Transylvania has an enduring glamour. Perhaps it is its connection with Dracula, whose gothic evil was based on the character of Vlad the Impaler; or the wild terrain where bears and wolves roam to this day; or Transylvania’s folklore and history, myth-ridden, exotic, a world of secrets and imagined shadows.
These thoughts were conjured by my first encounter with Miklos Bánffy’s epic of early twentieth-century Hungarian society The Transylvanian Trilogy, first published in Budapest between 1934 and 1940. Bánffy was a Hungarian aristocrat looking back at a lost way of life, one his own family had lived recently enough for him to have experienced it. His grandfather had led the Hungarian government between 1890 and 1895, and when Bánffy began writing he was documenting a world vanishing as he watched. Having served as foreign minister in the 1920s, he now held different political views both from the rightist government and the Bolsheviks by whom it felt threatened. He retreated to his country estate, Castle Bánffy in Transylvania, to write.
The three books of the trilogy were popular when they were first published in Hungary but then lay hidden for decades, until Bánffy’s daughter and Patrick Thursfield together translated and published the trilogy in English in 1999, giving the books titles taken from the Book of Daniel. Katalin Bánffy Jelen wrote the following dedication to her father: ‘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.’ I found that as with Tolstoy or George Eliot, time stops when you are reading Bánffy. The first volume, They Were Counted, opens in 1904 as carriages race towards a pal
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Subscribe now or Sign inTransylvania has an enduring glamour. Perhaps it is its connection with Dracula, whose gothic evil was based on the character of Vlad the Impaler; or the wild terrain where bears and wolves roam to this day; or Transylvania’s folklore and history, myth-ridden, exotic, a world of secrets and imagined shadows.
These thoughts were conjured by my first encounter with Miklos Bánffy’s epic of early twentieth-century Hungarian society The Transylvanian Trilogy, first published in Budapest between 1934 and 1940. Bánffy was a Hungarian aristocrat looking back at a lost way of life, one his own family had lived recently enough for him to have experienced it. His grandfather had led the Hungarian government between 1890 and 1895, and when Bánffy began writing he was documenting a world vanishing as he watched. Having served as foreign minister in the 1920s, he now held different political views both from the rightist government and the Bolsheviks by whom it felt threatened. He retreated to his country estate, Castle Bánffy in Transylvania, to write. The three books of the trilogy were popular when they were first published in Hungary but then lay hidden for decades, until Bánffy’s daughter and Patrick Thursfield together translated and published the trilogy in English in 1999, giving the books titles taken from the Book of Daniel. Katalin Bánffy Jelen wrote the following dedication to her father: ‘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.’ I found that as with Tolstoy or George Eliot, time stops when you are reading Bánffy. The first volume, They Were Counted, opens in 1904 as carriages race towards a palace for a ball. It is easy to imagine Bánffy’s own grandfather – nobleman, landowner and politician – as the attractive hero Bálint Abady, who leads us into a glittering, achingly romantic world of wit, gambling, madness, drunkenness, adultery, scheming and politics. Bánffy was in his fifties when he wrote the trilogy, describing a Hungary where society’s excesses had reached their peak. Disaster was already threatening, yet the danger went unnoticed as Budapest’s social butterflies danced and played cards while the country’s European power flickered and faded. Bánffy’s writing is alive with political and sexual tension, yet every glimmer and consummation is edged with loss. He knows the price of love, the cost of power and the inexorability of change, and on to these themes he pins his characters. The second volume, They Were Found Wanting, takes us through the 1910s, by which time the mask of pleasure is slipping both across Europe and, on a personal level, for the story’s protagonists. Love goes awry, politics are disagreeable, and the huge estates are becoming more expensive and difficult to run. We see this through the different paths taken by Bálint Abady and his childhood friend László Gyerőffy as they make their way, supported and then abandoned by a past of huge privilege, through the worlds of society and poli tics. László, the book’s antihero, is brilliant, impulsive and self- destructive, a clanging bell for the moral exhaustion of their class. Yet Bánffy portrays him with compassion and humour, so that even at his lowest he remains fascinating. The final volume, They Were Divided, is shorter than the first two, covering the years between 1912 and 1914. The Austro-Hungarian Empire is beginning to crack and fall apart. Bánffy’s characters are still busy diving in and out of love, quarrelling, hunting and gambling, and largely ignoring what is happening in the wider world. The reader, however, is mesmerized by the slow, exquisite tragedy that is unfolding. Like Tolstoy writing about pre-revolutionary Russia, or Molly Keane who captured the declining Anglo-Irish aristocracy, Bánffy shows a society on the brink of extinction. Yet it is still alive and kicking back: full of mistakes, broken promises, yearnings, lies, courage and humanity. The Transylvanian backdrop emerges with the vivid delicacy of a painting, a landscape both civilized and wild: beech forests, high meadows, rivers and storm-broken passes. Sometimes for Bálint the countryside becomes a refuge from the corruption of Budapest and the cynical stagnation of parliament. He immerses himself in nature to slake the frustration of his disastrous love affair with Adrienne Uzdy – a character based on Bánffy’s own muse Carola Szilvássy – or rides up to the hinterland of his estates in the Carpathian mountains for respite from the tainted world of politics. Whether he is alone, with Adrienne or with country people, nature is a salve, reflecting a spiritual element that resonates today. Bálint glimpses wolves among the pines, watches a hawk circling, bathes in an icy pool. Physical vitality is a relief from political intrigue and social pretence. Bánffy, who loved hunting, painting and politics in equal measure, knew the wildness of his country intimately. For him nature was a moral counterpoint to the arrogance and waste of the capital. Yet the natural world, like the human one, begins to topple. As Bálint retreats to the wilderness, local infractions signal the crumbling of a moral and practical code for living. Ancient forests are sold, destroyed by war and indifference. Bálint Abády is a principled man caught in a doomed love affair. His efforts to bring justice to his peasant tenants, to argue for reform in parliament, to live honourably, are met with amusement and incomprehension. He is too liberal for his class, and too aristocratic for the modern world. He is no hero in the grand sense, but he is trying to do the right thing. His tortuous relationship with Adrienne, married, beautiful and trapped, is handled with a restraint that is both devastating and gripping. Descriptions of the passionate and magnificent Adrienne are the closest Bánffy comes to purple prose, but she is saved by his depiction of her admirable restraint and sacrifice. At first reading Bánffy’s world appears dominated by men: they hold the reins of power, or so it seems. Yet women hold the narrative. Glamorous and purposeful, they move through the novel aware of the narrow parameters their world allows them, but nonetheless strategic, clever and generous. These women are not the clichéd ethereal muses of nineteenth-century fiction but, like Adrienne Uzdy, mod ern women. Her restraint is not passive, but an act of courage. Despite her need to escape from an insane husband, she sees Bálint not as a saviour but an equal, as the novel’s outcome reflects. László’s lover Klara Kollonich and Adrienne’s sisters are beguiling and believable, brought alive in sympathetic detail. There’s a reckless ness to their love affairs, for they know they may be thwarted by convention. Even in gossipy domestic scenes their intelligence gleams, their wit sparkles. Meanwhile, the older generation of mothers and aunts maintain the rituals of a society already disintegrating. They manage households, broker alliances and protect reputations in the belief that it is their role to uphold sacred memories of a culture that no longer really believes in itself. When the novels were first published in English, their reception by the literary establishment was enthusiastic – Patrick Leigh Fermor, Victoria Glendinning, Charles Moore and others were enchanted. Not surprising, for it’s impossible not to be seduced by Bánffy’s literary eloquence and attention to detail. Virtuoso music, superb horsemanship and fine theatre are all backdrops for scenes of erotic dalliance, reckless gambling and firecracker politics. This is an extravagant society, totally self-absorbed. But the tremor of change is palpable. The final volume is intensely dramatic, as war draws closer and we see just how shallow the glitter of this aristocratic life is and realize how quickly it will be extinguished. We see the collapse of a civilization and the indulgence, blindness and inertia that make it happen. Yet Bánffy has great tenderness for human fallibility, even as his characters sink beneath the weight of their own vanity. He knew what it meant to lose everything; his own estate was confiscated, his country partitioned, his class extinguished, and yet he wrote without bitterness. The heart of the trilogy lies in the tension between the wolf-haunted forests and the glittering salons of Budapest. Bánffy sees civilization as a thin veil draped on to something older and wilder. Reading him now is to recognize the behaviour of our own time – how we ignore impending disaster, our fatigue with politics, the widening gap between idealism and reality. I have reread The Transylvanian Trilogy twice. I can open it at any page and find myself once more in that fading evening light, drawn towards a palace whose windows are bright with candlelight, whose rooms are full of people I feel I know. I have the sense of having arrived in a place that never quite existed but is nonetheless a place I love. I am glad I can return there over and over again.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Raffaella Barker 2026
About the contributor
Raffaella Barker is a novelist whose books are full of characters who themselves would like to have read Bánffy if they’d known he existed. She is now on the lookout for another really fabulous trilogy, preferably in translation.
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