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    The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat
    Unavailable
    The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat
    Unavailable
    The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat
    Ebook868 pages12 hours

    The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat

    By Paul Lendvai

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The Hungarians is the most comprehensive, clear-sighted, and absorbing history ever of a legendarily proud and passionate but lonely people. Much of Europe once knew them as "child-devouring cannibals" and "bloodthirsty Huns." But it wasn't long before the Hungarians became steadfast defenders of the Christian West and fought heroic freedom struggles against the Tatars (1241), the Turks (16-18th centuries), and, among others, the Russians (1848-49 and 1956). Paul Lendvai tells the fascinating story of how the Hungarians, despite a string of catastrophes and their linguistic and cultural isolation, have survived as a nation-state for more than 1,000 years.


    Lendvai, who fled Hungary in 1957, traces Hungarian politics, culture, economics, and emotions from the Magyars' dramatic entry into the Carpathian Basin in 896 to the brink of the post-Cold War era. Hungarians are ever pondering what being Hungarian means and where they came from. Yet, argues Lendvai, Hungarian national identity is not only about ancestry or language but also an emotional sense of belonging. Hungary's famous poet-patriot, Sándor Petofi, was of Slovak descent, and Franz Liszt felt deeply Hungarian though he spoke only a few words of Hungarian. Through colorful anecdotes of heroes and traitors, victors and victims, geniuses and imposters, based in part on original archival research, Lendvai conveys the multifaceted interplay, on the grand stage of Hungarian history, of progressivism and economic modernization versus intolerance and narrow-minded nationalism.


    He movingly describes the national trauma inflicted by the transfer of the historic Hungarian heartland of Transylvania to Romania under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920--a trauma that the passing of years has by no means lessened. The horrors of Nazi and Soviet Communist domination were no less appalling, as Lendvai's restrained account makes clear, but are now part of history.


    An unforgettable blend of eminent readability, vibrant humor, and meticulous scholarship, The Hungarians is a book without taboos or prejudices that at the same time offers an authoritative key to understanding how and why this isolated corner of Europe produced such a galaxy of great scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateApr 3, 2014
    ISBN9781400851522
    Unavailable
    The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat
    Author

    Paul Lendvai

    Paul Lendvai, a Hungarian-born Austrian journalist and author, was the Vienna correspondent for the Financial Times for over twenty years. His most recent books, both published by Hurst, are The Hungarians (second edition); and Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman, which won the Prix du Livre Européen.

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    Reviews for The Hungarians

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    • 4/5
      To Paul Lendvai, the besetting sin of Hungarian culture is its "cult of history" and "the nationalistic sense of mission" that has resulted. This might be tolerable except for another unfortunate facet of the Hungarian national character (the main topic of this work), and that is the sense of paranoia over being an isolated people with possibly little to offer besides an esoteric language and a host of colorful legends. Lendvai traces these tendencies by examining exemplary personalities across the span of of Hungarian history, and he's at his best when he has a colorful character to peg his insights to. The downside of this is that Lendvai's prose tends to flag when examining the more cut and dry factors of national developement. While this is certainly the best account I've read of the general thrust of Hungarian history, particularly for capturing the spirit of the medieval and early modern periods, I do wish that Lendvai could have offered a better explanation (as opposed to description) of the origins of the destructive sense of entitlement that afflicted the Hungarian aristocracy, as so many of the evils of Hungarian history can be traced to this trait.