A people of extraordinary contradictions.

• Author: Lukacs, John
• Position: Book Review

Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat, translated by Ann Major (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 572 pp., $29.95.

IT IS GOOD that Mr. Lendvai chose to entitle his book The Hungarians and not Hungary. Most of present-day Hungary's inhabitants are of course Hungarians, but that is a relatively recent condition. The ancient kingdom of Hungary (the geographical Carpathian basin) was never entirely filled up by Hungarians--the kingdom also included Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Rutherians, Germans, etc. That was one source for the many recurrent troubles of the Hungarian state. For a very long time that state and the Hungarian population were not coterminous. Lendvai's otherwise pithy introductory phrase, "a country of extraordinary contradictions" should instead read: a people of extraordinary contradictions. Were you to say to a Frenchman that you like France while you do not like Frenchmen, he would not be pleased, but he would understand; if you were to tell him that you like Frenchmen but you do not like France, he would be speechless. On the other hand, were you to say to a Hungarian that you like Hungarians better than you like Hungary, he would understand, sadly, perhaps with a melancholy smile.

Most of Lendvai's book is a survey of one thousand years of Hungarian history, written by a well-read and often thoughtful journalist. It has a fair number of mistakes, most of them minor ones. One cannot separate, of course, a book from its author. Lendvai's main interest is that of the last hundred years, a history peopled by all kinds of good and bad, colorful but never drab, Hungarians. This has led him to give disproportionate space to all kinds of bizarre adventurers and mountebanks, each of them deserving a little book at least, but too much of them here. Besides this disproportion and besides the errors, the editing is wanting: many of the footnote references do not match the actual footnotes. (The translation by Ann Major is very good.)

The Hungarian state had an extraordinary founder, St. Stephen (1001-38), who was both a great statesman and a saint. He could have chosen a geographically almost natural alliance and convergence with the Byzantine empire and the Eastern Church. Instead, St. Stephen chose Roman Christianity and a dependence on the Pope, a Hungary looking to the West. His main domestic problem was with a bitter, dark, cruel pagan remnant among his people whom he was forced...