The Hungarians
Subtitle: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat
Contributors: Ann Major (Translator)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: April 1, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 664
ISBN-13: 9780691114064
Subjects: Australasian & Pacific history; European history (ie other than Britain & Ireland); Sociology, Social Studies; Hungary; History; History - General History; History: World; Australasia, Oceania & Other Land Areas; Eastern Europe; Europe - Austria & Hungary; European History; Eastern Europe - General
First sentence: During a little more than half a century, between 898 and 955, the Magyars were regarded as the scourge of Europe.
Description: "Lendvai, who fled Hungary in 1957, traces Hungarian politics, culture, economics, and emotions from the Magyars' dramatic entry into the Carpathian Basin in 896 to the brink of the post-Cold War era. Hungarians are ever pondering what being Hungarian means and where they came from. Yet, argues Lendvai, Hungarian national identity is not only about ancestry or language but also an emotional sense of belonging. Hungary's famous poet-patriot, Sándor Petofi, was of Slovak descent, and Franz Liszt felt deeply Hungarian though he spoke only a few words of Hungarian. Through colorful anecdotes of heroes and traitors, victors and victims, geniuses and imposters, based in part on original archival research, Lendvai conveys the multifaceted interplay, on the grand stage of Hungarian history, of progressivism and economic modernization versus intolerance and narrow-minded nationalism. He movingly describes the national trauma inflicted by the transfer of the historic Hungarian heartland of Transylvania to Romania under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920--a trauma that the passing of years has by no means lessened. The horrors of Nazi and Soviet Communist domination were no less appalling, as Lendvai's restrained account makes clear, but are now part of history."--Publisher description.