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Miklós Bánffy

They Were Counted

For my dear children, for whom I first started on this translation of their grandfather’s greatest work so that they should learn to know him better, he who would have loved them so much.

K. Bánffy-Jelen

In loving memory of Patrick Thursfield, 1923–2003

PRAISE FOR MIKLOS BANFFY. ‘BÁNFFY IS A BORN STORYTELLER’ PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR, FROM THE FOREWORD

‘A Tolstoyan portrait of the end days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this compulsively readable novel follows the divergent fortunes of two cousins, the politician Abady and gamble/drunkard Gyeroffy, detailing the intrigues at the decadent Budapest court, the doomed love affairs, opulent balls, duels and general head-in-the sand idiocies of a privileged elite whose world is on the verge of disappearing for ever. Banffy — Hungarian count — also writes with extraordinary vividness of the natural beauty of his Transylvanian homeland. Two more novels — They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided — followed, usually published as The Transylvanian Trilogy’ Adam Newey, ’1000 Novels You Must Read’, Guardian

‘Just about as good as any fiction I have ever read, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Love, sex, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos of a society which cannot prevent its own destruction — all are here’ Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph

‘Fascinating. He writes about his quirky border lairds and squires and the high misty forest ridges and valleys of Transylvania with something of the ache that Czeslaw Milosz brings to the contemplation of this lost Eden’ W.

‘Pleasure of a different scale and kind. It is a sort of Galworthisn panorama of life in the dying years of the Habsburg Empire — perfect late night reading for nostalgic romantics like me’ Jan Morris, Observer Books of the Year

‘Totally absorbing’ Martha Kearney, Harpe’s Bazaar

‘Charts this glittering spiral of decline with the frustrated regret of a politician who had tried to alert Hungary’s ruling classes to the pressing need for change and accommodation. Patrician, romantic and in the context of the times a radical, Bánffy combined his politics — he negotiated Hungary’s admission to the League of Nations — with running the state theatres and promoting the work of his contemporary, the composer Béla Bartók’ Guardian Editorial

‘Like Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, Miklós Bánffy is one of those novelists Austria-Hungary specialised in. Intimate and sparkling chroniclers of a wider ruin, ironic and elegiac, they understood that in the 1900s the fate of classes and nations was beginning to turn almost on a change in the weather. None of them, oddly, was given his due till long after his death, probably because in 1918 very much was lost in central Europe — an empire overnight for one thing — and the aftermath was like a great ship sinking, a massive downdraught that took a generation of ideas and continuity with it. Bánffy, a prime witness of his times, shows in these memoirs exactly what an extraordinary period it must have been to live through’ Julian Evans, Daily Telegraph