The Romance of a Decaying World

The Romance of a Decaying World

Miklós Bánffy's tale of the Austria-Hungarian empire in decline captures the charm and decadence of a doomed civilization.

By MAX EGREMONT

Miklós Bánffy knew about disintegration. A Hungarian aristocrat born in 1873, he had large properties in Transylvania that until 1918 were within the vast, ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire. He saw at close quarters the last years of a great European power as it, with the Continent, slipped into decline. In a life divided between the arts and politics, he was not only director of the Budapest Opera House and the National Theater but a long-time member of parliament and, briefly in 1921, foreign minister of Hungary. A marble bust of Bánffy stands today in the Budapest opera house, and it was he who, in 1916, organized the last Hapsburg coronation, that of the ill-fated Emperor Karl. Bánffy died destitute in Soviet-dominated Budapest in 1950. His life is a grim parable of central Europe's 20th century.

From early on he wrote. The plays and short stories culminated in three novels known collectively as "The Transylvanian Trilogy" (1934-40). Set in the years 1904 to 1914, and ending with the outbreak of World War I, the trilogy was written when Europe was becoming a cockpit for dictators. Bánffy felt that the warning signs had been there for years in the increasingly inward-looking and selfish behavior of the old ruling class. With the novels—individually titled "They Were Counted," "They Were Found Wanting" and "They Were Divided" in words drawn from Belshazzar's Feast in the Book of Daniel—he wished to revive the hopes, however misguided, of an earlier, more innocent age, as well as to show the decadence and introspection that had led to its end.

His method was simple and romantic: Through a story of passionate love, Bánffy would reveal a decaying world. Count Balint Abady and his married lover, Adrienne, represent virtue against evil and chance as they move from castles and palaces to grand town houses or set up assignations in ancestral forests. The spirit of modernism (which Bánffy supported in his role at the National Theater) has no role here; nor does that of Freud. Bánffy's aim was ambitious, to reflect decline and disaster, political and personal. Not since the work of Benjamin Disraeli and Anthony Trollope had there been such a comprehensive attempt to join fiction and politics.

Like those Victorian novelists, Bánffy knew his world. His characters are almost all from the aristocracy, living a life of pheasant shoots, fox hunts and parties. But they have power, in parliament and at the imperial court. He shows how the prewar generation's extravagance, snobbery and selfishness contrasts with the beauty of its surroundings. The great houses have libraries, but there is a sadness about how seldom they are consulted. Great importance is given to the trivia of sport, social scheming and clothes, including (for the men) a taste for English clothes that verges on madness. Dueling is rife, letting pompous nonentities set themselves up as arbiters of a complex code of language, choice of weapons and dress. For the women, all that matters is marriage to a well-born man, even if he is dull and you aren't faithful to him. Count Antal Szent-Gyorgyi, hereditary Master of the Horse to the King of Hungary, has a rigid order of precedence in giving out invitations to his shoot: Bad shots are out, as are persons of Czech origin or those who talk about politics, whereas "anyone who was able to trace his descent from the days of the Arpad Kings, especially if they had earned no black marks by unfortunate behaviour in the ensuing centuries," is welcome.

This could be pre-revolutionary France, and Bánffy well conveys the air of a world on the edge. A casual remark can lead to a duel, sessions of the Budapest parliament descend into riots, fortunes are lost in an evening's gambling. The old emperor, Franz Joseph, has an unpredictable and autocratic heir in Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who the nobles fear may bring about revolution—although this problem at least seems solved in August 1914 when the Archduke is murdered at Sarajevo. The "Tartar" looks and manner of several of the characters remind us that Hungary was, for centuries, on Europe's most eastern ramparts. But danger comes not just from events but from national character. Hungarians, Bánffy writes, have an Oriental yearning for nirvana, which makes them reluctant to strive for worldly achievement. Or are they just lazy?

Certainly this can't be said of the trilogy's central figure, the young, idealistic Balint Abady, the inheritor (like the author) of Transylvanian estates. Balint, whose father died young, has to cope with his adoring, conventional mother and the corrupt agents and lawyers whom she has indulged for years. There is also the tortuous Hapsburg empire: a patchwork of peoples and languages that stretched from Austria across northern Italy, through Hungary, Croatia, the Czech lands, Slovakia and the Balkans. In Transylvania, Romanians, although in the majority, were under the control of Hungarian landlords.

This society was deeply fractured; much of imperial policy was concerned with trying to keep down minorities that, particularly in the case of Hungary, had proud cultures and histories. Balint's ostensible good life of parties, sport, love and politics—like his creator, he serves in the Hungarian parliament—is fatally distant from the rest of his country, let alone the world. Europe's slide toward war reaches Bánffy's aristocrats only as a distant murmur.

Balint is, of course, his creator's stand-in. His ideas for improving his estates, helping the Romanians, shunning sleaze and party politics resemble Bánffy's own—in the novel Balint delivers one of Bánffy's own speeches in parliament. And Balint's illicit affair with the married Adrienne echoes Bánffy's liaison with an actress who was shunned by his aristocratic family. Like Miklós Bánffy, Balint has a large town house in Kolozsvar (now the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca) and a huge castle in the country, Denestornya (a version of Bánffy's own Bonczhida).

The trilogy, however, doesn't read like realism. There's a fairy-tale feel to Balint's life, complete with stage villains like a thieving estate manager and Adrienne's mad, sinister husband. Clichés, often very enjoyable, can take the books into Georgette Heyer territory: Adrienne, the damsel in distress, moves like a lithe panther; her tears sparkle like diamonds; often the couple walks at dawn or twilight through the Transylvanian meadows and forests (which Bánffy loved), invariably under a full moon; Venice sees the flowering of their love.

Against these, however, are fine touches, like the "cold saliva" of an old lady's kiss, the "gliding step" of an aristocrat "used to highly waxed floors" and the sad, deep innocence of the pre-1914 lives of the rich. A wily lawyer thinks about Balint: "This Count isn't a bad fellow . . . not a bad fellow at all, but, oh dear, how little he knows about life! He's like a child." Sex is, for the time, dealt with quite frankly; Adrienne's problem, put right by the gentle Balint, is that she has been made frigid by her husband's frenzied assaults. Gypsies are often at hand, sometimes taken into grand beds, even living with owners of manor houses or castles, but not asked to dinner except to provide the music.

The trilogy has its longueurs. Goodness and decency, especially when, as with Balint, they are quiet and sweet, are not exciting; and Hungarian political crises make hard reading. Luckily, there are lively characters, particularly the novels' naughty boy, Balint's charming but weak cousin, Count Laszlo Gyeroffy, a brilliant musician and reckless gambler. Drunkenness, long nights at cards or making love to women hung about with pearls consume Laszlo; and his descent is a powerful part of Bánffy's theme of decline. Not even the strong woman whom Laszlo takes up with can save him in the end.

The trilogy ends with Balint's farewell to his estate as he sets off for war in August 1914. The roads are crowded with cheerful volunteers and reservists going to their regiments, the anger and bitterness of the empire's constituent peoples all apparently gone. It's the book's most moving scene, partly because what comes next is both terrible and clear. "Hurrah for the war!" the soldiers cry. The count thinks of how his generation had "drifted farther and farther away from the practical wisdom of their forebears. Reality had been gradually replaced by self-deception, conceit and sheer wrong-headed obstinacy. Everyone was guilty, all the upper strata of Hungarian society." He feels "as if he were looking back from beyond the grave."

After defeat in 1918, Austro-Hungary was split up by the victorious Western powers; Miklós Bánffy's beloved Transylvania went to Romania, partly (it has been said) because of the charm of the Romanian Queen Marie, who stormed the Paris peace conference with 63 dresses and 83 pairs of shoes. After a frustrating time as foreign minister, when he tried to have the treaty revised, Bánffy retired to his castle, now in another country. There he worked to keep Hungarian culture alive under Romanian rule and wrote his books.

This Everyman edition (reprinting the 1990s translation by Bánffy's daughter and the writer Patrick Thursfield) has a fine introduction by the historian Hugh Thomas describing the slow decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire and telling of Bánffy's last years. In 1943, he tried to persuade the Romanians and Hungarians to disengage from their German alliances and make a separate peace with the Allies, avoiding Soviet invasion. In revenge, the retreating German army burned Bonczhida—a destruction completed by Allied bombers. Miklós Bánffy died in poverty in Budapest, having at last been allowed to leave Romania and join his wife, the actress whom he had been able to marry only after his father's death in 1929. "The Transylvanian Trilogy" shows that it is possible to keep an earlier time fresh by combining imagination and memory. The novels' atmosphere and fascination come from the clear evocation of a world. This, you feel, is how things really were.

—Mr. Egremont's "Forgotten Land:
Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia" was published last year.

A version of this article appeared July 5, 2013, on page C7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Romance of a Decaying World.

The book is The Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklós Bánffy