They Were Counted (The Writing on the Wall: the Transylvanian Trilogy)

by Bánffy, Miklós

  Ostensibly a love story, the two principal characters are cousins, one of whom prospers while the other declines into squalor and a lonely death: but the real theme of this extraordinary family saga is the folly and insularity of the Hungarian upper classes, who danced and quarrelled their way to self-destruction in the ten years leading up to the Great War; and the insularity of the politicians who were so pre-occupied with their struggle against Habsburg domination that they saw nothing of the storm-clouds gathering over Europe. Ironically enough I had just arrived at Bánffy’s description of the events following the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo – and the sad spectacle of the youth of Hungary marching off gaily to war while the hero of the novel reflects that nothing will come of it all but the destruction and dismembering of his beloved country – when bombs started exploding once again in that sad and much disputed city.

  At this time a symposium devoted to the life and works of Miklós Bánffy was held in the great hall of the Ráday Institute in Budapest. This was presided over by the then Foreign Minister, Jeszenszky Géza. The guest of honour was Miklós Bánffy’s daughter Katalin (my friend Kathy), and in addition to Mr Jeszenszky’s opening address there were speeches and reminiscences covering all aspects of Bánffy’s distinguished career from no less than eleven speakers, seven of whom had travelled from the former Hungarian province of Transylvania (Romanian only since 1920). These proceedings, which took from 9 a.m. in the morning until 1 p.m. were followed by a buffet lunch, a visit to the opera house where a bust of Bánffy by his friend the great Hungarian sculptor Strobl was unveiled. This had been preserved in the storerooms of the National Museum and had now been loaned to the Opera House by Bánffy’s daughter. The celebrations ended with the pinning of wreaths and bunches of spring flowers to the still battle-scarred façade of the former Bánffy house in Pest. All through the proceedings strobe lights were switched on and off, television cameras whirled and repeated flashlights showed the determination of the media photographers not to miss a second of what was going on. Afterwards Kathy, a grey-haired lady married to an American former naval officer, was interviewed for two different television cultural programmes. Now, I asked myself, why was Miklós Bánffy, a name hitherto unknown in England, so highly honoured in his native land?

  Count Miklós Bánffy was, as we have seen, Hungarian by birth, but a very special sort of Hungarian in that his family sprang from Transylvania; and Transylvania, Hungary’s greatest lost province, conjures up for Hungarians a totally different picture from that of the Dracula country of Bram Stoker’s novel and innumerable horror films made in England and America.

  After a turbulent history of domination by marauding hordes from Asia and the Turkish empire, and a period of semi-independence, Transylvania had settled down by the seventeenth century into a largely autonomous Hungarian province, a prosperous if turbulent land of mountains and forests and castles and historic towns. It was called Erdély in Hungarian, and Siebenbürgen – ‘seven cities’ – in German. Its capital, Kolozsvár, renamed Cluj-Napoca by the Romanians after Transylvania had been ceded to Romania by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, was a university town with a diffuse culture where the dominant Hungarian landowning families all had town houses, and which was proud of its status as an alternative capital to Budapest. The people of Transylvania were partly of Romanian origin, and partly Hungarian. There were also Jewish, Szekler, gypsy and German-speaking communities – the last known as ‘Saxons’ who formed a solid largely Protestant middle-class that did not take sides either with the Hungarian aristocrats who were the landowners or with the Romanian peasantry. Some of the noble families, like the Bánffy’s, were Protestant (though if a wife were Catholic, like Kathy’s mother, the sons would be brought up as Protestants while the daughters followed their mother’s faith), others Catholic, while the Romanian-speaking minority was Orthodox. It was from the ranks of the Bánffy’s, Bethlens, Telekis and other great landowners, that the princes and governors and chancellors of that once autonomous province had been chosen.

  Count Miklós Bánffy was born in 1873 and lived most of his life either at the castle of Bonczhida near Kolozsvár, or in the family’s town house in Pest a few minutes’ walk from the town palaces of his western Hungarian relations, the immensely wealthy Károlyi family. Mihály Károlyi, the country’s first republican president after the fall of the Habsburgs, was Miklós Bánffy’s second cousin, childhood playmate and once a devoted friend – a friendship which, after Károlyi’s marriage and conversion to radical politics, would be destroyed by mutual distrust and hostility. Bánffy, who like many of his class was educated at the Theresianum in Vienna, later studied painting in Budapest with Bartalan Szekely and then law and mathematics at the Hungarian University at Kolozsvár, first became a diplomat and then took up politics as an independent MP for his home province of Kolozs. During the First World War he was intendant of the Budapest Opera House, introducing, despite considerable opposition, the works of Bartok; and in 1916 being responsible for most of the arrangements for the last Habsburg coronation, that of the Emperor Franz-Josef’s successor, his nephew King Karl. In 1921 Bánffy became Minister for Foreign Affairs, resigning a year-and-a-half later principally because of ill-health brought about by overwork and the strain of trying to represent his country at the League of Nations (where, despite serious opposition, he had obtained Hungary’s admisssion as a full member) while being stabbed in the back by lesser men at home in Budapest. At that time he still had confidence in the régime of Admiral Horthy, who had by now made himself ‘Regent’ following the short-lived Socialist republic (of which Mihály Károlyi had been the ill-fated President) and the previous few months of the Communist rule of Béla Kun. This early confidence was to wane as Horthy soon showed signs of neo-fascist megalomania.

  In 1926 Bánffy retired from public life in Budapest and went back to live at Bonczhida. From then until his death he devoted himself to literature and the arts, partly as a prolific writer whose major work was the now classic trilogy about life in Hungary from 1904 to 1914, and partly in being one of the leading spirits in founding a publishing house to encourage young Transylvanian writers in Hungarian to become better known and so retain their identity in the face of Romanian domination. Bánffy’s published works also included novels, short stories, plays and two volumes of autobiography.

  On returning to Transylvania he acquired dual Romanian and Hungarian citizenship and, trusted by both sides though holding no official position with either, worked hard to reconcile the mutually suspicious governments in Budapest and Bucharest. His work was made easier for him as, unlike a some of the other Hungarian landowners, he spoke Romanian fluently. Despite the huge success of the Trilogy and widespread public appreciation of Bánffy’s cultural work in Transylvania, it is saddening to note that his political aims were not always understood by some of his fellow aristocrats who misinterpreted his efforts at rapprochement with Romania as acts of disloyalty to an afflicted and deprived Hungary. Ironically enough the (unpublished) letters of the distinguished Romanian diplomat Virgil Tilea, reveal that he too was subjected to similar criticism from his peers in Bucharest because of his friendship with Bánffy.

  The proof of the right-mindedness of both these clearsighted patriots was finally proved in 1943. Early in the war what the Hungarians considered to have been an historic injustice to their country was in part rectified when the so-called Vienna Award restored to Hungary the northern part of Transylvania which included Kolozsvár, the castle and lands of Bonczhida, and the Bánffy forest holdings in the mountains. Romania did not take the same view. On 9 June 1943, Bánffy went to Bucharest to meet the Romanian Foreign Minister, Georges Mironescu, in order to try to persuade the Romanians to sign a separate peace with the Allies and thereby forestall a Russian invasion and the destruction and the Soviet-imposed political revolution this would inevitably bring about. Despite warnings from Hitler that he knew very well what was going on, both sides did agree to abandon the A
xis, but there the agreement stopped. Romania, whose claim to historic rights over the whole region had brought about the transfer of sovereignty after the First World War, wanted the immediate return of Northern Transylvania while Bánffy argued that it would be better to leave this question in abeyance until the war was over when the great powers would make a final decision.

  Bánffy’s private dream, and that of many other Transylvanians at that time, was that this was the opportunity for Transylvania once again to become semi-autonomous as it had been in the seventeenth century. The return to Hungarian rule of the northern part of the province by the 1940 Vienna award had not been greeted by many Transylvanians with quite the same joy that it had been in Budapest. What Bánffy and his friends really wanted was a measure of independence for their beloved country; and though he and the Hungarian Foreign Ministry both wished to postpone a decision on the future of Transylvania, it was not entirely for the same reasons. Neither wanted to offer such a hostage to Fortune as would be a preliminary pledge to return those disputed lands to Romania. It was an agonizing choice, for Bánffy realized that unless both Hungary and Romania agreed to abandon the Axis, this dream would be for ever unobtainable. Nevertheless the negotiations were continued, and there was a further meeting between him and a Romanian delegation, this time headed by Iuliu Maniu. Once again the stumbling block proved to be the Transylvanian question and negotiations were broken off on 23 June 1943. Nevertheless these secret negotiations had one remarkable success. Bánffy was able to arrange that Kolozsvár was declared an open city and so its historic centre was spared the ferocious bombing that devastated much of the surrounding country.

  In 1944, as the Russians advanced towards Kolozsvár, the German army looted the castle of Bonczhida, and set it on fire as a spiteful revenge for Bánffy’s part in trying to persuade the Romanians to sign a separate peace. The contents of Bonczhida were loaded onto 17 trucks to be taken to Germany and were bombed to smithereens by the allied air forces. The once beautiful medieval and baroque castle is now a largely roofless, windowless, floorless ruin with most of its baroque decoration destroyed. Bánffy himself lived until 1950, dying at the age of 77 in Budapest after staying as long as he could in Kolozsvár (Cluj) trying desperately to save what still remained of his family inheritance. He did not succeed.

  A prolific writer, his great work the trilogy A Transylvanian Tale, was described in 1980 by Professor István Nemeskurty, one of the speakers at the 1994 symposium, as essential reading for all Hungarians who wished to understand the history and character of their own country. It had been Nemeskurty’s article, published in a Budapest literary review when the Communist régime was still in power, that had led to the re-publication in 1982 of the first volume (Megszámláltattál – They Were Counted). The English titles of the second and third books are They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided. On the fly-leaves of each of the three books is printed a quotation from the Book of Daniel describing Belshazzar’s Feast. These are taken from a Hungarian Protestant version of the Old Testament. In December 1993 the whole trilogy was republished in Budapest in one de luxe volume, and it was again critically acclaimed.

  As we were getting into our stride trying to make a viable English language version of this extraordinary book I reluctantly became only too aware of the leisurely pace of the trilogy, whose first volume – though it can stand on its own as a complete work of art – is much the same length as Anna Karenina. I estimated that if we were not careful the full text of our translation of the trilogy would be nearly as long as all four volumes of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. This meant that, as English needed more words than Hungarian to achieve the same effect, we would have to eliminate all textual repetitions (some used for emphasis in the original) and probably sacrifice some inessential details in the many subplots as well as some political detail that would be meaningless to anyone not a dedicated scholar of Hungarian political history: that is if any publisher were to look at it twice; and this despite the fact that the recent complete republication in one weighty tome – the original three volumes came out in 1934, 1937 and 1940 – and the symposium held in April 1994, had transformed a dead writer into one very much alive – at least in Hungary.

  A Transylvanian Tale is a remarkable work, compulsive and romantic, filled with love and sorrow and bewilderment and sex and action and splendid set-pieces of grand shooting parties, balls in country-houses, gambling for vertiginous stakes, and dramatic scenes in Parliament; as well as benign social comment, which can erupt into indignant condemnation of social folly. It is written by a man of amazingly clear sight, a patriot who loved his country – and women – and who understood, even if he could not wholly forgive, the follies and the political blindness which finally led to its dismemberment and humiliation after the First World War. Bánffy himself was an eye-witness to many of the historical scenes he describes in the book; and his detailed description of the last Habsburg coronation (published as his Emlékeimböl – From My Memories, an early book of memoirs now out of print-though we have started doing it into English) forms a sad footnote to the Habsburg domination which had so preoccupied Hungarian politicians from 1848 to the fall of the dynasty in 1918. As the struggle with the Habsburgs was the background theme to the trilogy, my conviction grew that this was a book which, if published in the West, would lead to a far greater understanding not only of present-day Hungary but also of the conflicts now erupting all over the Balkans.

  As a pendant to Bánffy’s best known work a posthumous book of late memoirs by him was recently published in Budapest. Bánffy wrote these in 1945 when he found himself alone in Cluj (still Kolozsvár to all Hungarians), after his wife and daughter had returned to Budapest to salvage the contents of their town house in Pest, which had all been thrown out into the street by the Russian troops who had requisitioned it. For three years they were separated, for the border between Hungary and Romania was closed by the military; and when Bánffy finally was able to rejoin his family he only had a year or so more to live. After Bánffy’s death his widow deposited what remained of the Bánffy papers in the library of the Ráday Institute (the HQ of the Reformed Church in Hungary) in Budapest. These memoirs, which were recently discovered there and edited and published by Zoltan Major, are quite short and deal only with the period when Bánffy’s was Foreign Minister to István Bethlen who had succeeded as Prime Minister after the exiled Habsburg monarch, King Karl (who had never formally abdicated), made his first ludicrous attempt at restoration and brought down the government in the process. Karl’s second putsch (in October 1921) came during Bánffy’s time as Foreign Minister, and had more serious repercussions, which included effectively scuttling all Bánffy’s efforts to achieve rapprochement with the new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and the greatly enlarged kingdom of Romania, as it was now to be spelt. In this work we can see the working-out of much of what Bánffy feared would result from the pre-war fecklessness of his countrymen so graphically described in the trilogy.

  I should here mention that in a work filled with unfamiliar names we have thought it better not to further confuse the reader with the many accents which abound in written Hungarian. Similarly, in the course of revising the text it became clear that there were many references, both to actual events and to once well-known public figures, which would mean nothing to an English-language readership, however potently evocative these may have been to Hungarians fifty years and more ago. Rather than inflict footnotes on the reader we decided, where necessary, slightly to amend the text to make the meaning clear.

  After much heart-searching we also decided to give our translation of the trilogy the English title of The Writing on the Wall rather than A Transylvanian Tale. We wanted to get away from the overtones of Dracula now inevitably associated for western readers with any mention of Miklós Bánffy’s homeland; and feel that the biblical reference is justified by the author’s own choice of titles for his three books – They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting and They Were
Divided – and also because he himself placed those quotations from the Book of Daniel before the title pages of each volume.

  In a book that includes descriptions of historic events and real characters it is inevitable that some may wonder how much of the work has an identifiable key. The answer is very little. There are descriptions of places which can be identified – for example the library at ‘Simonvásár’, the fictional Kollonich palace near Lake Balaton, is clearly based on that at the vast Károlyi manor-house at Foth, east of Budapest; while the Kollonich palace in Budapest is equally clearly the Károlyi house just behind the State Museum in Budapest. Similarly there are elements of the Teleki house at Gernyeszeg in the fictional castle of ‘Vár-Siklód’. There are many others likenesses of this sort both to people and places but, while incidents in the life of the author have their echoes in what happens to the two heroes of the work, Bálint Abády and his cousin László Gyerőffy, the only autobiographical element is that Balint’s political views seem to reflect those the author later expressed in his memoirs. There is one notable exception: Abády’s family home, the castle of ‘Denestornya’, is a lovingly described picture of Bánffy’s beloved Bonczhida; but even that is situated in a different part of the country. Likenesses abound, but that is the only true portrait, while the family names Bánffy chose for his characters mostly come from those of families who had long ago died out. Even though what has had to be a brief study of the source materials has proved endlessly fascinating, such recondite knowledge is not needed to enjoy the story Bánffy has to tell.