THE DUKAYS
by Lajos Zilahy & translated by John Pauker
An enormously readable romantic epic, first published in 1949, traces the precipitous decline of an aristocratic Hungarian family in the years following WWI. Haughty Count Istvan Dukay and his dull-witted spouse Countess Menti ignore the signs that their world is changing, while their four children pursue varying destinies: romantic Christina as a passionate intellectual hopelessly in love with a dethroned and moribund monarch; rootless Georgy in a pragmatic marriage to an American heiress to a meat-packing fortune; troubled Janos in homosexual submission to a malevolent mentor and in the energies of Nazism; and spirited Zia in a conflicted union with a scholarly astronomer who bears a strong resemblance to Tolstoy’s ardent humanitarian Pierre Bezukhov. Echoes of Proust and King Lear are also heard, but Zilahy’s scattergun plotting and discursive criticisms of the myopic Hungarian nobility dilute the novel’s force. The Dukays isn’t War and Peace, therefore. But it is an absorbing and highly entertaining chronicle that somebody really ought to consider turning into a miniseries.