The Transylvanian Trilogy, Volume I: They Were Counted
SynopsisPlot
They Were Counted, the first novel in the trilogy, introduces us to a decadent, frivolous, and corrupt society unwittingly bent on its own destruction during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bánffy’s lush depiction of an opulent lost paradise focuses on two upper-class cousins who couldn’t be more different: Count Balint Abády, a liberal politician who compassionately defends his homeland’s downtrodden Romanian peasants, and his dissipated cousin László, whose life is a whirl of parties, balls, hunting, and gambling. They Were Counted launches a story that brims with intrigues, love affairs, duels, murder, comedy, and tragedy, set against the rugged and ravishing scenery of Transylvania. Along with the other two novels in the trilogy—They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided—it combines a Proustian nostalgia for the past, insight into a collapsing empire reminiscent of the work of Joseph Roth, and the drama and epic sweep of Tolstoy.
Story
About this book
They Were Counted is the opening volume of Miklós Bánffy's Transylvanian Trilogy, set during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The novel follows two upper-class Hungarian cousins whose lives run in opposite directions. Count Bálint Abády is a liberal-minded politician who takes a serious interest in the conditions of Romanian peasants living on Transylvanian estates. His cousin László moves through a cycle of parties, hunts, gambling, and social display, largely indifferent to the political tensions building around him.
Bánffy, himself a Transylvanian aristocrat, writes from close knowledge of the world he depicts. The society in his novel is lavish and self-absorbed, its members occupied with love affairs, duels, and political maneuvering while the structures holding their empire together weaken. Transylvania's landscape, with its forests and mountain ridges, forms a persistent backdrop to the social drama.
The novel is the first of three. The subsequent volumes, They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided, continue the story through the years leading up to the First World War. Bánffy's trilogy has drawn comparisons to the work of Joseph Roth and Marcel Proust for its attention to a vanishing aristocratic order and the slow arrival of historical change.
