The Transylvania Trilogy Vol. 2

They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided

Banffy’s extraordinary novel set in Hungary and Transylvania in the years before the First World War and published in Hungary between 1934 and 1940 is of a Tolstoyan quality and range that recalls the greatest Russian and French novelists of the nineteenth century.

Miklós Bánffy (1873-1950) was a Hungarian nobleman with extensive estates in Hungarian Transylvania (now Romania), first patron of Bela Bartok and briefly Hungarian foreign minister after WW1. His castle and great library were deliberately destroyed by the retreating Nazis in 1944. 
 
INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY: 
Hugh Thomas is the author of The Spanish Civil War, Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom and a trilogy about the Spanish Empire. He was Professor of History at Reading University and has also served in the Foreign Office and as Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies. His books include novels, biographies and political as well as historical works.He became a Life Peer in 1981 as Baron Thomas of Swynnerton.

The liberal hero, Balint, is at odds with the politics of his time; he lyrically describes the idyllic pre-industrial world of Hungarian Transylvania, later to fall into the hands of first the Nazis and then the Communists, his love for Adrienne, married to an unpleasant and dangerous lunatic, and a Proustian society helplessly bent on its own destruction.This is a novel hard to put down, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that deserves to be much more widely known.First published in English in the early 1990s by a small publisher, and a huge word-of-mouth success, this is the first edition in hardback, and in two rather than three volumes.

Miklós Bánffy

Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament and the luxury life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abady becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy dissipates his resources at the gaming tables, mirroring the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire itself

They were counted.The Transylvania Trilogy. Vol 1.

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