The Phoenix Land
Praise for Miklós Bánffy:
‘One of the most celebrated and ambitious classics of Hungarian literature’ – Jan Morris
‘This epic Hungarian novel, absorbing both for its exploration of human nature and its study of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire … weaves social and political themes into Bánffy’s powerful tale’ – Daily Telegraph
‘A masterpiece. This very readable translation makes a wonderful book accessible to many more people’ – New Statesman
‘A genuine case of a rediscovered classic. The force of Bánffy’s enthusiasm produces an effect rather like that of the best Trollope novels – but coming from a past world that now seems excitingly exotic’
– Times Literary Supplement
‘Bánffy’s masterpiece resembles Proust’s [yet] he writes with all the psychological acumen of Dostoevsky’
– Francis King, London Magazine
‘A huge, historical, romantic novel [with] good story-telling, solid historical background and enjoyable drama’ – Library Journal
‘Bánffy is a born story-teller. There are plots, intrigues, a murder, political imbroglios and passionate love affairs. His patriotic feelings are totally free of chauvinism, just as his instinctive promptings of tribal responsibility have not a trace of vanity’ – Patrick Leigh Fermor
‘A wonderful work, an elegy for a lost Middle-European Eden’
– Ruth Pavey, Independent
Miklós Bánffy
The Phoenix Land
The Memoirs of Count Miklós Bánffy
Including Emlékeimböl – From My Memories
and
Huszonöt Ev (1945) – Twenty-Five Years (1945)
Translated by Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen with an Introduction by Patrick Thursfield
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
by Patrick Thursfield
From My Memories
Part One: A Wartime Coronation
Part Two: Times Of Revolution
Twenty-Five Years (1945)
Translator’s Note
Introduction by Miklós Bánffy
Glossary of People and Places
By the Same Author
Copyright
In loving memory of
Patrick Thursfield, 1923–2003
PATRICK THURSFIELD and KATALIN BANFFY-JELEN are the translators of They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided, winner of the Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2002.
by Patrick Thursfield
The thousand-year-old kingdom of Hungary, which formed the major part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the last Habsburg fled in 1918, was finally dismantled by the Western Allies under the terms of the peace treaties following World War I. Phoenix-like the Hungarian people survived the horrors of the war, the disappointment of the first Socialist Republic, the disillusion of the brief but terrifying Communist rule of Béla Kun and the bitterness of seeing their beloved country dismembered by the Treaty of Trianon.
This is the world that Miklós Bánffy describes in his two short books of memoirs. For some thirty years after Miklós Bánffy’s death in Budapest in 1950 it might have seemed as if Hungary had gone into official denial that he had ever lived at all. As for his writings, they too might never have existed let alone have been hailed as a national treasure. At the time of Bánffy’s death the post-war Communist government was at its most repressive; therefore, for the new rulers, the writings of any member of the former ruling class had never officially existed and, indeed, had been removed from the shelves of school and university libraries and were no longer offered for sale in the bookshops. Like their authors, they too might never have existed. Their significance, whether literary or political, was officially held to be of no contemporary value and so best forgotten.
In this climate of Communist political correctness, history was being rewritten according to the Party Line, and any digression from that was taken as at best subversive and at worst criminally traitorous. As a result of this short-sighted policy, several generations of young people of school and university age had no true knowledge of what had brought about the dismemberment of their once great and powerful country under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon, which had been imposed by the Western powers in 1920 and had been punitive rather than corrective of perceived injustice. These had the effect of arbitrarily replacing one set of ethnic imbalances with another in many ways as bad, if not worse, than those that had evolved over the centuries.
By the end of the nineteenth century the kingdom of Hungary, which for a thousand years had been the chief bastion of a Europe menaced by Turkish aggression, had become a vast multinational state whose peoples were of many diverse ethnic origins who spoke a myriad different languages and practised almost as many different religions. The existence of so many minority peoples, some of whom, to be sure, nursed dreams, if not of actual political independence, at least of some degree of autonomy, was to produce its own problems. However, it was not as simple as that. Western Hungary, which comprised the great Hungarian plain and formed the nucleus of the ancient kingdom of St Stephen, was bordered on all sides by very different provinces, each with its own ethnic minority, and some with more than one. To the east lay Transylvania, Hungary’s largest province, in which the population was fairly equally balanced between those of ethnic Magyar origins and language and those of Romanian stock; and here it should not be forgotten that only a minority of these last were indigenous Transylvanians. Their numbers had been vastly increased in earlier years, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by waves of Romanian immigrants from the eastern side of the Carpathians. These had fled their native land to escape the savageries of Turkish rule. It must be remembered that, as a sovereign national state, Romania had not existed until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it become a principality, later upgraded to a kingdom and ruled by a German princeling.
It was at this time that learned discussion about the origins of the Romanian people with their Latin-based language so very different from those of their Magyar and Slav neighbours, took flight. Romanian and pro-Romanian scholars offered the view that they were the true descendants of the Dacians, who had inhabited the land when it formed part of the Roman Empire and who therefore predated the Magyar conquest of Hungary and especially of Transylvania.
This theory provided a convenient and timely argument to reinforce Romanian irredentist ambitions and as such was cynically used to foment discontent among the Transylvanian Romanians (the majority of whom were uneducated peasants) who until then had shown little sign of resenting being ruled by landowning Magyar aristocrats or government officials from Budapest. There were some, usually scions of those ancient landowning aristocratic families (of which Miklós Bánffy was one), who, while still loyal to the crown, cherished the hope that one day they could obtain some measure of independence for their formerly autonomous homeland. To the south lay the Banat in which there were more Serbs than Magyars in the districts just north of Belgrade, while only a mile or two further north there were more Magyars than Serbs. A little further west, but still to the south of central Hungary lay Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Directly to the West lay the Burgenland, with a mixed population of Hungarians and Austrians. There were more Austrians in the narrow strip of land closest to the Austrian border and more Hungarians in the equally narrow strip to the east; but, while the town of Sopron was predominantly Hungarian, elsewhere the two races were inextricably mixed.
To the north was Bohemia, populated mainly by Czechs, with a small minority of Germans in its northern region, while to the east the Slovaks formed the majority. In both these regions there was a substantial minority of Hungarians, particularly on the north bank of the Danube between the Austrian border and Estergom, and it was the same in the Nyitra hills to the northeast of Estergom, which now lie partly in the Czech Republic and partly in Slovakia. In 1921 it had all been handed over to the newly formed state of Czechoslovakia. As a result of the new boundaries laid down by the Allies, hardly a metre of the former borders of the Hungarian-ruled part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire remained to her. These new injustices formed the basis of Hungary’s post-1920 demand that the boundaries should be revised if justice were not only to be done but also seen to be done.
This was Bánffy’s first preoccupation when he was appointed foreign minister in István Bethlen’s government in 1921.
Much of the blame for the unjust redistribution of what had for centuries been Hungarian lands must be laid at the door of the baleful influence exercised at the Paris peace talks by the militantly pro-Slav British journalist, Seton-Watson.
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