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Another Hungary
The Nineteenth-Century Provinces in Eight Lives
By Robert Nemes STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9912-6
CHAPTER 1
The Aristocrat
Before my very eyes I have seen youths grow up who have made good progress along the road of science and knowledge ... But hardly had they returned to their ancestral meadows, then I know not what inexplicable faintness soon came over them. The library was soon replaced by weapons, the arts by the love of hunting, and meditation by greyhound coursing.
József Kármán, "The Embellishment of the Nation" (1794)
One nobleman said, let us ride every day
Another chimed in, catching sturgeon is the way
Added a third, shooting at ducks would be the best
Declared the count at last, hunting is my request.
Count József Gvadányi, A Satirical-Critical Description of the Now Assembled Diet (1791)
WHAT SETS ARISTOCRATS APART from the rest of us? First, a title, such as prince, count, marquis, or baron. Viewers of the TV series Downton Abbey, set in England in the first decades of the twentieth century, might also point to the sprawling estate, countless servants, and fashionable clothes of the Earl of Grantham and his family. Fittingly, the Granthams shoot and hunt, and viewers can see the requisite hounds, horses, guns, and outdoor gear of the Edwardian era. The show is less fastidious, however, about the carnage involved in a day's hunting and shooting. Once common, images of rulers and aristocrats surrounded by their servants, beaters, and gamekeepers (not to mention the dead game itself) are at best anachronistic — a 1961 "trophy photograph" of a young Queen Elizabeth II standing over a slain tiger in India would be impossible to reproduce today — if not highly symbolic. Old photographs of Emperor William II of Germany, inspecting long rows of neatly arranged chamois and deer, seem to foreshadow the brutality and slaughter of the First World War.
The subject of this chapter, Count József Gvadányi, had no qualms about hunting. It comes up again and again in his writings. That an uncle died on a hunting trip did nothing to cool his ardor. In a letter poem written to one of his protégés, he explained that he would have responded sooner had two aristocrat friends not invited him to go hunting in nearby Moravia. Gvadányi provided only the barest sketch of the region they visited: "We ascended as well the lustrous, looming peaks, / We delved in deep valleys rumbling with rapid creeks." But he gave a precise inventory of their haul: twenty-eight roe deer, eight red deer, and fourteen boars, one of which nearly gouged a beater, who escaped by scrambling up a birch tree. When storms forced the hunters to retreat to a local village, they stayed with the priest, whom they repaid with part of their game. So often attentive to the sensibilities of his readers, Gvadányi in this case did not consider that his correspondent — a seamstress who lived in town, had two children, and struggled to make ends meet — may not have shared or even understood his enthusiasm.
But hunting had never been a pastime for commoners. In 1729 the Hungarian Diet (the kingdom's bicameral assembly) had confirmed that nobles alone had the right to hunt, pursue game across surrounding lands, and keep hunting dogs such as greyhounds and vizslas. For the writer József Kármán and other critics, practices like hunting stood as an impediment to progress and a symbol of the problems that lurked in the provinces. Kármán once complained that Hungarians preferred "a pack of cards or a heifer" to a book. Kármán could be a blind patriot — he boasted that "the uncouth Hungarian on our endless plains is possessed of a sounder judgment than the refined foreigner in his arrogant towns" — but he also bemoaned the isolation, indolence, and ignorance he found in the countryside. In his analysis, people and place are organically connected; that the nobility loved to hunt and play cards reflected and in turn perpetuated the rude state of the Hungarian provinces. The resulting equation, in which a blinkered nobility plus a poor countryside adds up to inaction and immobility, has long been a staple of Hungarian literature and history writing.
Recently, scholars have looked more closely at the place of nobles in this equation. The importance of the nobility to the fortunes of the Kingdom of Hungary has never been in doubt. Nor has its great size: nearly one in twenty residents of eighteenth-century Hungary enjoyed noble privileges, a figure matched only in Poland and Spain. Solidarity among nobles came from their shared privileges and common interests, but differences in rank, religion, language, wealth, and education were just as likely to divide them. A huge gap separated the poor, illiterate, lesser nobility of the villages (sometimes called the "sandaled" nobility because they could not afford boots) from the wealthy, cosmopolitan aristocracy ensconced in Baroque palaces on sprawling estates (of whom the Esterházys are the best known). Splitting the difference, scholars have focused on those in between, on the reasonably well-to-do, mostly literate, politically engaged "county nobility" — later called the "gentry." The outlook of these noblemen, historian Gábor Vermes has shown, fused Christian ethics, classical ideals, public service, and tireless legalism; they looked with suspicion on outsiders, members of other religions (especially Jews), and middle-class occupations. At the same time, their strong "sense of permanence" gave them the confidence to stand up to distant rulers, and Hungary's forty-six counties gave them a large measure of self-government on the local level. "The king might decide, but the county implemented," explained one historian. With the counties as their springboard, these provincial noblemen leaped over the aristocracy and became the leading force in statewide Hungarian politics at the end of the eighteenth century. Events reached a head in the early 1790s, against the backdrop of revolution in France, deep crisis in the Habsburg lands, and widespread political agitation in Hungary.
Gvadányi was peripheral to these events. Most scholars in fact have little patience with Gvadányi, who was neither a young reformer like Kármán nor an influential member of the county nobility. At best, he is portrayed as the "quill-wielding old Hussar general," avuncular and mustachioed, who wrote some humorous verses in sparkling Hungarian. Critics allow that his defense of traditional Hungarian dress made a splash at the close of the eighteenth century. But the count is also dismissed as hopelessly conservative — if not reactionary — in many areas. His opposition to literary innovations left him isolated from other writers, just as his loyalty to the Habsburg rulers kept him outside the Hungarian political opposition. He was indifferent to economic matters and wary of those who did not share his Roman Catholic faith. In many ways, the hunt-loving Gvadányi seems to embody the worst features of the Hungarian nobility.
But there may be more to Gvadányi than meets the eye. Two close readers of Gvadányi, the literary critics Ferenc Bíró and Viktor Julow, have found substance beneath the count's frothy rhymes. Bíró urges us to take seriously Gvadányi's claim that he wanted to write about "important matters." Julow sees in Gvadányi's writings internal contradictions that produce surprising results: "although he firmly believed that he was defending the old, in more than one respect he was blazing a trail for the new." Following these promising leads, this chapter looks anew at Gvadányi's life and work, paying careful attention to what they tell us about northeastern Hungary. Gvadányi passed much of his life in the region; he was born there, spent his childhood there, and was later stationed there as a solider. When he became a writer, he recreated its landscapes, languages, customs, and cuisine. These writings created a literary map of the region, and by poring over this map we can see how Gvadányi struggled to make sense of the region's poor material conditions, diverse population, and political aspirations. For all his love of hunting and horses, then, Count Gvadányi offered thoughtful answers to the questions of what it meant to be "provincial" in Hungary.
To the Modest Manor Born
Like many aristocrats, Count Gvadányi had roots outside Hungary. The Gvadányis came from Tuscany, where they were known as Guadagni and held the title of marquis. The family held important offices in a number of Italian states, and one Guadagni rose to the rank of cardinal. Around 1648 another member of the family, who styled himself Marchio Alexander de Gvadagnis, came to Austria and joined the ranks of condottieri serving the Habsburgs in their far-flung wars. Alexander died in Hungary fighting the Ottomans; his Italian-born son followed in his footsteps and ended up as commander of a border fortress in northeastern Hungary. As luck would have it, King Jan Sobieski of Poland-Lithuania, fresh from his momentous victory over the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, stopped at Guadagni's fortress for eight days. After Guadagni openhandedly hosted the king, retainers, and soldiers, Sobieski gratefully made him a Polish count (the conversion of Italian titles to their Central European equivalents was never automatic). Guadagni then used this honor to apply for acceptance as a naturalized Hungarian count, which the Hungarian Diet approved in 1687. Good hospitality as much as martial valor explained the sudden success of the Guadagnis in Hungary. Quick wits and an ability to adapt also helped. In the next generation, they would change their surname to the more Hungarian-sounding Gvadányi.
Scholars have made much of Count József Gvadányi's Italian origins. To one nineteenth-century biographer, they explained Gvadányi playfulness, vivaciousness, and sentimentality. Scholars less prone to stereotypes have argued that his family's recent arrival and rapid rise in Hungary may have influenced the count's outlook. When he was born in 1725, his family had been aristocrats for just thirty-eight years and Hungarian by birth for just one generation. Gvadányi, the argument goes, became a loud Hungarian patriot to avoid being taken as an arriviste, a latecomer to the Hungarian cause. His was the zeal of a convert. There may be some truth in this. But the ascent of his family was hardly unique. In the late seventeenth century, as Ottoman rule in Hungary collapsed and the Habsburgs moved in, many other families in the employ of the Habsburgs used a combination of military service, royal favor, shrewd marriages, and patronage of the Catholic church to secure estates and titles in Hungary. Most remained absentee landlords and eventually sold their properties. Not so the Gvadányis, who worked tirelessly to acquire lands to match their new title. The family's strategy, followed unerringly by all the male Gvadányis (József, his father, and two uncles), began with military service, followed by marriage to a Hungarian noblewoman with property, and then retirement from the Habsburg army and the life of a country gentleman.
Marriage brought Gvadányi's father back to Borsod County in northeastern Hungary. He settled in the village of Rudabánya, which was close to the fortress where his own father had earned much distinction. Rudabánya lay in a narrow valley in the foothills of the Carpathians, and its mines had produced iron ore for centuries. In 1700 the Gvadányis leased the village and its mines from Count István Csáky, whose family's great wealth and power placed it in the small circle of dominant aristocratic families. The Gvadányis in comparison lived modestly. According to the 1720 census, their main house was built of wood, had a tile roof, and sported a wooden tower. It had two large rooms (for the Gvadányis and their servants!), a kitchen, and a bath; a butcher worked below. Its outbuildings included a brewery, malt house, distillery, foundry, and blacksmith. The smells of butchered animals, fermenting beer, and charcoal fires must have been powerful and influential; Gvadányi's writing engages all the senses (village girls, he claimed, could not "set the heart ablaze" because they smelled "not of perfume but of cows"). The estate also included numerous farm animals, and peasants who tended the surrounding fields and vineyards. Each week the peasants gave their lord two or three days of unpaid labor, called robot; otherwise they worked their own rented plots of land. They also drank, and the Gvadányis made more money selling alcohol to peasants than they did pulling iron out of the ground. Undercapitalized and unproductive, the mines brought little income and were later abandoned. Significant investment arrived only during the communist era, when Rudabánya briefly flourished, but the iron mines closed for good in 1985.
Count József Gvadányi was born in Rudabánya on October 16, 1725. As a child, he had tutors, servants, books, and friends; he dressed up as a soldier and battled trees he imagined were Turks. But death was a frequent visitor in Rudabánya: of his mother's eleven children, only four survived infancy, and only one — József — lived to adulthood. The many pregnancies and early deaths must have taken their toll on József's mother and cast a pall over the house. József's father also died young, at the age of forty-five. When József left for school at age eleven, his mother came with him, and they never returned to Rudabánya.
The Gvadányis were Roman Catholic, and József spent his second decade in Jesuit schools. First came the equivalent of middle and high school in nearby Eger and then three years of university in distant Nagy-Szombat. One biographer has suggested that the Jesuits' emphasis on sustained concentration, oral argumentation, and historical drama influenced Gvadányi's later writings. For his part, Gvadányi stated that school awakened his love of poetry, philosophy, and reading; as a soldier, he hauled around trunks filled with books from one garrison to another. The heavily Latin-based curriculum of eighteenth-century schools also left its mark. Gvadányi bragged that by the end of high school he could produce a hundred lines of rhyming Latin couplets in under three hours. Like other writers labeled "Baroque," Gvadányi larded his writing with classical references. Most were well-worn: soldiers fight on the field of Mars, poets climb Mount Parnassus, hunters emulate Diana, and doctors recall Hippocrates. Readers today may find these references labored and wearisome, but two hundred years ago they conveyed seriousness and sophistication. Latin enjoyed special status in Hungary, and through much of the eighteenth century it remained an indispensible language of the royal administration, the Hungarian Diet, the legal system, medicine, the university, and the Catholic church. Not every official or magistrate could speak let alone read or write basic Latin, but they would have recognized and likely welcomed the gods and muses that populate Gvadányi's writings.
For Gvadányi, the choice of a career was easy. Soldiering ran in the family, and other options (the church, law, and public administration) did not and offered limited prospects to a young nobleman with an aristocratic title but little else. In 1744, at age nineteen, he joined the Habsburg army as an officer cadet and remained in uniform until 1783, when he resigned as a cavalry general. In between he fought in both the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years' War (1756–63). In the first he faced the Prussians, Spanish, and French, who briefly held him prisoner and later seriously wounded him in the leg. In the second he took part in Count Andreas Hadik's daring raid that captured the Prussian capital of Berlin in 1757; Gvadányi later claimed that the enemy responded by putting a bounty on his head. By all accounts Gvadányi was a brave soldier, and he won steady promotions over the years. His writings romanticize war but also document the hardships soldiers faced: "Alongside my glory, I suffered privation, / I endured frequent thirst, and sometimes starvation, / I withstood the snarling cold and sweltering heat, / Horses' jolts and horses' throws, with chaos complete." As the army shrank during peacetime he had to switch regiments, and promotions came more slowly. Older biographers sensed anti-Hungarian forces at work, but Gvadányi himself betrayed no bitterness about his service. In a letter written to an aspiring poet, he boasted about the Monarchy's armies and stated that there is "no more beautiful death" than to die for faith, homeland, and "gracious king."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Another Hungary by Robert Nemes. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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