE FIRST HUNGARIAN EDITION
Authorised Version
LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ld.
1894
[All rights reserved]
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
London & Bungay.
INTRODUCTION.
Hungarians regard Az Érdély arány kora as, on the whole, the best ofJokai's great historical romances, and, to judge from the numerousexisting versions of it, foreigners are of the same opinion asHungarians. Few of Jokai's other tales have been translated so often,and the book is as great a favourite in Poland as it is in Germany. Andcertainly it fully deserves its great reputation, for it displays to thebest advantage the author's three characteristic qualities—his powersof description, especially of nature, his dramatic intensity, and hispeculiar humour.
The scene of the story is laid among the virgin forests and inaccessiblemountains of seventeenth-century Transylvania, where a proud and valiantfeudal nobility still maintained a precarious independence long afterthe parent state of Hungary had become a Turkish province. We aretransported into a semi-heroic, semi-barbarous borderland between thePast and the Present, where Mediævalism has found a last retreat, andthe civilizations of the East and West contend or coalesce. Bizarre,gorgeous, and picturesque forms flit before us—rude feudal magnates andrefined Machiavellian intriguers; superb Turkish pashas and ferociousMoorish bandits; noble, high-minded ladies and tigrish odalisks;saturnine Hungarian heydukes, superstitious Wallachian peasants,[Pg vi] savageSzeklers, and scarcely human Tartars. The plot too is in keeping withthe vivid colouring and magnificent scenery of the story. The wholehistory of Transylvania, indeed, reads like a chapter from the ArabianNights, but there are no more dramatic episodes in that history thanthose on which this novel is based—the sudden elevation of a countrysquire (Michael Apafi) to the throne of Transylvania against his will byorder of the Padishah, and the dark conspiracy whereby Denis Banfi, thelast of the great Transylvanian magnates, was so foully done to death.
In none of Jokai's other novels, moreover, is the individuality of thecharacters so distinct and consistent. The gluttonous Kemeny, whosacrificed a kingdom for a dinner; the well-meaning, easy-going Apafi,who would have made a model squire, but was irretrievably ruined by aprincely diadem; his consort, the wise and generous Anna, always at handto stop her husband from committing follies, or to save him from theirconsequences; the crafty Teleki, the Richelieu of Transylvania, withwide views and lofty aims, but sticking at nothing to compass his ends;his rival Banfi, rough, masterful, recklessly selfish, yet a patriot atheart, 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 time-serving Csaky, as mean a rascalas ever truckled to the great or trampled on the fallen; Ali Pasha andCorsar Beg, excellent types of the official and the unofficial Turkishfreebooter