Sharp takes on suffering and hope

Miklós Bánffy was the very definition of a polymath. Born into an aristocratic family in 1873, he has a posthumous reputation as one of Hungarian literature’s greatest writers (he has been dubbed the ‘Hungarian Tolstoy’) but in his lifetime he was also known for his work in the theatre as a set and costume designer and made a name for himself as a cartoonist. He briefly served as a foreign minister in the Hungarian government. During the Second World War, his anti-German stance cost him his family home, and later, under the Soviet regime, he was left destitute and only allowed back to Budapest in 1949 where he died the following year.

The political censorship of his most celebrated work, The Transylvanian Trilogy, meant that Bánffy’s work has only got a wider international audience in recent years. The trilogy of novels — in English titled They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, and They Were Divided — are fine works of socio-political history and the kind of epic storytelling that stirs the reader’s imagination with the detailed depiction of lives, social structures, political upheavals, and landscapes that the writer knew intimately.

An easier way into Bánffy’s works and his writerly mind would probably be through the collection of short stories recently published by Pushkin Press, The Enchanted Night. These dozen stories, translated into English by Len Rix, span centuries and locales. While some of them are set in his beloved Transylvania, there are also forays into ancient Greece, Scotland, the Mediterranean coast, and even a long-lost Chinese kingdom. They encompass a wide range of genres — from the speculative to folktales and brutal, realist fiction.

The opening story, Wolves, set in a Transylvanian valley after a peasant uprising, gives the reader a taste of what to expect from Bánffy’s singular imagination: an atmospheric tale about man’s insatiable greed and appetite for violence in a harsh environment where nature is to be feared in all her cold, sharp-toothed ferociousness. As translated by Rix, Bánffy’s prose makes it clear that man’s civilised veneer can be cracked open far too easily: “He was tormented alternately by fear and by yearning. Again the image of the tall gallows loomed up before him, the four-pillared one at Gyulafehérvár he had once seen on a visit to the market. He remembered it as vividly as if it were there in front of him. Between the pillars hung some withered, shapeless objects. Children were throwing stones at them. They made a dull, empty sound, the sort you would expect from tree bark. That dull, hollow sound was truly horrifying.”

Who gets to wield power and why are the central themes in two of the stories in this collection, Helen of Sparta and The Stupid Li. In the first, after her return from Troy, the silent Helen watches her trollish husband Menelaus demand respect from his underlings for his less-than-heroic conduct during the war, and in the second, a Chinese diplomat tells the narrator about how an unremarkable man makes a deal with the devil to become the chief advisor to an ancient Chinese kingdom.

Given his own experience of the perilously fragile foundations on which societies are built, it isn’t surprising that the transactional nature of human relationships is what emerges as Bánffy’s abiding concern in these stories. And yet, even in these tales, which could so easily tip over into dark cynicism, characters who’ve endured great suffering are allowed to find their way to some hope. For all that he’d endured, Bánffy couldn’t let go of his inherent humanism and that has ensured his works continue to find new readers today.

The author is a writer and communications professional. She blogs at saudha.substack.com 

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.