István Csicsery-Rónay, Jr. — The Realistic Historical Novel and the Mythology of liberal Nationalism: Scott, Manzoni, Eötvös, Kemény, Tolstoy.

CHAPTER V: THE FANATICS

We are in the midst of the great religious war which was named, by those who lived to see the peace treaty, the Thirty Years’ War.

How greatly Europe, and especially Germany, suffered, how much it struggled!

How often the nations wished for peace, and how often it seemed near, only to recede after some capricious or tragic turn, into the inscrutable distance, as if it had been but an image in a dream, rising from the bloodsoaked earth like a specter, and while seducing hope into credulity, jaded it with constant disappoint­ment.

By why this elegiac tone, instead of facts?

The Czech revolt and the already fractious and weakened Protestant alliance, at whose head stood the Elector of Pfalz, were annihilated in a single stroke in the Battle of White Mountain by Ferdinand II and the army of the Catholic League.

But the stern conditions of the victors served only to arm the Margrave of Badendurlach and the Prince of Braunschweig in defense of the new faith and the Elector of Pfalz. The war erup­ted again, and ceased with the battles of Wimpfen, Hochst, and Loo, with the crushing defeat of the Lutherans.

And the world dreamed of peace once again, as it had after the bloody day at White Mountain.

The ravaged Lower Saxons, however, allied with a foreign power, the Danes, who invaded the German Empire, and the religious war flared up again.

The progress of renewed fightingJwas again short.

Mannsfeld, the leader of the new faith’s army, was beaten at Dessau, as was the ally, the Danish king, at Lutter; Wallenstein drove to the Baltic sea and besieged Stralsund; the strength of the Lutherans was completely exhausted, and in the Treaty of Lübeck the Danes committed themselves never again to meddle in the religious affairs of the German Empire.

Ferdinand II   believed the time had arrived to secure peace for a long time, through extremely forceful conditions.

But while his stern orders were bringing him closer to his goal, Gustav Adolf, the King of Sweden, landed on the Pomeranian coast with thirty thousand men… (Part I, § 1)¹

Zsigmond Kemény opens his great Transylvanian historical novel, The Fanatics, with this bird’s eye view of the Thirty Years’ War. Unlike the opening pages of earlier historical novels, it is not a prospect of national history, topography, or pastoral legend, but a political historian’s map of Europe. The scene spreads wide over the continent. The characters, such as they are, are associated with religious principles, not national societies; in so far as there are nations, they are powers, not peoples. The oppressive causal chain of war and political power overrides all other factors: strife leads to the too harsh conditions imposed by the victors, which in turn leads to new alliances and new strife.

Everything indicated that in 1638 — to the last days of which we have transported ourselves– the religious war that had so often seemed near its end, always to erupt again with ever greater rage and force, would be even yet darker and more desperate.

As a prelude and preparation for the national setting of the his­torical novel, Kemény’s introduction is typical of all his historical works, but anomalous among the earlier historical novels we have con­sidered. He presents a modern historical period as a simple struggle of force. It appears in laconic sentences. The conflicts are so little motivated they seem ethically indifferent. The chosen period seems mere­ly a testing place for kings and heroes — Gustav Adolf, Wallenstein, Oxenstierna, Ferdinand II, the Elector of Pfalz, illustrious names evocative only of power.

It is a peculiar framing device, when we consider those used by Kemény’s precursors. Their novels begin “out of time,” promising the reader, who is privileged to begin from the narrator’s special extratemporal promontory, that s/he will return to that ahistorical resting place via the characters’ struggles with history. The final goal of their protagonists’ peripeteia is the achievement of horizon, the revelation of meaning and value in the contingent realm of their own, and the world’s, history. Eötvös, it is true, inverts this process by debunking his “point out of time.” But even he depends on the reader’s expectation that historical stories begin with statements of the principle of meaning behind national history, and that the circle will be completed by the concrete evidence, the human experience of the facts, provided by the characters’ historical education.

There are no true nations in the first pages of The Fanatics. Nor is there a statement of principle investing the reader with the histori­cal narrator’s privileged prophetic vision. The historical aloofness and ambivalence implied by Kemény’s narrator, despite his sympathy for the nameless sufferers, marks Kemény as a modern among historical novelists. Once the European chronicle is complete, Kemény descends from the world-historical plane by degrees, narrowing his focus onto the Principality of Transylvania, which lies on the periphery of the war, and historically on the verge of entering it. Here, too, the human protagonists, the Princes, operate on the purely political world-histori­cal level, far from the everyday life of the Hungarian nation.

Beginning with István Bocskai, until the reign of György Rákóczi I, to whose capital, Gyulafehérvár, I lead my readers, alrea­dy three such individuals ruled Transylvania that were considered their spiritual leaders by the Protestants living under the Hungarian crown; two of them insured, with the support of foreign powers, that the new faith’s practices and rights were incorpo­rated into law by the Hungarian estates.

The third, that is to say, György Rákóczi, had as yet merely agitated in the northern provinces….

He was, according to his circumstances, both timid and bold; but being apprised in precise detail about the development of af­fairs in Germany, he moved forward in the religious conflict only so far that he might easily step back, so that, while he might en­courage and demand, he would not be ethically bound to draw the sword, to back up his resonant promises with the boom of cannons.

The Transylvanian setting was of great importance to the Hungarian public of the Nineteenth Century. The first Hungarian historical novels, by the Transylvanian Baron Miklós Jósika, (which were at the same time the first Hungarian novels to be properly called so), were set in Tran­sylvania during the Renaissance. The literary historian Antal Szerb writes:

It is surely no accident that it was Transylvania that bestowed the historical novelist on Hungarian literature. In the nineteenth century, Transylvania possessed only a past — although a more living past than that of any other part of the country, and incomparably richer. In those most colorful centuries, when Hungarian history was one interminable battlefield report, Transylvania had a Euro­pean history, with dynastic intrigues, religious conflicts, rich cultural movements, feuding families, wide-ranging diplomacy, and most of all, a tempo of life inconceivable in ever-ponderous Hungary. Even the geography was more disposed to historical conscious­ness than the flat or gently rolling Magyar regions: on the flat­ lands things endure or they perish; the mountains are the home of change, history in motion. And it is here that the monuments re­mained untouched by the pillaging of the Turks: ancient churches, and ancient castles inhabited by the same families now as many hundreds of years ago. (Szerb 317)

Transylvania functioned for Hungarian historical novelists much as the Highlands did for Scott. It reminded the Hungarian audience — a significant part of which inhabited Transylvanian cities — of a romantic subhistory, a strange and exotic past within the national borders. Indeed, Transylvania played a much more important role in the Hungarian past the Highlands played in English history. Its language, far from being an outlandish dialect, was the purest living Hungarian, unaffected by the arrested development of the three centuries of Turkish and Hapsburg occupation.

In the Seventeenth Century, Lowland Hungary was divided between the occupying armies of the Austrians and the Turks. The Principality of Transylvania escaped occupation because of its impassible terrain and intractable population, but it remained an important strategic area in Central Europe. It was the only independent Hungarian state for two centuries, during which it was ruled by an ancient aristocracy and Prin­ces elected by it. During the Sixteenth Century, these Princes had imported Italian artisans to establish brilliant Renaissance courts, where Italian humanistic aestheticism mingled with Turkish opulence, all against the harsh background of the Carpathian Alps and the archaic folkways of four nations: Hungarians, Romanians, Germans, and Székelys, a Hungarian “tribe” of great antiquity. The Princes maintained a pre­carious balance between Austrians and Turks, while struggling with unre­mitting internal challenges often fueled by the rival international powers.

In the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth centuries, a string of powerful Protestant Princes established Calvinism as the state re­ligion of Transylvania, and set up a communications network with Protestant humanists in Germany and the Netherlands. Religious toleration was practiced to a degree unprecedented in Europe at the time; four Christian denominations were protected by law (Calvinism, Lutheranism, Catholicism, and Unitarianism), while Jews, Eastern Orthodox believers, Moravians, and other radical Protestant sects were tolerated de facto. The Princes were unwavering enemies of the Hapsburg dynasty. With the Turkish Sultan’s compliance, they waged campaigns against the Austrian-con­trolled Hungarian territories, participating thereby in the eastern theater of the Thirty Years’ War until the defeat of White Mountain.

Two of the most renowned of these men, István Bocskai and Gábor Bethlen, laid the groundwork for the establishment of a centralized monar­chy in Transylvania. They built up the urban bourgeoisie, collected armies loyal to the Princes alone, and undercut aristocratic privilege. Under them, the Principality became one of the major powers of Central Europe.

For Hungarians, there is an epic side to any evocation of Transylvania. It represents a Golden Age of Hungarian culture of much longer duration than the reign of Mátyás (Matthias Corvinus) so revered by Eötvös,  a brilliant culture existing side by side with the constant civil wars, feuds, pea­sant uprisings, and conspiracies typical of the late Renaissance. Had Kemény chosen to depict a moment in the career of Bethlen, he would have treated a figure known in his own lifetime throughout Protestant Europe as “a hero of the faith.” Instead, Kemény chose to set his scene during the reign of György Rákóczi I, the Prince who presided over the beginning of Transylvania’s decline. Rákóczi had been elected from among the magnates, of whom he was the wealthiest by far. He supported the values of the aristocracy, and thereby undid much of the progress toward centralization made by his predecessors.

Kemény’s narratorial descent thus moves from unmotivated trans­- European world-history to the rich historical milieu of the Transylvanian past, evocative of memories of independence. But the motivation on this latter, national level, which might be expected to either motivate or contrast with the emptiness of world-history, is held in suspense until the end of the novel. The action of The Fanatics consists of the intrigues that ultimately decide, and provide motivation for, the deci­sion whether Transylvania will enter the Thirty Years’ War or not — and not incidentally, whether an indigenous urban bourgeoisie can be­come established in a period of aristocratic reaction. A single, intricate catastrophe that destroys most of the characters at the end of the tale fills the national historical action with a dense, even wasteful, charge of social and personal motivations.

This descent to a world-historical figure (Rákóczi), and thence to the personal sphere of the characters’ motivating action, differs from Scott’s and Manzoni’s mode of introducing the historical world in their novels. With them, the motivation of historical figures — Prince Charles Edward in Waverley, Don Gonzalo and Cardinal Borromeo in I Promessi Sposi — begins from the ground up, from the social impulses of nonhistorical characters who represent everyday social life in the com­munity. Lukács considers this one of the main characteristics of the classical historical novel. Scott is, as usual, the model, for he

lets his important figures grow out of the being of the age, he never explains the age from the position of its great representa­tives, as do the Romantic hero-worshippers. Hence they can never be central figures of the action. For the being of the age can only appear as a broad and many-sided picture if the everyday life of the people, the joys and sorrows, crises and confusions of average human beings is portrayed. The important leading fi­gure, who embodies an historical movement, necessarily does so at a certain level of abstraction. Scott, by first showing the complex and involved character of popular life itself, creates this being which the leading figure then has to generalize and concentrate in an historical deed. (Lukács 39)

What Lukács does not consider in this well-known formulation is the fact that it can only serve to depict historical moments seen from the Liberal view of history, in which important events are always seen as popularly inspired. We can go further: Lukács’ formulation is applicable primarily to those moments that support the Liberal view of history (or its cousin, Socialist history). Periods of severe reaction, of the apparent reversal of the vector of history, are inevi­tably imposed from above, and their depiction requires , at the very least, a modification of Lukács’ prescription for historical characterization.

Rather than laying a solid groundwork in the everyday life of the motivating characters, Kemény begins with an unmediated and unexplained historical world, and narrows his focus in stages to putatively increasingly meaningful levels: first, the Prince, an indecisive rhetorical figure unable to make any historical choices, whether national or world-historical; then on the Prince’s councilors to whom Rákóczi delegates his historical choice. The councilors are either hawks or doves, re­presenting the war party with its primarily aristocratic interest in acquiring territory and supporting the Hungarian estates, and the peace party concerned with preserving the delicate balance of power between Hapsburg and Turk, and civil tranquillity. Foremost among the council­ors is Rákóczi’s favorite, a mean and miserly parvenu, István Kassai, who advises the Prince first to consult with Constantinople, and while awaiting the Sultan’s advice, to eradicate an illegal chiliastic sect that Kassai claims is a threat to the nation’s security. Kassai is the spokesman for the peace party, and sworn enemy of the aristocracy. He is the bottom level of the established powers and the highest of the individual powers, a private man who uses his great political in­fluence for his own purposes. He loves peace only because he hates living in camp, and because he knows that every victory in battle increases the power of the aristocracy to the detriment of his own. Al­though he is personally loyal to the Prince, he does not consider the country his own; a bourgeois vs. the aristocrats, he serves the state, not the nation.

Kassai is the Renaissance intriguer, the Machiavellian. He requires the delay that the inevitably intricate negotiations with the Sultan afford him, to turn the Transylvanian crowd’s fanatical anti-Catholic fury against an outlawed heretical sect, the Sabbatarians. This sect preaches the coming of the final days, the believers count themselves among the elect, and worship on the Sabbath. Reputed to be at their head is Kassai’s envied rival and predecessor as privy councillor, the learned and generous, but vain and proud, Simon Pécsi. Like Kassai, Pécsi had risen to great influence from low artisanal origins, and had used his power as a councillor to acquire his wealth.

Without revealing his private motives to anyone, Kassai plots to use an emergency law, honesta custodia, suspending due process in the event of conspiracies against the state, and decreeing the forfeiture of the accuseds’ property, against Pécsi, the law’s original promulga­tor. As the conflict between Kassai and the unsuspecting Pécsi jumps into the foreground, the vertical, historical axis that dominated the initial chapters becomes a distant background for a character-tragedy unfolding with the compactness of classical drama. Kassai’s plot binds the public sphere to the private, the state to its dissenters, world history to everyday life. Kassai’s hatred for Pécsi has no rational source. It is the bedrock of the novel’s motivation, and it cannot be reduced further. Based on historical figures, the two bourgeois magnates are opposing principles of a historical class incapable of rising further, and fearful of falling back into powerlessness.

Never did two men risen from the dust occupy positions so con­trary to one another than the former councillor and the present one, although they began at the same starting point.

Pécsi, like Kassai, acquired enormous wealth, and if the latter’s was acquired through base means for the most part, the former had not always had clean hands, either.

Many accused Pécsi of despotism; while Kassai’s gold-filled purses were the trophies of intrigue and usury.

Pécsi, too, shoved magnates aside in order to ascend the stairs of influence; but Kassai, even for little gain let no op­portunity go by to ambush the high-born, whom he could flatter equally well, and whenever he could do so without danger, would irritate them, trick  them, and humiliate them from sheer envy,…

Pécsi was open-handed and generous; Kassai miserly and heart­less.

The former surrounded himself with the radiance of a fairy-tale, and possessed an extremely refined taste; the latter was not only niggardly, but ugly as well.

Pécsi kept a large court, which, with its livery and noble born pages, competed with those of the medieval barons; but Kas­sai withdrew to Gyulafehérvár, to a couple of dingy rooms, and for thrift had his meals brought to him by the poorest of students, while the chimneys of his great castles were never seen to smoke even in the harshest weather; and as to the sort of table he kept, few mortals other than the priest and the schoolteacher could give certain information.

Lavishly indulgent to Pécsi, Nature had endowed him with a poetic vocation, besides a scientific education. The sacred songs he composed and which enraptured his fellow-believers he set to music himself. He was well-versed in architecture, he designed fairy gardens, decorated his walls with beautiful oil paintings, and was the most enthusiastic patron of anyone who helped elevate cultural life, from the wandering fiddler and troubadour to the industrious, cloistered scholar. Kassai, on the other hand, had only contempt for useless fancies that bring nothing to the kit­chen, He had no respect for learning, except for sophistry and certain machiavellian crafts with which we make the will of the crowds our own instrument, and political power the advocate of our domestic interests, the courtier of our vanity, and the wage slave of our passions,.

Pécsi’s models were Cosimo and Lorenzo da Medici; Kassai most admired the Jew sitting on his money chest, content with the Egyptian onion with which Pharaoh had nourished his ancestors when they grew hungry building his pyramids.

Pécsi liked to count himself among the magnates, but he admired and embraced excellence without regard for differences of rank. Kassai was ashamed of his own relations working with their hands, and he longed more to bring down those of high station than to approach them, and of the attributes of demagogues, he acquired only the knowledge of envy. (Part I, §11)

Kassai’s hatred existed in repose before the novel’s time, and rou­ses itself to action only when he discerns a chance to acquire his ri­val’s wealth. Before the action of the novel begins, Kassai’s neglected nephew, Elemér, had been in love with Pécsi’s beautiful and sensual daughter, Deborah. Pécsi had grown to love the boy as a son, and was willing to bless the marriage. Sensing in the arrangement a way to Pécsi’s wealth, Kassai adopted Elemér, gave him his own surname, and treated him as his favorite relation. Pécsi’s pride would not allow him to connect his name with Kassai’s, and he forbade his daughter to see the young man again. The personal slight serves as a pretext for Kassai’s awakened hatred; but far more important is the fact that Pécsi’s fortune has slipped through his fingers. And yet, the hatred goes beyond particular pretexts. Both the present and the former councillors are driven by passions irreducible to further motivation. Kassai tells his nephew,

I despise Simon Pécsi. If he had not refused to grant you his daughter’s hand because of me, if he had never wronged me, I would despise him with the same might. If he had burned my house, rob­bed me of my wealth, my hatred for him could not grow greater than it is now, and if he had saved my life, my hatred would not abate. This hate is constant and complete until my coffin is closed… (Part II, §11)

Kassai’s plot against Pécsi hinges on the fact that Pécsi, along with several other lords, is known to have joined the Sabbatarian sect, which looks up to him as a leader and depends on his influence in securing legal rights for them. Though he never visits their small congregations in the countryside, Pécsi’s vanity is flattered by their admiration, and he writes hymns for their services and entertains the proselytizing ministers (called “angels” of the sect’s seven spiritual communities, which are named after the seven churches in the Book of Revelations) on their visits to the capital. On one of these visits, Kassai forces the best-loved of the Sabbatarian Angels, István Laczkó, whom Kassai discovers is a fugitive jobbágy from an estate that he — Kassai — has just acquired, to act as his spy against Pécsi. Laczkó is presented with a cruel and humiliating choice: either he and his family will be shipped back to the estate he had fled, or he must buy his freedom by spying on his benefactor, and implicating him in the Sabbatarians’ agitation. The weak-willed Laczkó agrees, after agonies of conscience, for he has never mentioned his previous identity to his children and freeborn wife, and cannot bear the thought of subjecting them to the bestial conditions of Laczkó life.

Kemény’s structure asserts the semantic priority of the unmotiva­ted world-historical frame at the same time that he searches for the motivations of historical events in ever narrower spheres of action. But the explanatory motivation in The Fanatics is never found. The Prince prefers to wait for the war and peace parties to decide the matter of the war between them, and he has no motivating role in the cen­tral conflict of the novel, Pécsi’s and the Sabbatarians’ struggle with Kassai. Since neither the European generals directing the international war nor the Prince reveal intelligible motives other than the exer­cise of power, Kemény’s narration moves further and further away from the historically central events toward personal, psychological ones. Ultimately, Kemény’s search for meaning in the sphere of private motives will lead to their mythicization, while the Thirty Years’ War remains at best a non-ethical epic struggle between forces representing religious principles, at worst a bellum omnia contra omnes.

The Political Background of The Fanatics

The novel is set on the cusp of the Renaissance and the Reformation, when, in the Liberal view of history, the principles of despotism and freedom of conscience began to occupy the center stage of modern history. Transylvania in the Seventeenth Century was on a geographical cusp as well, for its Princes, “heroes of the new faith,” lived in pa­laces designed by Italian architects to house Calvinist courts, in a land where the new religion, with its doctrinal questioning of autho­rity, was a vehicle for building the broad base of popular support necessary for the centralization of the state. The Renaissance introduced the elements of absolutism and the raw power of the purely secular state into modern thought, while at the same time it produced the articulation of European humanism.

In contrast with the Renaissance’s introduction of the notion of despotism, the Reformation represented the first great modern “liberation of the spirit,” at least for the young Kemény writing before the Revolution of 1848/9. In an early editorial written while a journalist in his native Transylvania, Kemény had described his vision of modern history in Liberal, even Hegelian, terms.

The liberation of Europe was not attempted all at once, but through major moments. — People first wished for freedom in their rela­tions between earth and heaven. And Luther and the Reformation emerged. The Reformation was perhaps the boldest innovation of our embourgeoisement, and cost the most blood, when we tally up our victims of the religious wars and martyrs’ pyres. After the Treaty of Westphalia, the Christian religion still generated conflicts, but not great upheavals. And judging from the past, we may rest easy attending the future; for none of mankind’s questions has pro­duced two world revolutions. Centuries passed before the second main idea of our embourgeoisement took the stage: political liber­ty. The spirit wished to free itself from the shackles of common law forged by history. And Mirabeau appeared, and the French Revo­lution. Now the constitutional debates take place on the field of contracts and flow in the channels of compromise. — But we have hardly rested, and already we seem to see new storms gathering on the horizon! The bolder spirits begin to preach that the spirit wishes to emancipate itself, and this time, from the roots: for it threatens the old social conditions. The reformation of social life already has its dreamers and teachers, new Savonarolas and Wycliffs, Are these noisy and restless beings in the right, and if so, to what degree? — this is not the place to examine the mat­ter, it would be laughable to pass judgement with an opinion on the deepest insight of our age…. I ask only, what is the reason that in our age, which is otherwise materially oriented, and not as sen­timental as the eighteenth century, the theme of social reform has taken the stage and gains so many converts? — Whosoever deals with economics and statecraft sees that in the foremost states of Europe the inequitable distribution of wealth grows ever greater, the rich grow richer by the day, and the poor ever more miserable. (qtd. in Benkő 46-47)

The tone of the piece betrays a weariness with violent emancipation, a wish for social peace — sentiments that were to become more marked in Kemény’s writing after the Revolution. Like Eötvös, Kemény advocated Li­beral development for conservative reasons. He feared that an economi­cally and socially backward Hungary and Transylvania would decay until they were helpless against their two greatest enemies: the external ero­sion of national independence by Austrian absolutism, and the internal disintegration of the Hungarian national state through the nationalism of the Slav and Romanian nationalities. For Kemény, the emergence of national revolutionary movements by nationalities in Hungary threatened the double-catastrophe of national and class war.

Kemény argued that only Liberal economic and cultural development of a Hungarian national state could counteract the emotional attractions of nationalism and socialism. Like other Hungarian Liberals, he opposed the ill-conceived policy of forcible Magyarization instituted in the 1830s and 40s as an instrument of national integration. Formally, at least, Kemény was an internationalist who, in Benkő’s words, “recognized no differentiating mark between men except education” (Ibid.). Liberation of the jobbágys, economic reform and more equal distribution of wealth and education: these were the programs that be believed could defend the nation against the centrifugal forces of ressentiment na­tionalism,

From the edge of Croatia to the peaks of the Carpathians, a counterforce of foreign tongued nations is developing. And our neighbor, the twin principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, have not forgotten the name of Dacia and times past, whose memory re­turns like a haunting specter. We stand between the threatening elements like the Hindu, who does not grow despondent when the forests ignite, but wisely chooses a circle for himself, and clears out every leaf, branch and other flammable material. Only a short hour is measured out to us to free ourselves from fate, and in the name of God, if we delay, the flames will rush together over our heads, Our circle of defense is Liberalism. Let us guard it and keep it pure. ²

Inherent in the notion that liberalization is the emergency brake of history was the view shared by all Hungarian public figures before the Revolution, that Hungarian hegemony in the Danube basin was historically justified and politically imperative. Conservatives claimed the rights of a thousand year old culture and state administration, and the Liberals generally conceded the point. Only a few, among them Eötvös and Kemény, acknowledged any validity in the nationalist movements at all. Even they, nonetheless, agreed that the acceptance of Slav and Romanian demands for administrative and cultural autonomy, not to speak of in­dependence, would open the door not merely to the fragmentation of the Hungarian national state, but to Russian expansionism. It was generally believed throughout Europe that the Slav nationalities were encouraged and supported by the Czar, with the intention of establishing a Pan­slavic Empire (Kovács 175-76). The most anxious minds in Hungary even imagined a pos­sible alliance of the ethnic minorities (who, taken together, composed the majority of Hungary’s and Transylvania’s populations) with both Austrian and Russian absolutism.

The nationalities’ conduct during the Revolution supported the worst Hungarian fears,. The Croats, Serbs, and Rumanians joined the counterrevolution in 1848, mostly on the strength of Austrian promises of autonomy. Through the nationalist armies’ attacks against Hungary, the Hapsburgs drained away much of the Revolution’s military strength. Even so, the Austrians were able to subdue Hungarian resistance only with the assistance of Russian troops, who exacted the final surrender of the Revolution in August of 1849. The victorious counterrevolution proved to be as oppressive for the nationalities as for the defeated Magyars. Count Schwarzenberg, the new Austrian Prime Minister, revived Joseph II’s vision of a unified and centralized Gesamtstaat under Austrian hegemony. He abrogated all constitutions, instituted a military and police terror in the conquered territories, and established a policy of Germanization in administration and education. “The new system did not recognize any particularism, national autonomy, or constitutional control. Countries were reduced to provinces, nations became ethnic groups, and in place of a constitution a powerless nine member Imperial Council (Reichsrat) was established: this was the administrative scheme of ‘supranational’ neo-absolutism” (Barta 287-88). Frustrated by the Austrians’ perfidy, and fearful of being absorbed into a Pan-German absolutist state, the nationalities in Hungary became an extremely suspect and uncertain factor in post-revolutionary Hungarian life.

The “nationalities problem” was not merely a matter of Magyar cultural or administrative domination. It was a social and economic problem as well. Kemény was acutely aware of how volatile the situation was: the majority of the nation was both without rights and mate­rially oppressed, and this latter, fundamental oppression appeared to him a much more difficult problem to resolve than that of national consciousness, for which the education of a progressive, Liberal in­telligentsia might suffice. Even if Liberal progress might offer an alternative to nationalistic enthusiasm, it would be hard put to re­concile the polarity between rich and poor, a polarity that Liberal capitalism did not decrease, but rather increased. Like Eötvös, Kemény accepted the objective justification of revolutionary action by an impoverished, pauperized populace. But unlike his colleague, he had no hope that a form of agrarian capitalism under the auspices of an intellectual administrative class could prevent the bad effects of capitalism on Hungary (Pándy 53).

Before the Revolution, Kemény’s fellow Centralist Eötvös had perceived revolutionary socialism as a spontaneous, “natural” eruption of the oppressed, and after 1848, as a perverse and unsubstantial movement — doubtless because he associated it with its early, utopian forms. Eötvös, who was familiar with Engels’ work, viewed class conflict as a more solid, and hence more dangerous, aspect of the spirit of the age (Komlós 122-29).  In Hungary in 1514, Eötvös ultimately made of Dózsa a heroic revolutionary, and offered as one possible interpretation of history the notion that revolution, even in its worst anarchy, is an organic, storm-like purification of an unjust society. Kemény entertained no such hopes. Revolutionary socialism — no matter how justified and sympa­thetic it might appear — could objectively have only two issues: anarchy by the masses, and their despotic exploitation by demagogues and the agents of absolutism. Both his fears had support in the events surrounding the Cholera Revolt of 1830-31, and the Galician peasant uprising in 1846, when at Austrian instigation the Galician peasantry wiped out the revolutionary Polish nobility.

…no matter what those may say who seek patriotism in their flirtations with the mob, that part of the nation that possesses nothing cannot understand the lofty and sacrificing ideals of loyalty to the existing, stabilized order. If troubled times should cloud our skies, if our political situation should be threatened by civil war and attack from abroad, the jobbágy, who is always appraised and chased from his land, would stand on his threshold, and one glance would convince him that he has nothing to lose, and we would feel anxiety in our breasts at every unfenced plot, col­lapsing cottage, and untilled cropland. ³

Kemény conceived the threats of revolutionary socialism — and indirectly, nationalism — to be directed against culture and education (műveltség). Government, “statecraft,” was a matter only for the most qualified and self-sacrificing men; it demanded a consciousness foreign to the mob.

…everywhere in Europe we see the eternal conflict of the rich and the poor, and we consider pauperism to be the blind Sampson who, although he will never have eyes to see, grows in strength day by day, until he finally brings down the pillars of the existing order. (Pándy 59)

…it would be the stupidest experiment to strive to correct the troubles brought about by the educated with ignorance. Let culture heal the illnesses that it has brought about, and for which only it can provide medicine. (Ibid. 54)

Kemény had supported the early constitutional phase of the Revo- lution, but the turn toward revolutionary republicanism, and the severance of ties with Austria, filled him with anxiety. He followed the revolutionary government until the last days of its existence, in contrast with most of his Liberal colleagues, like Eötvös and Ferenc Deák -­- but he worked unceasingly to create a compromise between the Hapsburgs and the Revolution. After 1849, during the dismal period of the Reaction, Kemény publicly repudiated the republican phase of the Revolution, laying the blame for its defeat on Kossuth. His pamphlets, intended as briefs for his own exculpation before Haynau’s military tribunal, were viewed by many of his contemporaries as collaborationist, and served as the whipping post for later attacks on Kemény’s reputation.⁴

Kemeny’s views did not, however, change in essence after the Revolution. He became the leading public figure of the passive resistance, as editor of the leading Budapest newspaper, the Pesti Napló. Almost singlehandedly he reorganized Hungarian cultural life, proposing the scientific, literary, and educational projects Hungary would require to lay the groundwork for a European bourgeois culture. At the same time, he denounced all efforts to alienate Austria, for he believed the pro­tection of Hungarian nationality depended on the good will of the Aus­trian Empire, which, in any case, had proven itself invulnerable in his eyes (Németh 610). Instead of political or social agitation, the Hungarian “bour­geois gentry” (polgári nemesség) should learn to contemplate its precarious political position coolly and objectively, through the study of history,

It is the task of history to return tranquillity to the spirit without apathy; to guide vain rashness to thought, but not to depress sober strength; to encourage doubt concerning great words and brilliant ideas, but not to banish hope for the spread of the interests of humanity and culture, The role of history is to teach moderation instead of puffery, and by dispelling the cloudcastles that sick imaginations build with such great delight, to mark out the humble space where loyal work will have its effect and gain its rewards…. (Élet és Irodalom 132-33)

Kemény and the Theory of the Historical Novel

We are far from Eötvös’ Romantic Prometheanism. For Kemény, his- tory, and particularly the historical novel, was the teacher of what might be attempted by public-spirited men for the good of the nation, without precipitating disaster, “Wherever literature begins to ignore national history,” he wrote in 1853, “a certain restlessness, fractious­ness and fanaticism is afoot, which sooner or later will become manifest in every other sphere of activity….” (Ibid. 133).

Kemény’s historical novels were thus written against the background of the Austrian neo-absolutist Reaction, during the police terror of the Bach system. Kemény lived in fear of a new eruption of either Hungarian revolutionary activity, or nationalistic agitation by ethnic nationalists. Such new uprisings, he felt, would upset the deli­cate world-political balance that permitted, at least tacitly, a Hungarian material and cultural embourgeoisement. He chose the Seventeenth Century Transylvanian setting as an historical image of the national predicament of his own time. It is not, strictly speaking, a prehistory of the present, or even a precedent, so much as a parable of the present, precise in the concrete evocation of a specific historical time and place, but also a lesson in quasi-mythic laws of history. The literary historian Miklós Nagy writes:

The evocation of seventeenth-century Transylvania after the revolution was directed to the gentry-based intelligentsia thrashing between depression and dreamy hopes: even in the past, only poli­tical sobriety and thorough deliberation could preserve the inde­pendence of a small country in the press of the great powers. The Liberal preaching slow progress wished to frighten his readers away from the passions of public life: from the tyrannical prejudices of the majority, as from the restlessness of the oppressed minorities (the Sabbatarians!), reminiscent of the revolutions of the recent past. (Nagy 129)

But by setting the action of The Fanatics as he did, Kemény maxi- mized the ambiguity of history. The Reformation, although formally the first great struggle for “freedom of conscience” in Liberal ideology, was also the first anarchistic mob movement. In the same way, the Renaissance established the standards of both culture and despotism on the same foundation. (“Péchi’s model was a Cosimo or Lorenzo de Medici,” while Kassai’s 1earning is of “machiavellian craft.”) In The Fanatics, the dark side of each great movement of the spirit of the age wins out: Kassai’s intrigues and the Sabbatarians’ fanaticism. The unremitting world war frames everything, a war fought ostensibly for religion, but whose only issue was, in Hegel’s words, “of a political nature,” the consolidation·of parties and states “on the basis of external power” (Hegel 434).

Kemény expected the historical novel to act as an antidote to the overrationalistic and oversystematic historical theorizing of the French Liberals and German idealists, who, he felt, ignored the role of individuals and unique events in history, and thus encouraged a historical class pride and complacency on the part of the bourgeoisie. Praising Macaulay, Kemény attacked abstract historiography for judging the past by modern standards. Before historians like Ranke and Macaulay,

facts were joined arbitrarily; the interconnections of events be­came artificial, and the world spirit, like a great locomotive, pulled huge loads that the writer, and not Providence, had attached to it…. Some factors were excluded, without which no history can be written. The accident, the arbitrary, the capricious were exiled, as material not belonging to the system. But no matter how the sages expound, these all have roles in history. As sometimes a thick fog or a dustcloud will determine the issue of a battle, in the ethical world as well there is a gigantic power in material circumstances that were not taken into consideration, or a mood, whose origin is untraceable.

Finally … the greater the democrat the historian, the less he gave credit to the historical influence of authority, or fa­mous individuals. In his view, everything was achieved by popular opinion, by the instinctual and fateful will of the crowd. The great statesman or agitator was only a straw thrown in the great tide of events, marking the swiftness of the stream with its mo­tion. From this perspective, the democratic historian did not fuss much with the depiction of individuals, and he was content to characterize the events, the crowd and the ideas.

The philosopher-historian held himself equally high, or even higher. He, too, argued away the influence of individuals on the behalf of his system, in order to drape them in abstractions; and since he depicted them as the manifestations of the world spirit, he felt no need to describe the individual. (Élet és Irodalom 314)

Like Manzoni’s, Kemény’s approach to history emphasized the feelings and actions of individuals. His protagonists’ plots take place in history, but they are not determined by historical records. The Renais­sance Transylvanian climate of intrigue, violence, and secrecy, which he drew from the tellings of seventeenth century chronicles, permitted him to devise a complex of intersecting plots that necessarily contain more meaning than the historical records could disclose.⁵ Unlike Eötvös, Kemény gave the historical novelist the right to change historical truth in the interest of “meaning,” under certain conditions. If the manners of the period represented in the novel would shock the reader, and thus distract her from the essence of the character, then Kemény would permit a polite modernization in the interest of discretion and the work’s essential integrity. Paradoxically, Kemény wished to pro­tect the historical meaning from the ignorance of his as yet provin­cial petit bourgeois audience.

The novelist must write with historical fidelity the effects of ethical concepts different from ours on matters of character and action, as long as it is possible to transport his audience into the alien world-view through the magic of art; but when this is no longer possible, when the reader is no longer able to apply the historically true ethical motivations to the actions stemming from them, and because of this, she would certainly misunderstand the characters, then the novelist must sacrifice his fidelity for the sake of his art, and he must modernize those ethical concepts that, in their original shape, would create a perverse effect. (Élet és Irodalom 162-63)

It was not enough that the historical novelist had to be completely familiar with the historical material, he also had to make the novel an aesthetic whole. The novelist was required to know all the actual in­terconnections of events, but he was not to be so faithful that he could not shape “a completed and coherent story.”(Ibid.)

History is a never-completed whole, weaving itself from the past through the present to the future, and even its great periods are not as complete as the theoretical minds imagine, while the novel, by contrast, must be aesthetically finished, with a fully-formed story, resolved ideas, facts leading to the conclusion, developed passions, and poetic justice uttered in the catastrophe. (Ibid.)

The historical novelist, according to Kemény, had to choose the facts to be ordered at the same time that he chose their order, because the contemporary sources could not perceive all the threads and influences that contributed to historical reality. The novelist’s task was to “draw the scattered elements into a nexus” (Ibid.). He had to concentrate historical reality as it might have been experienced by contemporary individuals.

Most important of all historical sources for Kemény were the Sixteenth and Seventeenth century Transylvanian chronicles. The great majo­rity of them had been written about and/or by the members of aristocra­tic families and Princes, and thus they described the important histori­cal events in their relationship to characters and their intentions. For the historical novelist, wrote Kemény, whose primary task was to evoke “the details and shades” of a living past, the chronicles were essen­tial. They were naturally novelistic, grounded in the subjective point of view of their authors, who described events and trends through the refracting glass of their own prejudices and those of their class and age. “It is impossible for the memoire writer — even if he could strip himself of his own vanity — not to announce great things as small, to describe small things in detail, and not to reflect in his narratives the spirit of the age, with its injustices, boorishness, and passion-mongering” (Ibid. 165).

Chronicles and memoires are inherently character-centered. Tocqueville’s observations on aristocratic historiography are pertinent: aristocratic historians “refer all occurrences to the particular will and character of certain individuals; and they are apt to attribute the most important revolutions to slight accidents.” Thus they can often “trace out the smallest causes with sagacity,” while leaving “the grea­test unperceived.”

When the historian of aristocratic ages surveys the theater of the world, he at once perceives a very small number of prominent actors who manage the whole piece. These great personages, who occupy the front of the stage, arrest attention and fix it upon themselves; and while the historian is bent on penetrating the secret motives which make these persons speak and act, the others escape his memo­ry. (Tocqueville 494)

Kemény held that this character-centeredness was the correct ap­proach for the historical novel, and he criticized the historiography of his own age for having neglected it. The locus of historical experience was the historical character. The professional historian was caretaker of the facts; the historical novelist was concerned with the meaning of the facts and the way in which they were experienced. This psychological vision — implied in Scott’s and Manzoni’s ethical tales — comes so far into the foreground in Kemény’s historical fiction that it all but eclipses the objective trends and events. Of the anachronisms Kemény allowed the historical novelist, none was more important than motivation,

…the personages of history are for the most part insufficiently motivated. We all know that the springs of our actions rarely come before the public eye.

In fact, the expressed causes are for the most part ostensible ones, or are invented from guesses about circumstances after the fact.

It is certain that with respect to human virtue and vice there are a few great rubrics under which public opinion lists those of our deeds which are spoken of on the street, in the sa­lons, and among coteries.

But in nine cases out of ten, a secret intuition will whis­per to us that the world is mistaken…. Sometimes, for example, our actions stem from the fact that we have carefully concealed a secret irritation, or an inexplicable disposition of blood and spirit. (Élet és Irodalom 166-67)

The same psychological complexity applies to historical figures, whose distance from us complicates their reticence even more. Histori­ans must be content with only the most plausible, documented causes. Moreover, historians tend to classify historical individuals in terms of the more abstract and ideal categories of their own political and personal prejudices. “As a consequence, character in life is motivated; but if historical characters were enchanted back to life by art, as soon as they acted only according to historians’ motivations, everyone would consider them unmotivated” (Ibid. 167).

This concern with motivation in Kemény went beyond character. Historical trends, unseen by contemporaries and yet present in their works, were also unmotivated. “No one understands his age sufficiently.” Nei­ther the chronicler nor the historian can capture both the experience of history and its objective truth, for each concentrates on one facet to the exclusion of the other. For Kemény, it is precisely the task of the historical novelist to synthesize motivation and event. His theore­tical solution was the device of the “Wise Nathan:” “the anachronism refers to the ideas that might have occurred to a calm and clear-sighted man even without historical antecedents” (Ibid. 170). For example, although the parties of the religious struggles of the Reformation were too biased to report events objectively, one could imagine “a Wise Nathan between the factions, capable of perceiving their biases.”

Tragedy and Determinism in The Fanatics

The “Wise Nathan” theoretically provided for the possibility of a raisonneur in historical fiction without discordant anachronism. But Kemény was greater as a novelist than as a theorist. He made only super­ficial use of the raisonneur himself, and only in his last novel, Troubled Time [Zord Idő] (1857-62). In The Fanatics there are neither central heroes nor Wise Nathans standing in the wings observing the tragic course of events. The function of clearsightedness in the novel would devolve on the omniscient narrator, but for an important obstacle: Kemény’s narrator is no more objective than his characters. In the peculiar universe of the novel, the known historical past is first subsumed by the tragic plots of the protagonists, then transformed by them into an all-overriding fate, Motivation hypertrophies; the novelist becomes a detective searching for the secret intentions and unspoken feelings of historical characters, investigating the meaning of their fate as if their fatedness were a matter of historical record, and not his own aesthetic invention.

Kemény wished most of all to penetrate his historical characters’ “subjective” sense of the past. But where is the nucleus of this subjectivity? As with his narrative descent in the introductory chapters, Kemény moved further and further into his characters, beyond class and nurture, to a bedrock of quasi-mytical, structural patterns of charac­ter. Objective history appeared as a result of the intersections and interweavings of countless individual intentions, the outcome of which was never congruent with any individual’s wishes.

Viewed from outside, this web of intentions was systematic. It was impersonal, implacable, fatelike. For Kemény, living anxiously under the Austrian terror and fearing national destruction from all sides, there was no historical resting place. History was the issue and the cause of human action. This was not yet the historical determinism that would reign in Central Europe at the end of the century, for Kemény’s characters are still responsible for their actions, and the fatedness of history is partly their own choosing. Rather, it was balanced precariously between the hopeful Liberal historical vision of the pre-revolutionary days and the pessimism of the Reaction.

Kemény was virtually obsessed with motivating the action in The Fanatics. Deeply influenced by Dickens’ version of the same obsession in Bleak House, Kemény tried to create an image of history in which everything was mutually signifying. The concentration of events and causality was never merely an aesthetic device for enlivening the action. It was a way of imposing fate on historical contingency. In The Fana­tics, Kemény drew the threads of the action into so tight a web that each episode, each character’s every act, hastens the fate of all the others. Each character is doubly, and even triply, determined; the same chain of actions is presented in several different contexts, and on several different levels of causation. It is as if Kemény believed that a single structure of action would appear either too accidental or too fated. He heaped historical, moral, mythical and mimetic structures of motivation one on top of the other in an attempt to insure the richness of historical meaning, which became at the same time, its corruption.

Character tragedies ostensibly account for the novel’s structure of action. Péchi is the victim of his own blind ambition and isolation, Deborah of her snobbery, Kassai of his envy and powerlust, Laczkó of his ambition and weakness of will. The Sabbatarians urge Péchi to support their bid for legal rights, but he resists because he believes they are too few and the temper of the nation is against them. The sect gives him no credence, since it has mistakenly interpreted the indifferent tolerance of their neighbors to be solidarity, and they are eager to gain protection from the constitution before Kassai’s anti-Sabbata­rian decree can be used to persecute them. Péchi agrees to hold a meeting to discuss the matter with the leaders of the sect at his country estate, and to advise them against open agitation. The Sabbatarian Angels are convinced that Péchi will be swept up by the sect’s enthusiasm at the meeting.

While Kassai plots to trap him at this conclave, Péchi withdraws to his “retreat,” the inner sanctum within his glorious mansion, where he studies astrological charts and learned books, and plays his organ. Perceiving a possible ally in Péchi against Kassai’s influence over the Prince, the aristocracy tries to woo the former Councilor and his daugh­ter out of their retirement. But the great patron is reluctant to leave his retreat. His study of the zodiac has revealed that he is in great danger, that a traitor —   whom he believes to be Elemér — will betray him. When he speaks of his fears to Laczkó, the former Angel recognizes himself as the traitor, and the guilt that has oppressed him suddenly breaks out. Refusing to continue his spying, he submits to Kassai’s jobbágy-bondage; he is sent back to Rápolt, the estate where he had been a jobbágy, and goes mad.

When the Sabbath appointed for the Sabbatarians’ meeting arrives, Péchi is dumbfounded to see the size of the delegation. He tries to dissuade the believers from extreme action, from alienating the state and the populace with their fanaticism, but they are beyond his influence. Elemér, apprised of his uncle’s plan, arrives at the meeting to warn Péchi of the imminent attack on the heretics. But Laczkó, having reco­vered his sanity and having fled from Rápolt a second time, has prece­ded him. He confesses his sin against the community and pleads for the congregation to escape while there is yet time before Kassai’s troops arrive. When Elemér enters the chapel the Sabbatarians believe him to be at the head of a large force, and they cut him down before he can utter a word. Laczkó is killed as well, and when the troops finally do arrive a bloody skirmish ensues, and most of the members of the sect are killed on the spot. The survivors, including Péchi, are shackled and returned to the capital.

Kassai’s designs succeed too well. Péchi’s life and property is forfeit, and it is customary for favorites to receive part of the proper­ty of wealthy traitors. But Kassai begins to feel for the first time the full impact of his sterility and the loss of his heir. His own house has come down instead of Péchi’s. His rival is sentenced only to the forfeit of his property — and through the capricious wedding­ day wishes of the Princess Zsófia, the Prince’s new daughter-in-law, those estates are returned to Deborah on the condition that she marry Ferenc Gyulai, a shallow young magnate for whom Deborah abandoned Elemér. The Prince’s wife, Zsuzsanna Lorántffy, adds her stipulation: De­borah must keep her own name and the property must be held by both the Gyulai and Péchi families in common. With this Shakespearian restoration, Kassai resigns, his vengeance thwarted. Finally, the army mar­ches off to war, led by the aristocrats (among them Kemény’s own ancestor, János Kemény, himself to become a Prince of Transylvania after Rákóczi).

With the exception of Deborah, who is restored at the end of the story, each of the characters’ psychological tragedies is also exter­nally imposed, by cosmic or social destinies independent of their choices. Péchi’s astrological prophecies, for example, are invariably correct, but he invariably misinterprets them. He mistakes the signs of Elemér’s sacrifice for betrayal, and believes that Elemér, rather than Laczkó, is his “Judas.” Péchi is connected with the zodiac. The broad outlines of his history, including his past influence as Bethlen’s Councillor, disclose that, quite aside from the virtues and flaws of his character, he is subject to the medieval cosmic laws of Fortuna. When he has influence, his enemies are brought down. When he loses his influence and withdraws, he is the one brought down — by his own law, it is true, the honesta custodia, but not because Kassai is motivated by a grudge against him for previous wrongs. In this sense, Kassai’s hatred is structural, inexplicable, fortuitous, “in the stars.”

The two structures, Fortune-tragedy and character tragedy are incompatible, and the effects of their double influence is to leave Péchi obscure as a character. He is simultaneously a victim of quite different destinies: of his own ambition to “step over the barrier erected for [him],” his desire to rise in the society of magnates; of his retreat into his “hermitage” to study the stars, turning a blind and trusting eye to the intrigues of the world; of his misreading of his own horos­cope; and of a quasi-cosmic retribution for his despotic use of the honesta custodia while he was Bethlen’s favorite.

The connecting threads are drawn very tight. Sometimes a covering metaphor will tie the different fates together (blindness: to reality, to the stars, to the political sphere, to his own weakness), sometimes a common cause (isolation, vanity, pride), or a single concrete symbol (the “hermitage”). Kemény does not, however, bridge the difference between the ruthless former Councillor suffering retribution for his despotism, and the gentle, refined, overtrusting father and patron of the arts enjoying his retirement, and suffering the consequences of his isolation,.

Laczkó is also defined by two incompatible tragic patterns. His first fall into sin, the agreement to spy for Kassai, is the result of both his failure of nerve at the prospect of suffering the jobbágy‘s fate alone, and his unwillingness to subject his wife, Klara, and his family, to degradation and hardship. In one sense, he is the “most weak­ willed of the Angels” (Part I, §15); in another, his sin lies simply in choosing the lesser of two evils, which “draws its nourish­ment from the same sap from which proud virtue blooms” (Part II, Chap, 3) — one of Kemény’s constant themes. Underlying both of these conflicting — and curiously complementary — personal motivations is the suprapersonal, external force of class oppression. Laczkó is an escaped jobbágy, for whom there is simply no other alternative than a life lived in constant fear of discovery. The laws do not protect him. Only a pro­vidential intervention from above might save him, such as Zsuzsanna Lorántffy’s tardy purchase of Rápolt and all its serfs at the end of the novel.

Kemény did not challenge or motivate the class condition of the jobbágys. As Nagy writes: “[Eötvös’] Dózsa novel could not have been continued after the emancipation of the jobbágys and the defeat [of the Revolution] of 1849…. in the climate that demanded unity: the time of confrontation with the popular movements, of striving for a complete picture of society, had run out” (Nagy 169-70). By accepting the oppression of the jobbágys as structural, an unquestionable part of social life, without filling it with ethical or other historical meaning, Kemény made of Laczkó a victim not personally responsible for his fate, but structurally bound by forces beyond his control. He is a typical fu­gitive jobbágy, a precursor of the victims of naturalistic tragedy.

Thus Laczkó is caught in a double bind of two kinds. Kassai gives him a choice between sinning against his congregation or sinning against his family, while Kemény (as novelist-demiurge) gives him a choice between suffering because he is a jobbágy,, or because he is a free man. More than the other characters, Laczkó is aware of the double bind.

Let whosoever can dream of free will in the world’s great servi­tude, let him do penance, and dress in sackcloth, and toss ashes on his head. Shame on such idiotic simpletons! and contempt!.. Every one of our acts is a mirror in which fate shows its face. (Part II, §4)

Elemér would be equally justified in condemning the idea of freedom of choice. For Elemér, unlike the other characters suffering from a surfeit of motivational structures, has no motivational structure at all, except that of irony and chance. Elemér is a social cipher. Kassai adopts him as his nephew, but that is all we learn of his family. Although we may surmise that he is of the same bourgeois class as Kassai, he is also a member of the “Association of Nobles,” the Prince’s royal bodyguard, of which the magnate Gyulai is also a member. Elemér has no character flaws, except perhaps the lack of ambition. He pities his uncle too much to repudiate him. His place, and fate, in The Fana­tics, is externally imposed. He is favored at first because Péchi’s charts indicate he will guard Péchi’s house from ruin. Péchi and Deborah then reject him because of his uncle’s actions, not his own. In the climactic tragic collision, he is killed before he can even speak, or give a sign that he has recognized an order guiding his fate. In Elemér we are given the inverse of overdetermination, which results in the ironic sparagmos of an innocent’s sacrifice. But to what end?

Kassai is also a double victim, within his own set of tragic structures. He is his own victim, since he is the intriguer, the de­nier, whose work in the end must of its own nature turn back against him. Only after Elemér’s death does he recognize that his nephew was the only person he had ever loved, and that with his death it is his own house that has fallen, not Péchi’s, Deborah remains alive and the heiress of her father’s estates as soon as she marries into the aristocracy.

The cynical István Kassai, who scorned family arrogance, and dis­played his bourgeois origins, who condemned Péchi for his puffery, felt after his nephew’s death that, after all, it would not have been so laughable, so ridiculous, had the name Kassai appeared often in the history books.

Sadder than this was the fact that the old man began to feel his affection for the deceased at his burial, (Part IV, §13)

In a wonderful, Dickensian scene, Kassai undergoes his own perverse recognition.

How Kassai would have loved to scratch the corpse up out of the earth with his ten fingers, how he would have loved to have gained from fate the gift of life for the corpse for just one minute, so he might stand it up in front of him and explain to it, with his fists raised: “You were so stupid when you wouldn’t realize that according to the laws of the land Péchi deserved his death long ago, and that my vengeance was justified. You were a blockhead when you ran to your death because of Deborah, because she’s a girl rotten at the heart, she ridicules your dreaminess, she goes strutting to her lordling with her smooth, genteel manners, and in the middle of her bridal delights she’ll tell the story of how a moonstruck youth betrayed her uncle for her, and killed himself, even though his love had been rejected, even though in recompense for his adoration they took him by the collar and threw him out of the house. He-he, she’ll tell everything. Or do you think that be­cause she’s poor now she won’t find a husband? She’s fine meat, an enticing figure, and she knows how to use it. Don’t delude your­self by thinking that she’ll remain a virgin. She’ll get a husband and reveal all your lunacies. I laugh at you, too; he-he, I’ll laugh too… Ey, you don’t even deserve that. What have I got to do with you? I’ll disinherit you, I’ll name another heir…no… when I’m on my death-bed I’ll have all my chests opened and I’ll throw all my gold out into the street, and my silver, every cop­per, let the beggars have them, let them become lords, drunken lords, raucous lords, great lords, top-top men of Transylvania. I’ll scatter my wealth. You won’t get a coin from me, stupid boy! Get out of here at once! Get back in the coffin! What do I care if you’re dead!” (Ibid.)

Kassai is not only a victim of his own hunger for power, but also the enmity of the aristocracy toward the parvenu bourgeois. As Péchi — a bourgeois magnate who might have found himself in a similar position — remarks to Deborah: “New families do not grow deep roots in Transylvania. The first thunderstorm sweeps the ground away from under them” (Part IV, §4). The magnates are jealous of their power, and infuriated that a single non-noble can dispose of such influence over the Prince to pre­vent them from seeking their epic glory in war. In the end, it is a Princess’, Zsófia Báthory’s, mediation that decides the fate of Kassai’s power. Kassai had wished to “retreat” to one of Péchi’s pastoral estates — — but Zsófia on her wedding day requests that Deborah be restored to her fortune, leaving Kassai, whom she despises, with nothing. The power of rational intrigue breaks against a Princess’ aristocratic caprice.

The Sabbatarians’ fate closely parallels those of Péchi and Laczkó. The members of the sect are also double victims: of their inability to see reality clearly, and of the unjust persecution directed against them by a hypocritical state for the private designs of a single man. The Sabbatarians’ flaw is their demand for recognition by the constitution as an officially tolerated sect — the same demand Rákóczi encourages the Hungarian Protestants to make of the Hapsburg monarch. The diffe­rence between the two congregations lies in numbers. The Hungarian Protestants are a majority, while the Sabbatarians number a mere few hundred.⁶ They believe they have the backing of their neighbors, but they have mistaken tolerance for active support. Péchi begs them first to convert enough new members to form a de facto power base, before try­ing to gain formal recognition, but their fanatical enthusiasm blocks out all contrary evidence. Had they accepted tacit toleration, they might have continued to live in peace, like the Jews, the Greek Ortho­doxy, and the Moravians (Part II, § 18).

Kemény’s narrator treats the Sabbatarians in contradictory fashion, as both dangerous extremists and virtuous puritans. At one point, he writes that their adherents join them only for bad reasons: “The bolder ones were drawn to the young religion by danger, the curious by the cloak of secrecy, the capricious by the prohibition, the weak by the ob­servation that the government, since it had published its decree, seemed almost to regret its act, and now watched placidly even the more overt agitation” (Part II, §2). Later, the narrator speaks approvingly of the absence of adultery among the sect (Part II, § 18), and con­demns the violence directed against them by the state and the mob (Part IV, §18).

The line dividing devoted puritans from dangerous fanatics appears when they declare their need for formal recognition by the law. Kemény based his picture of the Sabbatarian movement on the model provided by his own time’s nationalistic and utopian movements. In both he recog­nized the virtuous seed: the justification for religious and national “freedom of conscience.” But he believed that individual freedom should not be carried to the extreme of isolating the small group from the whole national community, and mistaking that isolated group-interest to be the good of the whole. To demand official recognition of indivi­dual or group concerns in a time of despotism could endanger the group and the larger community as well, which might suffer the destruction of tolerated freedoms by tyrannous rulers on the pretext of rooting out fanaticism.

“Your grace,” spoke the Angel of Thyatira, “never has a religion had so little pride that it has been satisfied to be graciously tolerated by power. We have need of rights, not mercy or condescension. I will allow that the Prince will not lock in the stocks the legs of the man whose lips pray on the Sabbath. It may be that the dragoons won’t throw us out of our homes, as the master throws out his wormy cur. And it may be that the gendarme won’t burn the brand of shame on our brows because we believe strictly in the Re­velations of St. John, of which the Evangelist himself says: “Bles­sed is he that reads of it, and blessed are they that hear the words of this prophecy and keep that which is written therein, for the time is short.” Your grace, it is probable that tomorrow we can await the new redemption in secret once again, as we did yesterday, but we wish to confess our faith in the open; we do not wish to wander, we wish to live, multiply, and gain our rights.

“Then the cup of the Lord’s anger will be emptied on your heads,” spoke Simon Péchi, with grieved sympathy. “You will have martyrs, and no believers will remain to record their names for later redemption. And the remainder themselves will not know whe­ther you were Jews, or the congregation of Christians that taught the purest gospel of all, albeit to deaf ears. (Part I, §13)

The parallel between the Sabbatarians and the nineteenth-century extremists is not clearly articulated by Kemény, and the sect’s doubly motivated tragedy is, ironically, insufficiently motivated. Kemény tried to invest the group with the kinds of traits that determine the fates of individual characters: character flaws and unjust external compulsion. The key to the Sabbatarians’ role — and how they should be interpreted historically — lies in their social character, their social position in the structure of seventeenth-century Transylvania. But Kemény was so concerned with supplying dramatic, psychological mo­tivation that he ignored the sect’s social background, that which grounds them in history.⁷

Kemény’s drive to motivate all objects and actions in The Fanatics, and thus to give meaning to history from below, from the massive, complex interaction of different, yet interdependent personal dramas, goes beyond dramatic-novelistic foreshortening and becomes the theme of the novel. The desire to overdetermine actions has its cause in a combi­nation of conservative and progressive social values. Caught in what he believed was an unlooseable vice, Hungary appeared to Kemény to be doomed to a single course of action: passive resistance to absolutism, Any other course would cause the nation to tumble into the abyss.The freedom was there to choose the one right way, or the many ways of disaster. István Sőtér writes:

…this tragic view serves to spur only responsible, careful, athough extremely anxious, action. Tragedy is precisely not inexo­rable — one not only may, but must avoid destiny. Kemény wishes to teach us how we can escape from destiny — that is, how wise calculation and foresight can harness destiny to our cart. We have need of ethical severity in our acts — we must avoid frivolity and dreaminess so we can deflect tragedy and destiny. (Sőtér 451)

This theme, implied in Kemény’s political and journalistic wri­tings, and inferrable from The Fanatics when placed among his other writings, in fact seems overoptimistic for the novel itself. There are no examples of such wise choice in The Fanatics. Laczkó wife, Klara, the sole survivor and salvager of the novel, has no choices to make. It is her destiny to be virtuous, courageous, and strong. In the novel, this freedom to choose the one correct choice is shown, if at all, only by the many negative examples.

Nor does destiny in The Fanatics appear mechanically cruel, or unpredictable: it is only that the possibilities of stumbling seem so disproportionately great. A single bad choice, perverse judge­ment or act is sufficient for the wheel of fate to seize the stum­bler and carry him toward catastrophe. (Ibid. 547)

History in Reaction: The Dissolution of Language

A world so overdetermined is not determined at all. Within the web of social and personal forces, each powerful group or individual interferes with all the others. The world of The Fanatics is full of rumors, plotters, manipulators, spies, and denunciators. It is a microcosm of absolutism. No information can be fully trusted to be accurate, everything must be vigilantly investigated. Much of the novel’s action consists of efforts to discover and conceal secrets. Kassai must find out when Péchi is to meet with the Sabbatarians, and what he has told them in his convocational letter. Elemé spends much of his time unra­velling the threads of his uncle’s intrigue against Laczkó. Laczkó’s whole life is a secret: not even his wife knows he is a fugitive jobbágy.

The Fanatics was a product of Hungarian life under the Bach system’s police terror, with its “standing army of soldiers, sitting army of bureaucrats, kneeling army of priests, and crawling army of spies” (Adolf Fischof qtd. in Jászi 102). Where a state relies on spies and agent-provocateurs for social order, it rules by conspiracy, and makes intrigue the model of statecraft. Inevitably, it produces its own enemies — however many enemies it may have had at the outset. It fulfills its own prophecies, discovering plots that it has organized in the imagination of its police, or true conspiracies formed as a response to terror. Where even the most private activities of everyday life can be viewed as damning evidence, the most innocent citizens are forced into petty conspiracies to protect their privacy and integrity. Hypocrisy and secretiveness abound; intrigues invade all contacts. Anyone might be a denunciator.

Government by conspiracy survives through lies. Neither the state nor the spy can reveal that it is a secret conspirator, or it will sabotage the basis of its existence. The spied-upon victim must lie to keep the spy in check. This intrigue-as-technique becomes an ethic, and an ontological principle. Words never mean what they were originally in­tended to mean. And since spies watch not only for voiced opinions, but anything that might be “significant,” everything is invested with potential significance, and nothing can be permitted to signify as it did during times of candor. The truths of all forms of language are camouflages, tracks are disguised; simultaneously, motives must be discerned, Survival in a world of plots depends on one’s success at both lying and seeing through others’ lies.

When a society engages in such wholesale suspicion, language becomes the ruling force of life, from everyday routines to the direction of the state. Language absorbs everything, hidden significance lies disguised in the most harmless objects. And yet nothing means anything any longer. The network of misinterpretation and mistrust breaks down every pocket of meaning through the sheer weight of lies and secrets. All semiotic systems cease to generate meaning. It is the mode of signifying that becomes the locus of meaning. The technique of subverting communication becomes the sole purpose of communication, and it undermines all values and goals outside it.  General mistrust generates a bad infinity of hidden meanings.

Kemény lived and worked in such a world of plots and lies for most of his life. Under the Reaction, he was subjected to constant harassment by Bach’s censors. His biographer writes that during his term as editor of the leading Budapest newspaper, the Pesti Napló, “the police sensed hidden meanings, revolutionary spirit behind every phrase; its censors initiated a veritable campaign of annihilation against the Pesti Napló, and expunged even completely innocent words without cause…” (Papp 337).

Suspicion is a survival mechanism unaer despotism. To relax vigilance in a climate of intrigue inexorably invites disaster. Laczkó is too confident that his new role as priest and family man among the Sabbatarians, under an assumed name, makes him safe. Kassai’s spies discover him, and he is forced to leave his sect and family. Péchi’s great weakness is his credulity about human motives, and in turning his natural powers of inquiry away from earthly affairs to astrology. Ironically, his astrological prophecies prove to be correct, but his inability to interpret them properly lead him to bad judgements.

In the pivotal misrecognition scene, Péchi discovers the threat of betrayal in the zodiac. Elemér’s horoscope, which once had been very propitious toward Péchi’s own, has become ever more threatening since Péchi refused to grant him Deborah’s hand. Péchi joins the two rea­dings, and suspects Elemér of the betrayal that Laczkó must commit, When the fallen Sabbatarian minister visits him during the night, Péchi takes him into his confidence.

“Regard, your grace,” repeated Péchi, “the ill-boding constellation that threatens Jupiter. This star is mine, and my destiny is writ­ten on its face. Your grace is fortunate not to know the horrible letters. I can read from the sky.”

“And what does your worship read?”

“That Judas Iscariot has betrayed me.”

István Laczkó covered his face with his hands, and his knees trembled. Péchi saw this agitation as an honorable man’s horror of sin. (Part II, §19)

Everything becomes language under such circumstances, and language simulatenously loses its meaning. Hungarian critics have not paid sufficient attention to this central theme in The Fanatics, for it is this that makes intelligible Kemény’s involuted prose and novelistic design, and in this lies the key to his deeply ambivalent approach to history. Kemény creates a world in The Fanatics ruled by the ruthless logic of linguistic irony, whose rules decree that no statement, no set of conditions, motives, acts, developments, phrases — can be taken to have secure meaning. Everything is undermined: either by external forces working against it, or by the ambiguities used to protect it. The break­ down of meaning occurs everywhere: in signifiers, in signifieds, and in the operations linking the two.

The breakdown of signifiers disrupts the meaning of names. Names must not be believed. They pretend to fasten down reality, but in fact they are merely masks. In order not to have to keep an expensive house­ hold, Kassai, the “councillor-without-title,” has himself called simply “Master Judge” (Part I, §5). The Sabbatarians drop their old names to adopt new, complicated Biblical ones, They call their spiritual communities after the seven churches of Revelations, and their mi­nisters “Angels.” The irony of aliases is most obvious in Laczkó’s case, who had cast off his original name, Pista Szőke, not for religi­ous reasons, but to avoid detection. He is doubly protected by his new name and his church title, the Angel of Sardis, Yet no alias can pro­tect him from Kassai, who is not fooled by names.

The family name also hides more than it reveals. Both Péchi and his daughter take the fact that Elemér has been adopted by Kassai as his heir as proof that Elemér, too, is an enemy of the house, inciting them to reject their only protector. Deborah, furthermore, is too quick to admire the name of Gyulai, the scion of an ancient Transyl­vanian magnate family: “the first leanings toward Gyulai in Deborah’s proud heart, although under an alias, were spurred by the enchantment of noble birth” (Part II, §16).

As the common signifiers of social life collapse, names must be made secure within smaller groups. Language contracts, and rather than communicating to the whole community, it speaks to initiates holding the key. The Sabbatarians turn to Old Testament speech. Ironically, by isolating their community with the vocabulary of millenarian enthusiasm, they approach closer to the truth behind conventional names. Like Kassai, the Sabbatarians see through conventional masks. Laczkó is both an Angel and Judas Iscariot: the prophet of equality and universal love, and the betrayer of his own spiritual community. When Kassai in­forms his captive that he is to be returned to Rápolt to end his days as a jobbágy, the Sabbatarian Laczkó see Kassai as the Antichrist (Part I, §14). During his madness, Laczkó forgets his master’s secular name, and interprets his struggle with him as one between his own soul and Beelzebub (Part III, §11). The allegorical name is apt, since the demonic Kassai uses men as instruments in his own design, and leads them into sin to serve his pride.

Where human, secular names lie, true names must have mystical origins, and consequently must appear in secret forms. Péchi reads the zodiac for the truth. The Sabbatarians reject all language but that of revelation: “it is in the interest of our faith that we be persuaded through signs,” one angel tells Péchi (Part IV, §11). Laczkó feels that his betrayal has marked him  for all to see. As he is being returned to Kassai’s estate, Laczkó asks a passerby whether “the word spy is written on my face in Roman or in Arabic letters?” (Part III, § 11).

What is sin? That which is written on your face, Pista Szőke. O, if only I knew how they know what is written on my face! But it’s a closed book only for me, this book read by so many. Let’s see the book. A million letters! Satan has written all over my face. I know Satan’s writing already, He must have tired in the long labor, but he certainly used his time well, (Part III, § 5)

Signifiers collapse under the weight of ambiguities, and the signi­fieds collapse as well. Most of the important tragic errors in The Fana­tics are the consequences of misunderstandings. Characters do not, or cannot, acquire enough knowledge upon which to act, yet they insist on making judgements on the basis of illusory understanding and impulses.

We have spoken several times of Péchi’s catastrophic misreading of the zodiac, and Deborah’s misinterpretation of Elemér’s relationship to his uncle. The confusion extends to groups. The crowd’s fanatical religious hatred, which serves Kassai as the initial inspiration for his anti-Sabbatarian decree, is fueled by its half-knowledge about the true situation of the Protestants in Austrian-occupied Hungary. In the crowd scene in Part I, §2, the war-partisans cannot fit into the Cathe­dral to hear the Bishop’s sermon. They hear only the most emphasized shreds of the speech, which spur their extremist imaginings.

…since it could understand but little of the unctuous speech, the crowd outside was not so much under its spell that it would wax enthusiastic or humble in accord with the speaker’s holy goal.

…. Beyond the portico of the church, only the most emphasized words could be understood, which were associated by the listeners’ imaginations. Here was a perfect opportunity for the passions to intensify through intuitions and suspicions.

Kassai’s initial insight, which sets the central action in motion, is the realization that the crowd’s lust for religious war can easily be diverted toward the persecution of a sect nearer to the hearth. He agrees to the war, on the condition that the Sabbatarians first be brought to justice. The mob, which had a few hours earlier clamored for the freedom of conscience of their brethren in Hungary, now turns against the sect, “as it was fashionable among crowds, without any real reason.”

It could not keep its hostility to itself when it saw Kassai’s proclamation nailed to the churches and public buildings.

“Destroy the Sabbatarians, destroy them!” was shouted.

But why? We can discern a few reasons from the conversations. “We must destroy the Sabbatarians, His Worship Kassai is right. We must not allow a single one of their seed to remain, they all are evil. They’re usurers, they eat only kosher meat, they fal­sify measure, they crucified our Lord Jesus, and even now, every Easter they baptize their mangy babies with the blood of kidnapped infants,” said Mrs. Panna.

“But … those are the Jews… not the Sabbatarians,” answered a schoolteacher.

“But the Sabbatarians are just like the Jews.”

“How is that?… They’re quite different, in fact,”

“Then why don’t they want to worship on Sunday? Someone who doesn’t work in his shop or workplace on the Sabbath is a Jew.”

“And did you hear … that the daughter of my lord Kerekes walks on the housetops every night, when the moon is out?”

“And it’s no wonder … My lord Kerekes is his grace’s, Simon Péchi’s, neighbor. If Péchi were not such a great lord, they would have burned his house long ago. Let’s put our trust in My Lord Kassai, he’ll take care of those Sabbatarians.”

“Last year the frost ruined the land of seven villages … but it did no harm to Balázsfalva, which lies among them.,”

“That’s only natural, Balázsfalva is My Lord Péchi’s estate.”

“We need no further proof that the Sabbatarians are black magicians.”

“Especially when we consider that last year the caterpillars did no harm to Péchi’s garden, while they destroyed and stripped the prettiest saplings of his majesty, the Prince.”

“Simon Péchi even believes in the millenium.”

“The evil man! I thought he only believed in Satan; but if he believes in the millenium, too, I’d have him burned on wet logs and by slow fire,”

“What sort of creature is that millenium?”

“Well, it must be some kind of sea-monster, etc.” (Part I, §6)

The Sabbatarians also permit their desire for recognition and their prejudice about their own sectarian superiority to tragically cloud their judgement.

The general confusion of language undermines almost every attempt by the protagonists to communicate with one another. The fear of punish­ment and the ruin of his life keep Laczkó from confiding his true iden­tity to his wife until it is too late — and even the final communication is in the fom of a letter whose “hieroglyphics of horror” Klara must decipher herself. The most extreme example is Péchi’s confusion about his own identity in his relationship with the sect. He is flat­tered by their need of him, but he does not wish to be associated with their extreme demands. He urges them to be satisfied for the time being with de facto toleration.

“But how long will this toleration last?” [asked the Angel of Thyatira]. “Do we have guarantees that the savage letters of the law will not awaken from their doze [to devour their prey?]”

“Rákóczi,” replied Péchi “who urges freedom of religion so much in Hungary cannot begin a persecution of faith in Transylvania, even under the protection of the law. And furthermore, we … I mean to say, the Sabbatarians, must not stir up against themselves the blind enthusiasm of the other denominations with public rites. For us … I mean to say, for them, there is no need even for a church. Does not Saint John say: Nor did I see a temple in New Jerusalem, for the Almighty God and the Lamb are its temple?”

The Angel of Thyatira moved restlessly in his chair, His dis­satisfaction was apparent, he resented the indifference he believed he detected in Péchi’s statement. (Part I, §13)

Péchi cannot determine whether he is one of the Sabbatarians or an outsider, a dilemma that leads him to arrange the ill-fated meeting to attempt to dissuade the sect from fanatical agitation. Only there does he discover that he has nothing n common with them.

Language breaks down. Not even lovers — Deborah and Elemér, Laczkó and Klara — can communicate with one another. People withdraw from the public world into private ones to cultivate private languages. The area of human contact shrinks and breaks into fragments. Péchi has a large, brilliant household, but he usually withdraws to his “hermitage.” He trusts only the language of the stars. Laczkó, maddened by guilt, creates a private language of sin. Elemér, too, collapses into a feverish dream world after Deborah’s rejection.

Isolation from reality causes each of the major catastrophes in The Fanatics. Instead of true awareness of facts, causes and motives, the protagonists fill the holes in their knowledge with illusions. De­borah’s vanity and snobbery, Elemér’s passivity, Laczko’s overconfidence, at first, then his black depression, interfere with their judgement, and blind them to obvious consequences. At the center of this archetypal drama between illusion and reality are Péchi and Kassai. Like his daughter’s, Pecsi’s vanity has blinded him to the dangers of associating with the illegal sect. He trusts overmuch in his influence over them, despite the fact that his contact with them has been limited to meeting with a few nobles and Angels. The novel’s climactic recognition comes at the Balázsfalva conclave, when Péchi meets his constituency face to face. The two forces that required each other’s help for so long con­front each other as mistrustful, alienated solitaries. Listening to the visionary speech of a Sabbatarian prophet, Péchi is dumbfounded.

“And since when have the Sabbatarians had seers?” asked Péchi, stunned.

“Since the men of misunderstanding and the pimps of power have be­gun to whet their weapons against us.”

“And where does this fanatic live?”

“Jehovah ordered this saint to the city of Sardis, to spread the gospel, when the former priest disappeared with his family.”

“What? My lord Istvan Laczkó is not in Sardis?”

“We believed him to be working in the vineyards of the Lord under your grace’s protective wings, and we learned only yesterday that we were deceived. As soon as he heard the news of the disappearance, our prophet recalled the fallibility of man, ripped his outer and inner clothing, tore his hair and beard, and sat in the dust, lamen­ting the approach of the Antichrist.”

“I’ve been swept into a completely new world,”  spoke Péchi and stared. “What has happened among you, that I can hardly recognize your language now?”

“Your grace has stayed in the court of Darius Longimanus, while the new Esdras led us back to the New Jerusalem, so we should never again permit ourselves to be dragged into the captivity of the spi­rit by any power,” replied the minister of Thyatira. Péchi stared at him. His partisans had never treated him like this before. They had never said that he lagged behind the times, that he stood iso­lated, that he did not understand the situation, that he had a flag, but no followers. (Part IV, § 9)

Péchi’s recognition comes too late. The sect’s illusions have turned into active fanaticism. It is prepared for a horrible martyrdom. But Péchi has no intention of fighting for a faith he cannot even comprehend. He is trapped — he might still withdraw from the attacking troops into a secret compartment in the basement of the chapel, but a legend of an earlier lord of the manor that had died of hunger while trapped in that secret cell reminds him that any further isolation can only result in death,

Eötvös’s language is at the root of the confusion and ultimate corruption of meaning in The Fanatics. Hungarian schoolchildren gene­rally feel that Kemény’s works are visited on them as an obscure punish­ ment. His style is notoriously difficult; not in the same way as Eötvös’, in whl.ch the archaic effect comes from the obsolescence of his basic rounded, forensic diction. Eötvös’s language, especially in his last two novels, The Fanatics and Troubled Time, is a protean, constantly shiffting process. One chapter may shine with the light of the author’s inspiration; in another, the reader may have to slog through muddy sen­tences full of subjunctives, conditionals, and passives, all awkward constructions in Hungarian, and arbitrary leaps from lyricism to dis­cursiveness in the same paragraph, or even the same sentence. One of the few critics to confront this problem, János Barta (1966), describes it in terms of Kemény’s immaturity as a stylist.

One of the causes of the well-known unevenness, fragmentariness, and difficulty of his style is precisely the lack of a single, harmonious narrative mode. In this respect, a certain immaturity remains in him to the end of his career. The drive to confession, and description of life, lyric subjectivity and ballad-like drama, the experiments in objective narration and satirical aloofness, scholarly analysis, tour-guides for the salon, and the deeply penetrating sympathy with others’ psyches all appear together in an unbalanced multiformity…. (Barta 107)

Even his admirers have felt a need to apologize for, or to explain, the difficulty of Kemény’s language. The great twentieth-century nove- list, Zsigmond Móricz, went so far as to try to rescue The Fanatics by “freshening up” the style in a 1940 edition, with ludicrous results. It is striking that none of the analysts of this classic Hungarian wri­ter — generally agreed to have written the greatest nineteenth-century Hungarian novel, although critics disagree as to which of his works it is — have spoken of the relationship between Kemény’s language and his historical-novelistic world-view. In Kemény the attempted synthesis of romantic and realistic styles is an attempt to synthesize contradictory views of history and politics; and if language is destiny, the sheer number of shifts of mood, voice, vocabulary (neologisms, Transylvanian folk-expressions, archaic terms, biblical phrases), and literary forms within forms reflect, and provide the foundation for, an impenetrable web of linguistic forms that leaves no unified, “harmonious” aesthetic style. For Kemény, there is no clear, unambiguous formulation of reality. Language collapses on the surface level of the novel’s message: it is not the changes in the characters’ internal motivational struc­tures that bring about the tragic consequences, but the constant shif­ting and collapse of the articulation of reality. In this respect, Kemény participates in the central project of literature in the Hapsburg Empire after 1848, and he must be counted as a forerunner of Musil, Kaf­ka, Hoffmansthal, and Kraus, whose works were attempts to purify the language of the social order corrupted by despotism.

Kemény’s experiments were not yet consciously purgative. Hungarian prose had only just begun to discriminate among the neologisms of the Language Reform; and that process can be observed first-hand in the unfolding of Kemény’s career. Hungarian had as yet neither a literary prose, nor a discursive prose. Politically, it was an embattled tongue, threatened on one side by Germanization, on the other by the Slavic and Romanian nationalities, who resented and resisted the use of Hun­garian as the language of administration. Kemény attempted to charge the Hungarian language and history — which together form the conscious­ness of the community — with all the meaning he could pack into them, and hoped that the juxtapositions would produce a synthesis. Instead, they created a dense and fragmentary world, in which the individual’s

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(Part IV, §4).  The demand for freedom of conscience brings terror and oppression. Both bourgeois magnates fall because they served their Princes loyally. A single formula, spoken of the Turks’ philosophy of life, characterizes the public sphere: “Among the Turks, the unfortunate is always a sinner” (Part III, §9).

Below the level of concrete historical motives and personalities, the characters of The Fanatics, like the other signifiers, are reduced to primary, archetypal oppositions and symmetries. Their moral opposi­tion proves to be magical and mythical, barely connected to historical contingencies. The Machiavellian Kassai embodies intractable evil egotism: he is a usurer, a slavemaster, a self-destroying hypocrite who kills the only person he loves; his heart is “a web of dried up and shrunken muscles” (Part II, §19). He is a coward, a miser, fixated on the earth: its gold, its secretiveness, its darkness. He is filthy and lives in a basement. He is also the life-denier, all head and no body (Part II, §10). For Laczkó, he is “a demon who steals men’s souls” (Part II, §2), a “murderer of souls, plunderer of virtue” (Part II, §20), the satanic tempter, Beelzebub.

Péchi is Kassai’s opposite. He lives in radiance and luxury, and observes the stars instead of the earth, content to passively chart the destiny inscribed in the zodiac. His hospitality is “from a fairy tale” (Part II, §14). An air being, he speaks of himself as “the setting sun, which gilds the clouds and appears richer in its hues than when it hung high on the horizon” (Part II, § 9) . Péchi, the bourgeois, passes through the aristocrats’ world like a comet, which “some­ times enters the circle of planets, but nonetheless does not belong to the system of the zodiac. It was there, it shone, it vanished” (Part IV, §4). The demonic Kassai calls Péchi a magus unable to control the demons he has conjured up, while Péchi refers to himself as “the Son of Man” betrayed by a Judas (Part II, §19).

From this perspective, historical content is irrelevant to the tragic development. As we noted earlier, each of the characters is brought down by more than one destiny, each with different implications: historical, social, moral, mythic. Kemény’s attempt at restoration in this doubly corrupted world — corrupted both by history and myth — comes through the two most positive characters in the novel, Laczkó’s wife, Klara, and the Prince’s wife, Zsuzsanna Lorántffy. Where the wellsprings of meaning are corrupted by evil and weakness of character, the resolving forces must be able to counteract the generalized disor­der through incorruptible purity of practice, as well as intention.

Kemény’s two heroines are magical-moral mediators of good, agents of life and value against the omnivorous irony of the world of worldly power. Klara is Kemény’s feminine ideal, beautiful, chaste, and innocent of any experience of sin. After hearing her husband accused of being a spy against the sect, and receiving an obscure warning from him in a letter, Klara determines to go for protection and aid to Lorántffy, a woman famed for her purity and charity. Lorántffy immediately adopts Klara as one of her ladies in waiting, revealing the secret of her identity to no one, lest Kassai divine her plans. Klara and Lorántffy together discover where Laczkó has been taken. Lorántffy then buys Laczkó from Kassai’s fiscal secretary without his master’s knowledge, and bestows it on Klara as a gift for her services in court. But in the meantime Laczkó has escaped from Laczkó and run to his death in an attempt to wam the Sabbatarians of their danger,

The relationship between the Prince’s Lady and Klara rights every­ thing that can still be righted. They, too, conspire and keep secrets, but in the interest of saving lives. Klara is known to the court as “the secret of the Prince’s Lady.” She is utterly innocent, obedient to her husband, and an ideal, “fairy-like” beauty compared favorably with Deborah’s seductive sensuality. The Prince’s wife, with her “puri­tan virtue, her noble but unpoetic taste” (Part I, §4),  contrasts with the depraved intricacies that are the “poetic element” in Kassai’s evil. At the conclusion of the tale, Klara is known as a “guardian angel,” who renounces everything but caring for the sick and wretched jobbágys on the estate she receives from Lorántffy. She is the opposite of Kassai, the slavemaster. Lorántffy herself is known as “the woman among women” (Part III, §5), a magical female mediator destined to counter the sterile profanity of the bachelor Kassai,

Resolution in The Fanatics is a function of Motherhood. Klara seeks the aid of the Prince’s Lady because her inner voice exhorts her: “Save your child!” and “Let us all perish together” (Part III, §3). Lorántffy accepts Klara as her handmaiden because of the Sabbatarian woman’s piety, misfortune, and family love, and soon treats her as a surrogate daughter. Both are absolutely respectful and devoted wives. Like all the Sabbatarians, Klara considers adultery the blackest sin (Part III, §§5, 6), and obedience to her husband the primary virtue (Part II, §5). She follows her husband’s trail through the harsh Transylvanian winter until she can go no further alone, and must be adopted, complete with her cause, by the Prince’s wife. Lorántffy, by the same token, has severe moral standards, but avoids trying to influence her husband’s political decisions, except those that would lead to violent intolerance (Part IV, §5).

Lorántffy and Klara live in the historical world, but they are not of the historical world. They are pious, capable of great self-sacrifice, and concerned with nurturing their families and nation. The restoration in The Fanatics is not won by any character’s particular efforts; it is granted from above. Lorántffy buys Rápolt and gives it to Klara. After Laczkó’s death, Klara devotes herself to the principles opposed to Péchi’s isolation and vanity and Kassai’s objectification of human beings; she devotes her life to the poor and the sick. In the two wife-­ mothers, communication and community are restored, although the restoration, coming after so much waste, is only a salvaging. In Kemény’s romantic mythology, Lorántffy, the “Woman among women” mediates for the Christlike Klara, who alone in the novel is capable of transfoming suf­fering into life. “Klara could cover the crown of thoms that suffering had placed on her brow so beautifully with ivy twines and rose leaves, that it seemed a wreath granted as a gift of joy” (Part III, §12). Klara creates a separate world of virtue in the fallen world of history: “Mrs. István Laczkó created a separate world for herself, whose responsibilities, customs, joys, and satisfactions only those can conceive who are as good and as unfortunate as she” (Part IV, §19).

The Postrevolutionary Stalemate: Aristocracy and Liberalism

Kemény’s historical fiction comes at the end of the development of the progressive nationalistic vision of history in the Nineteenth Cen­tury. The historical novelists we considered in the previous chapters each wrote variations on the theme of dialectical historical progress toward the establishment of a unified national society resulting from a synthesis of fragmented and antagonistic ethnic and class differences.

In Scott’s first novel, the ideal union of Scotland and England represented by the marriage of Rose and Edward comes about only with the tragic expulsion of Fergus MacIvor’s Highlanders. Fergus and the Stuart Pretender each embody a special sort of isolation that Edward cannot accomodate in the Union. Their feudal world-views — for the former, the ancient code of the clans, for the latter, the code of French absolutism — are archaic, i.e., they are irremediably isolated in time, Fergus’ and Flora’s sacrifices are the tragic cost of a comic outcome. Heroic and despotic values perish with them: uncritical loyalty to the chieftain, the chieftain’s protection of his community, un­reflective courage, and the symbolic, impenetrable aloofness of the Highland region. Their time has passed, only romance pretends that their values are still liveable. Although the Highlanders still exist physically, they are merely the shells and costumes of an illusion. They will not join the nation on the present’s tems’ They will not accept the new values: commerce, comfort, peace, imperial community — pax Britannica.

When the theme of national synthesis reached Hungary, and Eötvös, in the years preceding the Revolution of 1848/9, the historical preconditions that Scott had had at hand as raw material for his histori­cal tale had become programs on the continent — to a great extent precisely because of Scott’s influence. Especially in the Austrian Em­pire, those preconditions (assimilation of conquered nationalities by a central ethnic group, the destruction of non-assimilable nationalities, a bourgeois nobility, and a centralized national state) became the contradictory goals of both absolutism and the national liberation movements. Vienna wished to attain the same unity as England, in its Gesamtstaat periods and the institution of Gemanization, first under Joseph II, and later, Count Schwarzenberg. The “opposition” to Austrian hegemony was both ethnic and political. But this opposition included the great majority of the Empire’s population. Nor did this majority consist of ethnic groups inhabiting remote and ancient redoubts cut off from contact with the mainstream of European culture. They were nations, possessed of different degrees of consciousness that they were individuals in a community of nations. Some had historical and multinational state-formations already (the Poles, Hungarians and Italians), while many of the younger nations looked forward to union with­in a supranational Panslavic state. These nations could not have been “expelled” from history as the Highlanders had been; their value to the Austrian economy, and their number, was too great.

At the same time, the “coincidence of interests” of the bourgeoisie and the nobility that provided Scott with his social idyll was absent in the Hapsburg Empire. Hapsburg absolutism depended on the suppression of the interests of both the rising bourgeoisie and the nationalist nobility, which had drunk deeply of the Enlightenment. This class-anta­gonism led in Hungary to a division of the nobility between the small, pro-Austrian magnate class and the nationalist gentry, and thus, the Austrian aristocracy often found itself supporting movements of social reform and national autonomy as ways of weakening the Hungarian nobles.

Kemény wrote The Fanatics after a cataclysmic national revolution, a disastrous defeat at the hands of two armies of absolutism, Austrian and Russian, and following it, a lingering military and police terror directed toward the destruction of national identity. Eötvös’ and Kemény’s own wamings had not been heard, and the nationalities had indeed risen against their Hungarian landlords, unwittingly on the side of absolutism. The preservation of national unity was much more difficult, in Kemény’s eyes, after the Revolution than before it, when Liberal compromise with the government, and good will toward the peasantry, might have succeeded. His historical fiction is no longer about the actions and commitments demanded by progress, the acceptance of the new world order represented by Edward, Renzo, and Brother Lőrinc awakening from their self-alienating, anachronistic illusions. Survival for Kemény depends on patience, caution, foresight, almost superhuman awareness of the balance of terror. Absolutism outside, nationalism and socialism inside the country, require that the nation’s each step be slow and unfrictious. Progress slows to a crawl — perhaps even to a motionless wait.

Kemény’s history is a world of parables, teachings from the book of survival. He did not consider Hungarian nationality in organic terms, like the pastoral nation Scott inherited from English tradition, or the storm-and-seed metaphors that recur in Manzoni and Eötvös. For Kemény, the nation is a balance. Isolation of one of its elements, a class, a party, a powerful individual, leads not to its excision from the historical organism, but, more likely, to the disease of the whole.

The problem for Kemény, as for all the protagonists of The Fanatics, was how to discern the true state of things in order to take right action. History is such a web of intersecting intentions, with so many interferences and miscues, that even if the tragic figures of the novel were disencumbered of their perverse weaknesses, they still would not be able to see through to the truth. Fatedness is the atmosphere of history. History is made by humans, it is a human invention, not a demiurge’s. But it is too complex for any one person to under­stand. The only defense against its pressures is not to act, and thus not to add to the density of the weave — that is, passive resistance. But where, then, is the progress, and can inaction insure the survival of the nation?

Kemény was torn by a deep ambivalence, a faith in Liberal enbour­geoisement articulated especially in his political journalism, and the fear of national disaster. The Fanatics is his attempt to mediate the conflict.

He was aware of his ambivalence, and considered it typical of his age.

The destruction of the old legal conditions has made the basis of the existing social order more precarious…. We are almost as cu­rious in searching out the errors of our social relations … as in our news-hunger, with which we accept the new social ideas, and in the readiness with which we stand ready to mock them.

This same critical impulse and doubt in thought, this helpless­ness in creating, appears with regard to ethical concepts as well. If we are materialists, we resist applying our concepts to our ac­tions; if we are religious and recognize spiritual and ethical res­ponsibilities, we are ashamed of their practice beyond a certain point, and laugh at it. We have deep faith in neither direction. We search for the weaknesses of each. We have often inhabited the opposite of each. We read attacks on our own opinions with almost as much relish as their defense; and we can bring up almost as many arguments against ourselves as for ourselves. (Élet és Irodalom 192)

This modern dilemma leads to paradox in political action.

In the fields of politics and literature every reform must take on some of the mistakes of the opponents it besieged, and if you have struggled against constraint, against your most serene ideals you have, to some extent, created anarchy. And if you took up arms against disorder, you drew the boundaries of liberty too severely. (Ibid.)

In his “most serene ideals,” Kemeny was a Liberal dedicated to the creation of an intelligentsia with Western Liberal cultural and economic principles. But in The Fanatics it is the aristocracy that is privileged. The aristocrats live in an Olympian realm. They are untouched by the catastrophes destroying the best lives around them. They are interested only in participating in the war, to gain their share of epic glories.

To whet the sword, to saddle the battle-steed, to stand old Zsig­mond Komis and young János Kemény at the head of the two magnifi­cent armies under the Prince’s direct command, to advance from To­kay to Nagyszombat, unfurling the banners of freedom of faith and conscience, absorbing the disaffected elements everywhere, with at least sixty thousand men to invade Moravia or Silesia after the siege of Nagyszombat, to join with the Swedish general, Baner, and with a common plan of attack to force Ferdinand II into a decisive battle…. (Part I, §1)

Even Gyulai, the shallow courtier, receives instead of punishment, the hand of the beautiful, and still wealthy, Deborah. Intrigues and corruption do not destroy the magnates, they merely obstruct their path to the goal, the religious war. Nor can any of the bourgeois parvenus join them without having first to lose all they once had, like Deborah. ” Kemény’s novels summarize the human and ethical values of a patriarchal-romantic system of life — as well as surrounding them with the shadow of passing time, of annihilating catastrophes” (Barta 95).

Kemény’s sources were generally aristocratic — to the extreme, inasmuch as the memoires of his ancestor, János Kemény, condemned the Prince, Rákóczi, as an arriviste of mediocre lineage. According to the elder Kemény, the Prince undermined the nation “by lending his ear to evil councillors and seeking his own good through suspect means” (Papp 371). Kemény did not accept his ancestor’s assessment at face value; much of the guilt imputed to Rákóczi in the memoires is transferred to Kassai in the novel. Nonetheless, it is clearly the aristocrat’s point of view that is represented in the novel’s nostalgic vision of the nation’s former glory.

For the bourgeoisie of the novel, the aristocracy represents the political heavens. Péchi speaks of the magnates as the zodiac he can only visit as a comet, indicating their distant power over everyday lives. Deborah understands that feuding aristocratic families can al­ways make up their differences through intermarriage, since “they pur­sue their opponents because of partisan fury or vengeance,” but bour­geois feuds can never be put to rest, since they are caused by vice, not epic disagreements. Her father’s feud with Kassai can never be put to rest by her marriage to Elemér, because “István Kassai is a common thief, who would like to stuff all those purses his father once knit­ted” with her father’s gold (Part II, § 6). Unlike aristocratic pride, bourgeois pride is mere arrogance. Elemér might have saved Péchi’s line, but he is banished because of family jealousies.

Adding to the complications, the incongruous relationship between the Transylvanian aristocracy’s despotism and the Reformation’s “free­ dom of conscience” — on which the nobility’s agitation for war depends — is a historically accurate paradox. In Transylvania, the Calvinist church was organized by and through the magnate and gentry clas­ses. Religious innovation began with the village populations, but since all official organization privileges were the prerogatives of the upper classes, the villages had first to successfully draw their lords to the new faiths in order for them to become established. The Prince became the chief patron of the Calvinist Church, and the magnate-patrons took an ever-greater part in detennining ecclesiastical policy. Thus, Calvinism became “the Hungarian religion” officially during the Seventeenth Century, and was controlled from above (Ende 223-26).

The Sabbatarians were caught between the official state Calvinist church, and the millenarian left-wing of the Reformation. It is interes­ing to note that Kemény did not accept the judgement of his friend, the scholar József Lugossy, whose historical work on Péchi in 1850 was one of the no­velist’s main inspirations. Lugossy was demonstratively sympathetic to Péchi, and condemned the magnates for their oppression of his sect (Papp 343). Kemény’s Péchi, by contrast, complains to his daughter that “we have crossed the barrier marked for us, exchanging the preconditions of hap­piness for worldly fortune” (Part IV, § 4).

Kemény’s historical view was closely allied to the Transylvanian aristocracy’s, if only from the fact that all the evidences of Hungarian culture were creations of the aristocracy. The great libraries, castles, cities, and literature, the ars Hungarica, had in Kemény’s eyes been raised to their highest level by the Transylvanian magnates. The Golden Age was now over, however. Absolutism had eroded it, reducing it to the constant bickering among landlords jealous of their tax-exemptions. Bureaucratic terror and frontal attacks on the language under the Bach system had corrupted the national tongue. Capitalism was reducing even the slight patriarchal protection the landlords offe­red the jobbágys to wage-slavery, pauperization, the rootlessness of the agrarian masses.

Far from absorbing dying nations, as Scott’s genial and wealthy England had done, Kemény observed his Hungary as no longer integrated. The nationalities could not be absorbed; that had been a vain hope. They were too young, they were not ready to be bought by economic pros­perity, nor would there have been Hungarian capital available for the purchase. Hungarian hegemony was essential to the region’s stability, according to most Hungarians, and its loss appeared to them the first step toward Czarist expansionism,

Hungarian national life during the Reaction had no rallying point, other than culture. With an inchoate bourgeoisie and an abject peasantry, that rallying point was equivalent to historical aristocratic culture. The aristocracy, however, was historically dead. An impoverished Baron oscillating in his conduct between urban bohemianism and the puritanical conservatism of his Transylvanian upbringing, Kemény was himself a living example of the difficulty of transforming an aristocratic culture into a bourgeois one. In the bourgeois world -­- Hegel’s “world of prose” — the nation’s history became a parable of learning to live within the limitations of class and nationality. The aristocratic actors that acted with impunity, without guilt or respon­sibility, had disappeared. The bourgeois world had to learn how to ba­lance its desires and self-interest; the bourgeoisie had become the na­tion only by default, by virtue of the fact that it alone could carry the old cultural national values among the demagogic utopian visions of the plebs, and the imperial designs of absolutism.

Conclusion

According to Lukács, after 1848 the concept of history contracted, and with it the historical novelist’s sense of the field of historical possibilities in the present. Since writers could no longer observe the conflicting social interests in the open after the repression of working class movements, they gradually came to view history as a pro­cess leading up to a present frozen in the social relations of post­- revolutionary European capitalism. History ceased to be a dynamic con­cept when the bourgeois class unilaterally sealed off the future to forestall the destruction of its economic and social relations. At the same time, it claimed that this freezing of the historical process was the institution of democratic culture. History became a relative and subjective concept. The political sphere was replaced by the private sphere, and national prehistory was seen in the light of this interna­lized, privatized present.

Stated in this way, Lukács theory is not entirely adequate. One cannot fruitfully make the post-1848 reaction identical with class-war. In Eastern Europe, Italy, and Germany, revolutionary ideals were carried by a Liberal nobility and bourgeoisie, and the nationalistic peasant movements were essentially bourgeois-led as well. The Austrian Reaction was at first national and political, rather than class-related. The Hapsburgs were primarily concerned with the subjection of other nations and potential nation states to Austrian domination. This is not to deny that class interest was of major importance. The Austrian aristocracy allied with the Hungarian magnates, and introduced absolu­tism and capitalism together in its own class interest. But it is not accurate to claim the primacy of class struggle over nationalist strug­gle in the nineteenth century. The two were bound in a complex embrace. Sometimes they worked toward the same goals (in the early phase of the 1848 revolutions), often contrary ones. After the violent suppres­sion of both Liberal social ideology and nationalist ideology by the Austrian police forces, the internal social relations of a country could be seen only in the context of broad state-power relations: first, among the great, oppressive, hegemonistic world powers, in whom class and national oppression coincided; then within the countries themselves, where problems of class and nationality shifted relations constantly. The political sphere became primary as soon as a nation — including the Liberal bourgeoisie, nobility, and peasantry — considered itself at the mercy of a foreign power and threatened by mutilation or anni­hilation. The post-revolutionary period did mark the beginning of mo­dern Austrian imperialism, but also the mingling and confusion of class and nationalist ideologies within the conquered nations.

In The Fanatics Kemény attempted a model for going over the head of historical development, to prevent a continuation of the tragic and pathetic pattem of collective national history. He tried to create a social parable of rhetorical, non-dynamic class-oppositions (both between and within classes), raised to the level of and mediated by moralized magical forces: the struggle between the instrumental-material-satanic force of profane power, and the altruistic-ascetic-humane force of feminine nurture. The former, embodied by Kassai, utilizes the letter of the law to undermine its spirit, creating an atmosphere of intrigue, division, and mistrust of language. The latter, embodied in Klara and Zsuzsanna Lorántffy, restores whatever meaning has not been destroyed through Kassai’s manipulations, through their magnani­mous “true Christianity,” the humanistic spirit of self-sacrifice that inspires law — both religious and political — and commitment to the life of the community.

The problem of unjust class-relations, the “misery and humiliation” of the jobbágy‘s lot, and the special dispensation of the aristocrats, is solved by way of a mythic intervention from above: the acquisition by the Prince’s wife of Rápolt and her deed of it to Klara, a solution analogous to Talbot’s gift of Tully-Veolan to Baron Bradwar­dine in Waverley. But the solution in The Fanatics comes too late to save Laczkó, for whom it was intended. Thus no dynamic solution to class inequality is even posed in Kemény’s novel, the instrumental, satanic structure of class slavery is a given. Only private solutions are possible, the philanthropic, discreet, and local transfer of power to altruistic landlords and landladies, a solution that continues the status quo in law, until, by gentle diffusion, the de facto becomes de jure. For Kemény, the priority of social concerns was the opposite of that of the revolutionary socialists. He attempted to provide a place for individual responsibility (and, by analogy, responsibility of small nations) in a world of overwhelmingly “naturalized” social and political forces. In his discussion of the privatization and subjectivization of the historical novel after 1848/9, Lukács does not speak to the fact that, along with the bad conscience of the bourgeoisie vis a vis the proletariat, the Socialist movement increasingly presented itself as the vehicle of “scientific history;” class struggle and the ultimate victory of the proletariat were considered to be facts derived from the objective conditions of history as certain as cause and effect.

Kemény was aware of the Socialists’ arguments, he was troubled by them, and, most importantly, he was convinced that they were based on a correct observation of the course of history since the Reformation. He identified his interests with Western bourgeois development, and at the same time accepted as a natural consequence of that development the pauperization and proletarianization of millions of peasants and workers — the premises and tools of revolutionary socialism. Kemény knew he had accepted a paradox. On the one hand, Liberalism stood for the development of bourgeois “freedoms of conscience,” liberty of inquiry and culture in the private sphere. On the other was the fact that the basis for the development of the ideology of individual liberty was the development of material life at the expense of the material freedom of most members of ithe society. These, in their turn, would be encouraged precisely by the ideals of liberty proclaimed by Liberal ideology to gain their rights collectively, by violence if necessary, and at the expense of the Liberal “sacred concepts” of the rights of private property, the very principles classical Liberals believed in­sured liberty of culture.

Kemény attempted to resolve this ideological dilemma in The Fana- tics by establishing a double moral structure in the novel. On one side, the morally conscious populace (the Sabbatarians, who, as we have seen, represent the oppressed peasantry in general, and the nationalities in particular) is presented sympathetically. It is oppressed by the state and individual corrupt officials for their own ends, and by the igno­rance of the Lumpenproletariat. It is goaded into an extremist attack on the establishment in order to defend its right to free religious association and practice. Class, policy, and morality combine as com­plex historical motivations of oppression, Within this structure, the solution would be to strike a balance between individual conscience and group identity, the demands for formal recognition and the web of political-historical interests which, when observed from below by the oppressed, appear as “natural forces” of history.

Kemény’s other structure in the novel presents the Sabbatarians, once they are committed to extreme isolation, as threats to the peace­ful development of moral conscience. Civil dissension, whether justified in its causes or not, always serves those who rave no ideals or princi-ples to anchor and guide their interests. When any group or individual exaggerates its place in the polity, there is no measure for moral beings to hold themselves to in political life. Revolution and dissent, under the conditions of authoritarian and class rule, produce anarchy, the destruction of community and culture, even while they cannot shake the foundations of absolutism. This is the lesson of 1849, and 1639. In a time of oppression, moral awareness demands the sacrifice of one’s own interests for the community. Laczkó’s betrayal of the Sab- batarians, Deborah’s desire to rise in class, Péchi’s unthinking dab- bling in sectarian politics bring only disaster. Only Klara’s total sacrifice of herself brings happiness. Freedom of personal action with­ in historical limits manifests itself in the excrutiatingly narrow choice between blind self-interest and humility.

Thus, seen from above, the forces of dissent are centrifugal “natu­ral forces” of human self-delusion in the making of history. One must be aware of complex forces in prder to judge correctly, but awareness is all but impossible and it cannot prevent suffering. It cannot change history as it is. It permits an active wait, a wise patience, philan­thropy in a small sphere. It condemns premature action.

The two ideological structures — one Liberal, bourgeois, pre-re­volutionary, the other conservative, nostalgic, aristocratic, and post­ revolutionary — cannot be overlaid on each other peaceably without some double-binds resulting. The Sabbatarians are presented as both sympathe­tic dissenters and dangerous fanatics. Laczkó’s plight is the result of both weak moral fiber and an external plot laid against him. Péchi is the victim of his own political ruthlessness and his self-deluding innocence.

In the novel, the two antagonistic structures mesh, the pre-revolutionary structure is transformed into the second, post-revolutionary one via the mediating influence of a mythicized, magical structure of action, in which concrete social and political qualities and conditions that have both concrete, historical, as well as allegorical, value with respect to Kemény’s present in 1859, are gradually subsumed by moral types with magical dimensions. All the characters are overdetermined, given a double moral reality.

History, with Kemény, has lost all of its providential lucidity. The alliance between different world-views, between aristocrat and bourgeois in Scott, the aristocrat and peasant in Manzoni, and the bourgeois and the peasant in Eötvös, that had produced a confidence in the continuity of the best values of the past into the present, breaks apart in Kemény into two separate, conflicting, dangerous imperatives. Neither yields, and the historical individual is ground up between them.

He feels that history is simultaneously urging and obstructing it is as difficult to take a step as to stay in one place; fate puts us to a terrible test, since it places us before a double trap. History as a trap: this is the root of Kemény’s tragic world-view. History, which says yes and no at the same time, and turns the two great ideals — embourgeoisement and na­tionality — against each other, which had elsewhere been realized together, Kemény is startled by the mocking and cruel challenge, which he believes fate has thrown in the nation’s face (Sőtér 465).

For this history to have any meaning, any chance at resolution, it must have a counter-fate, a quasi-magical nurture of community to match the quasi-magical destructiveness of the forces of anarchy and Realpolitik. In The Fanatics Kemény’s resolution, such as it is, rests on the reinvention of a mythical connection between psychological, subjective experience of unintelligibly complex reality and the principles of tragedy that go deeper than the contingencies of history.

Notes to Chapter V

1. All quotations from The Fanatics are my translations from the Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó edition of A rajongok (Budapest, 1969)

2. Kemény’s speech to the county meeting of Kolozs county, July 26, 1842, qtd. in  Gyula Barla, Kemény Zsigmond Föbb Eszméi 1849 Elött [Zsigmond Kemény’s Main Ideas Before 1849]. 74.

3. From an editorial in  Erdélyi Hírlap, 1844, qtd. in Barla, 90-91.

4. Lukács joined in the postwar Left’s attack on Kemény’s reputation. See “Az МКР és a magyar kultúra” [The Hungarian Communist Party and Hungarian Culture] in Magyar irodalom – Magyar kultúra [Hungarian Literature, Hungarian Culture] 472.

5. Laczkó, Elemér, and Klara are invented characters. Kassai appears in the chronicles — most notably in the memoires of Kemény’s ancestor, János Kemény — merely as Rákóczi’s mean and miserly councillor, and the head of the peace party. Péchi’s and Debo­rah’s downfalls had been recorded as a tragic drama in János Szalardi’s Siralmas krónika [Sorrowful Chronicle], a seventeenth-century text that Kemény edited in 1852-53, as was Deborah’s restoration by Zsuzsanna Lorántffy. But Kemény altered the recorded facts of Péchi’s tale to round off the tragic enplotment. Accor­ding to Szalardi, Péchi had five daughters, and he gained his release from prison in a year by converting to Calvinism. The novel’s Péchi has only one daughter, Deborah, and there is no word of his conversion or release from prison. Kemény was cer­tainly motivated by the dramatic advantages of fewer protagonists and an unresolved downfall. Above all, the changes reinforce the tragic tone of the historical story at the expense of true but “disharmonious” facts. (Ferenc Papp. Báró Kemény Zsigmond. II. 369; 343)

6. Later researchers were to show that Kemény was in error in his low estimation of the number of Sabbatarians. Sándor Kohn writes that they numbered twenty-thousand, a formidable membership. (Cited in Nagy 131.)

7. The identification of medieval chiliasm with socialism in the Nineteenth Century was widespread, and in the case of Lamennais, was encouraged by the socialists themselves. It is made even today, as in Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium, 308-15.