The latest title in the Blue Danube imprint, which focuses on literature, history and travel in Central Europe, is Venetian Angel, a short novel by Ferenc Molnár, now translated into English for the first time.  Molnár was a famous pre-war dramatist whose many plays included one on which the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel was based.  Here, in the introduction, his grandson Mátyás Sárközi writes about the author:

Ferenc Molnár, my grandfather, had to leave Hungary in 1937 because of the Fascist tide there. He aimed to take refuge in America, but his first stop on the way to New York was Venice, a city he loved dearly. In this novel he calls it ‘a wonder of the world’.

Daily life in Budapest was still undisturbed in 1933. Molnár was seen daily in his straw hat, sparkling monocle in the right eye, strolling along the Duna Corso, the promenade on the Pest side of the Danube, stretching from the Elisabeth Bridge to the Chain Bridge. Already a well-known dramatist and writer in Europe and America, he was greeted at every step, even by friendly strangers. The Athenaeum publishing house asked him for a new novel. What should he write about? He submitted a manuscript without much of a story, its title inspired by a little flute-blowing putto at the bottom of Bellini’s Madonna in the Frari church in Venice. In essence, the story is a love triangle, a romance coloured with intrigue and jealousy. Molnár, with the skill of a psychologist, describes a young woman on the verge of becoming a grown-up, still unversed in the complications of adult life, still a dreamer. The action is played out against the backdrop of the Venice which Molnár knew so well, with its fascinating history and its narrow little alleyways.

He maintains that living abroad makes one different. Does it? Perhaps less so today than it did in Molnár’s time. Now the world’s populace is becoming a global melting pot of nationalities and races. But the main theme remains eternal. The protagonists come into sharp focus in Molnár’s mirror. A mirror which is able to show not only virtues, but every human foible and frailty.

Mátyás Sárközi
Hampstead, 2024

Good to see Bas Bleu featuring Blue Danube’s Mrs Anderson as one of their summer “mystery” titles.

Here » for their excellent summary (and attractively discounted price!).

“Accompanying Milla [the Mrs Anderson of the title] is the romantic but comically clueless Tibor Vida, a struggling Hungarian composer who serves as both her love interest and the Dr. Watson to her Sherlock Holmes.” Read more »

With some great reviews too:

In The Bookseller:
Blue Guides launches literary imprint »

On HLO:
Blue Guides Release Two Books by Miklós Bánffy »

In The Lady:

In The Oldie:

The Monkey and Other Stories is a collection of short works written across virtually the full span of Bánffy’s writing career, covering the years from just after the turn of the twentieth century to almost 1950. As such, they cannot be expected to cohere as a single work, but rather highlight the ways in which Bánffy changed and developed as a writer. 

These changes should not be overstated: his signature style is instantly recognisable, whether the story was written in 1910 or 1947, and his unique sensibility—an artist’s eye for place and a kind of unforced, universal empathy that imbues almost everything, from people to animals to whole landscapes, with a kind of consciousness and volition—can be seen throughout his work. 

So what does change? Well, his early work is characterised by a marked ‘seriousness’, both of tone and content: in stories such as Wolves and The Emperor’s Secret he deals with war, death, betrayal, suffering and the ultimate harshness of life. It is as though the young Bánffy, scion of one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Transylvania, is trying through his fiction to vicariously explore the experience of being powerless in a cruel world, or at least to demonstrate that, as a writer, he can inhabit that reality. 

For the Bánffy of later years, particularly during and after the Second World War, it is clear that tragedy and suffering (of which Bánffy had had more than his own personal share), had lost their inspirational pull. His short story The Monkey, for instance, and his novella The Remarkable Mrs Anderson—though not devoid of darker overtones—are overwhelmingly good-humoured and cheerful. There is an insistence on the wonderful richness and beauty of life, and on the necessity of enjoying it. The story Lememame is particularly interesting because of the dates of its composition. The central narrative, written in 1915, is a rather unsettling war story, set on the Eastern Front and dealing with Bánffy’s recurring themes of power and powerlessness, and whether mercy for the wicked is warranted. It fits, in other words, with much of his early work. However, it was not published until 1943, by which time Bánffy could not help adding a more avuncular ‘frame narrative’, in which he humorously recounts the circumstances of the story’s rediscovery. He admits, too, that the story needed work; that he ‘had to delouse, brush and iron it before deeming it fit to be seen in public.’ One wonders whether he might have altered the ending slightly, to better reflect his changed sensibilities…

This shift in tone is hardly unusual among writers: it neatly tracks the clichéd life story of the artist, struggling at first in an insalubrious garret, but progressing by degrees to wealth, comfort, and establishment recognition. What is interesting, in Bánffy’s case, is that his own life followed precisely the opposite trajectory. 

Born into wealth, he was educated at the prestigious Vienna Theresianum, which taught the children of the Austro-Hungarian elite. Writing of his alter-ego, Bálint Abády, in the first volume of his Transylvanian Trilogy, Bánffy says:

His eight years schooling in the Theresianum had been rarefied and genteel, while life at Dénestornya was an unending bucolic dream. Later experiences at university, diplomatic training and service abroad had been similarly pleasant, showing him little more than the pretty surfaces of life. In short, we can say that to this point he had lived in an insular world of affected good manners, where human wickedness, jealousy and greed were concealed behind elegant masks. It would take a far keener, more experienced eye than he yet possessed to see through them.

That is not to say that Bánffy’s youth was without heartache: the early loss of his mother; conflict with his father over gambling debts; the pain of his love for the married Baroness Carola Szilvássy Bornemisza (the inspiration for Adrienne in the Trilogy). All the same, the horrors of World War One, then the transfer of Translyvania—and with it his home, Bonchida—to Romania in 1920, were a new kind of trauma; something experienced not merely on an individual, but on a collective, national level. 

Worse was to come. By the late 1930s it was clear to Bánffy that a new war was looming. His remarkable science-fiction story The Infected Planet, written in 1939, is suffused with grim forebodings of a global cataclysm, and the final, unforgettable pages of his Transylvanian Trilogy, completed around the same time, can be read either as an indictment of the slaughter that characterised World War One, or as a premonition of fresh slaughter to come. 

The Second World War lived up to Bánffy’s worst fears, and by the time it was over he was ruined and destitute, his home ransacked and burned by retreating German soldiers in revenge for his diplomatic efforts to extricate both Hungary and Romania from alliance with Nazi Germany. In 1949 he wrote to the first prime minister of communist Romania, Petru Groza: “Having lost my entire fortune and, with no pension, at the age of 76 I have in the strictest sense of the term nothing on which to live.”

It is remarkable then, that it was at this time, having been reduced from the highest echelons of society to absolute penury, that he wrote perhaps his most joyously life-affirming work, the novella The Remarkable Mrs Anderson. In a review in Helikon, Gyula Dávid describes Bánffy at this point as“a liberated master craftsman, leading his two heroes from crisis to crisis and adventure to adventure… This is no mere escapism, but a playful spirit set loose to soar above the shattered ruins of reality.”

Perhaps, after all, this should not surprise us. After all, Beethoven wrote his Second Symphony, one of his most playful and irreverent compositions, during a period of deep depression in the autumn of 1802, as he struggled to come to terms with his progressive hearing loss. Likewise, Mozart’s symphony no. 41, the ‘Jupiter’ symphony, was composed in the summer of 1788, at a time when Mozart was ill, depressed, and mired in increasingly unpayable debts. More pertinently, perhaps, Bánffy’s contemporary (and one-time reviewer) Antal Szerb wrote The Queen’s Necklace—his light-hearted, funny account of a scandal which ruined the reputation of Marie Antoinette—in 1942, just as life for him, as a Jew in Hungary, was becoming intolerable. 

It may be, as Dávid suggests, that we should not view these efforts as mere escapism. Instead, they are affirmations of the power of art not merely to reflect reality but to create it anew, generating by sheer force of imagination a world conducive to creative expression. 

Thomas Sneddon

One of the stars of The Remarkable Mrs Anderson is the narrator’s car, a “dark blue Lancia of the newer model”.  It is clearly open top, variously described as two seater, blue, fast (“my poor little Lancia’s speedometer hovered between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and twenty five [kmh]”) and a relatively common model on the Italian roads (“there are plenty of Lancias of my sort here in Italy, but there can’t be more than two with Hungarian plates”).

The narrator, Tibor Vida, a successful operetta composer, single and approaching middle-age, buys it from a diplomat in Palermo while on holiday in Sicily, where he, Tibor, has gone to recover from a failed affair (“my first taste of that particular medicine from the receiving end”) and enjoy the financial rewards of his latest operetta (“Shakuntala, an international hit, with two runs in London’s West End”).  And where of course he will meet the remarkable Hungarian journalist, art historian and ex-wife of Mr T.W. Anderson of Chicago – we hear no more of the latter.  

The car in the picture above is a Lancia Belna Cabriolet (F234), and as a convertible Lancia it meets many of the scant criteria that Tibor provides.  But this model was manufactured from 1934 to 1937, raising questions of when Miklós Bánffy intended his novella to be set.  The story is not about politics – indeed the author was consciously escaping the terrible politics of his time writing in near-captivity, a class enemy in the second half of the 1940s in what had been a family house in Cluj Napoca in communist Romanian Transylvania – and no specific historic events are given.  The period is inter-bellum, Italy is clearly fascist, but had been since Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922.  There are indications of the poverty of the time, also maybe – pointing to the 30s rather than 20s – of a scarcity of foreign tourists: Tibor and Mrs Anderson are “practically the only guests” in the lakeside hotel in Genzano di Roma.  

So for the moment we conclude that The Remarkable Mrs Anderson may be set in the 1930s, and the Lancia may indeed be the 1934-37 Lancia Belna above.  But possibly blue all over without the white sides.  And a surprising choice for a sensitive and musical composer: “my little Lancia tore along with fresh, eager energy.  She has no silencer to speak of, and the four stroke-engine hammered a joyous, deafening rhythm.”  Maybe he was more of a composer of rollicking operettas than sensitive sonatas … 

By Bánffy translator Thomas Sneddon

The world Miklós Bánffy inhabited as a young man is an often striking, not to say disconcerting, mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the archaic and the modern. Hungary in the early years of the 20th century was a place where a gentleman might drive to a pistol duel in his Mercedes motorcar, or even, conceivably, take the Budapest underground. By 1914 Budapest had, in addition to electric underground trains, an extensive electric tram network, electric street lighting, and an increasingly sophisticated telephone system. At the same time, however, in more remote parts of the kingdom, such as Bánffy’s own Transylvania, the inhabitants of many rural villages lived much as they had done for centuries, and while serfdom had been abolished, land ownership still followed largely feudal patterns, with the landed gentry holding the vast majority of territory. By the time of Bánffy’s death in 1950, however, communist governments in Hungary and Romania were attempting, with remarkable thoroughness, to annihilate that world. Understanding this region of Europe during the critical period of transition which Bánffy’s life spanned is not straightforward, and I have put together a short list of books in English which I consider the most useful. I highly recommend all of them, and have consulted several of them frequently while translating Bánffy’s work. 

1: Comrade Baron, by Jaap Scholten. Comrade Baron is a fascinating account of the Transylvanian aristocracy, and in particular the hardships they faced after 1945. Bánffy himself features prominently throughout, and it introduces many of the real-life individuals who inspired the characters in his fiction. It also tells the story of Bonchida, the Bánffy family home (and the inspiration for Dénestornya in the Transylvanian Trilogy), as well as the heartbreaking story of how virtually all its priceless treasures were destroyed. 

2. Budapest 1900, by John Lukacs. Written in strikingly beautiful prose, Budapest 1900 guides the reader through a city which, though utterly different in many regards, still remains strikingly familiar architecturally. Budapest at the turn of the 20th century was a vibrant, dynamic, young city; it produced, in this era, such figures as Bartók, Kodály and von Neumann, and Bánffy spent much time in the city as a young parliamentarian. Incidentally, it also provides a lucid and concise summary of the political events which perplex so many readers of Bánffy’s Trilogy. 

3. Danubia, by Simon Winder. Danubia is the second book in Simon Winder’s trilogy on Central Europe (Germania, Danubia and Lotharingia) and is, in my view, the best of the three. Careful with facts but light in tone, and often extremely funny, Danubia is probably the most accessible, all-round history of Central Europe. It deals more with Austria and Bohemia than with Hungary, but for a general background to the empire within with Bánffy was born and raised, this is an excellent place to start.

4. The Will to Survive: A History of Hungary, by Bryan Cartledge. There are a number of good histories of Hungary, but most (for perfectly good reasons) focus on events in the 19th and 20th centuries. Cartledge provides the fullest account I know in English of certain historical periods, such as Transylvania’s 17th-century independence, that helped form Bánffy’s identity as both a Hungarian and a Transylvanian. It is, moreover, a tremendous work of scholarship. 

5. The Vanquished, by Robert Gerwarth. The vast majority of Bánffy’s published fiction was written after 1920, and was strongly influenced by the events of the six years from 1914 to 1920. That the First World War was an appalling charnelhouse is widely appreciated—though Austria-Hungary’s horrendous losses are not always considered in the West—but the events which convulsed Central Europe during the 1918–20 period are almost unknown in the English-speaking world. Gerwath’s The Vanquished ranges across many Central and Eastern European states, but includes a clear (and searing) account of the tribulations which continued to beset Hungary even after the Armistice had been signed. Bánffy’s Trilogy, as well as short stories such as ’Somewhere’, rely for much of their emotional heft on a shared cultural understanding among Hungarians of the sheer magnitude of the disasters which, by the end of the second decade of the 20th century, had left the country on the verge of collapse. Gerwath’s is the best account in English of this critical period. 

6. Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. The second book in Leigh Fermor’s account of a youthful trek across Europe in the mid-1930s leads him into Transylvania, and to lengthy encounters with much the sort of characters whom Bánffy describes in his fiction. Much has changed since the pre-war days, of course, and the people he meets live in greatly reduced circumstances (Bánffy tells a remarkably similar story of an encounter between a young Englishman and Transylvanian gentry trying to conceal their poverty in his short story Somewhere) but though diminished, it is still recognisably the same world, while Leigh Fermor’s writing is, as fans will know, superb throughout. 

7. Patrick Leigh Fermor: Noble Encounters Between Budapest and Transylvania, by Michael O’Sullivan. Nobody in the English-speaking world knows the Hungarian and Transylvanian nobility like Michael O’Sullivan, and in this engaging, authoritative and richly illustrated book he follows Leigh Fermor’s journey from Esztergom to the Iron Gates, providing a trove of biographical detail and enlivening anecdotes about the people he encountered on his journey, as well as what befell them in the years which followed. 

‘I’m staying at the Excelsior. It’s a very fine hotel, and from my top-floor perch I can survey the whole city, right out to the bay, or towards the splendid bulk of Monte Pellegrino. I had a piano brought up to my room so I can work on my newest operetta.’

So writes Tibor Vida in his diary in Chapter II of The Remarkable Mrs Anderson. As the narrative progresses, more details are given about the Excelsior. In fact, all the way from Palermo, the minutiae of Mrs Anderson’s journey with Tibor are described and savoured with the precision of a leisured person’s travelogue. One senses that Bánffy is following them in his mind, reliving scenes that he too once experienced. After all, when he wrote this novella, in 1949, he had no internet search engine or Google Street View to help him with his research. But his descriptions are spot-on. Sitting in his small room in Kolozsvár/Cluj, in the single cramped apartment which had been allotted to him in his own now-confiscated town house, he must have been relying on memory, thinking back to lost days of freedom, sunshine and youth.

His memory was an accurate one. The Excelsior is not an invented hotel; it first opened its doors in 1891 and it still exists; in fact it is recommended as a place to stay in the most recent edition of Blue Guide Sicily. It lies north of Palermo’s historic centre, in a mainly 19^th-century district, and its façade sports something very like the kind of balconies that Tibor Vida describes in Chapter V, after his room is broken into: ‘But how the devil would anyone get in through my balcony? Every room has its own balcony, and while they’re pretty broad, they certainly don’t meet one another. I’d estimate a gap of at least a metre and a half between my balcony and the next one, above a three-storey drop.’ There are more details, too, to lead us to suspect that Bánffy must have known this hotel from personal experience. He talks of a ‘nearby square’ where Mrs Anderson plans to hail a taxi. Yes, Piazza Mordini: the hotel’s south elevation looks onto it. And when Mrs Anderson goes out for a stroll ‘in the neighbouring English Garden with an “unknown gentleman” ’, this garden is clearly the Giardino Inglese, which is just round the corner from the Excelsior on Via della Libertà. Nor is it improbable that Tibor should have worked on his latest operetta at the Excelsior. After all, in a nearby building in 1882, Wagner completed Parsifal (in Palazzo Ingham, now the Grand Hotel et des Palmes). As a keen music aficionado, Bánffy would have known that.

For his villain, Schönberg-Belmonte, Bánffy chooses a different hotel, the Villa Igiea (and though he spells it ‘Igea’, it is definitely the same place). ‘I’m not staying in town, you see,’ Schönberg says airily, ‘but out at the Villa Igea, above the bay. Do you know it? It’s the most expensive hotel in the area, of course, but a charming place…’ It still is expensive: several hundred euro a night. Blue Guide Sicily describes it in the following terms: ‘A beautiful Art Nouveau building in Acquasanta, 3km north of the city. Built as a sanatorium by Donna Franca Florio, it never functioned as such. With the help of Ernesto Basile she pragmatically transformed it into a luxurious hotel for her friends. Cushiony salons abound; a peaceful refuge over the years for the rich and famous, besides many crowned heads.’ Since it was originally intended to be a sanatorium, its name makes sense. Igiea is the Italian version of Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health. Ernesto Basile (1857–1932), born in Palermo, was the most famous architect of his day, a major exponent of international Modernism and Art Nouveau and influenced by the Arab-Norman style of his native city. The beautiful Donna Franca Florio had a fabled collection of Cartier jewellery and a string of pearls seven metres long. Malicious gossip alleged that her husband gave her a new bead for every infidelity. Bánffy could not have chosen a more appropriate home-from-home for ‘Uncle Schöni’.

For Bánffy’s next specific hotel reference, we have to wait until Milla and Tibor get to Padua. Here, Mrs Anderson checks into the Croce d’Oro. Bánffy surely had an actual hotel in mind but this one is more difficult to pin down. The Guide Bleu of 1928 speaks of an hôtel meublé called the ‘Savoia-Terminus (ex-Croce d’Oro), tout près de la gare’ on Corso del Popolo. The building still stands, right outside the railway station, but it is no longer a hotel. Could Mrs Anderson have stayed there? Unlikely. ‘The bells of the cathedral were tolling Mass when she left the Croce d’Oro the next morning,’ Bánffy tells us. ‘Walking a little way down Via Dante, she soon came to the shop of Egisto Ristorini.’ But both the cathedral and Via Dante are a long way from the railway station, a good twenty-minute walk. So perhaps the hotel was a different Croce d’Oro (Padua seems to have had plenty with this name), perhaps the one listed in the Blue Guide Northern Italy of 1937, where a room cost 8 lire and full board 25 lire. The Blue Guide locates it in Via Cesare Battisti, a long, narrow, ancient street with low arcades on either side. It would have taken less than half the time to walk to Via Dante from there. But though this Croce d’Oro reappears in successive editions of the Blue Guide until 1960, there is no trace of any such hotel there now. However, there is another contender, and one which feels much more likely. Standing right in the middle of town on Piazza Cavour, it once boasted of being the first hotel in the city to have a lift, electric light in all the rooms, central heating, ensuite bathrooms and a motor omnibus service to the railway station. 

The building still stands (it is now a bank). But it stopped operating as a hotel in 1920, some years before the events in Mrs Anderson take place. Bánffy probably did not know this. He may have stayed there before that date, remembered it, and incorporated it into his tale. 

At the end of the novella, in Budapest, another grand hotel makes its appearance. ‘I’m staying at the Ritz,’ Tibor tells us. This is not the Ritz-Carlton of today, which occupies the former headquarters of an insurance company. The Ritz that Bánffy had in mind was one of a long string of glamorous hotels on the Danube bank. It opened in 1913, run by the same company that operated the Ritz in London, and old photos reveal that the building had something of the same elephantine bulkiness. In 1945, during the Siege of Budapest, when the Soviets chased the Nazis from the city after a month and a half of bitter fighting, it suffered a direct hit and was engulfed in flames. Two years later its remains were cleared away and in 1981 a new hotel, today’s InterContinental, opened on the site.