Authors: Diane Pearson
Csardas (94 page)
An invitation from the publisher
For a writer to tackle a subject in which the country, social background, and temperament of the people are outside his or her inherent knowledge is the height of impertinence. But writers are impertinent. They also frequently become obsessed by themes outside their own experience, and once a writer is obsessed there is nothing to do but give way and indulge the obsession.
Csardas
is the result of my obsession.
The title (the cs is pronounced
ch
as in
church,
the s at the end is
sh,
as in
brush;
thus, phonetically,
chardash)
came to me while watching a very old couple dancing this courtship dance at a village in the mountains of northern Hungary. The old man was very tall, very thin; his wife—dressed in the black skirt and kerchief of the country people—was a diminutive little lady who was as wide as she was high and who barely came up to her husband’s chest. They should have looked incongruous and funny together but they were neither, and such was their grace that soon the younger and more energetic dancers stopped to watch and finally applaud. The faces of the old people were marked by years of harsh living—two world wars, innumerable revolutions, foreign occupation, in addition to the general hardship of just being poor (the lot of the Hungarian peasant has never been an easy one)—but as I watched I suddenly saw them, fifty years back, as they once had been: a strong, handsome young man and a neat little brown-eyed peasant girl. And between that young couple and the old people now before me lay the whole brave, bloody, dignified, cruel story of the Hungarian people.
To list everyone who has helped me with this book would be impossible, and indeed, perhaps they would not wish to be listed, for
Csardas
may not be the kind of book they had finally envisaged. So I just offer my warm and heartfelt thanks to the friends I made in Hungary who, in every walk of life, gave me unstinting help and the most generous of hospitality. On my visits there (made as a lone traveller and without any official guide), I found nothing but kindness and a desire to help. Somehow the language barrier was bridged—mostly because nearly all the Hungarians I met were fluent in two or three tongues—and I returned with a notebook full of personal reminiscences from people of all ages, not big reminiscences of epic history (they can be gleaned from the history books) but tiny details of a first ball dress, of a peasant child walking barefoot to school through the snow, of an old coachman who used to fascinate two small boys with wild tales of the Prussian wars.
I have, for ease of reading, left out all the accents over Hungarian words and have also anglicized some of the more difficult names. I hope the Hungarians will forgive me for mutilating their language, and I hope, also, they will forgive any errors I may unwittingly have made. With research and constant questioning I have endeavoured to make the book as authentic as possible, but undoubtedly something will have slipped through.
The bibliography at the end of the book lists my main source references for the historical background, but I want particularly to mention Paul Ignotus’s
Hungary.
In a wealth of reading I found this account to be the most balanced and also the wittiest (Hungary may be brave and bloody, but it has never lacked a sense of humour). Mr. Ignotus, a scholar and historian, was also kind enough to indulge my craving for personal reminiscences.
And finally I must mention, with warmth and gratitude, the man who inspired
Csardas,
who during the four years it has taken to research and write it gave me constant encouragement and patiently answered a huge variety of questions, ranging from the effect of the
Anschluss
to what he ate for breakfast as a little boy. To Nicholas Vilag, my dear friend, I say a particularly warm thank-you. You should really have written this book yourself, but as you wouldn’t, I have done the best I could.
DIANE PEARSON
September, 1974
Clark, Alan.
Suicide of the Empires: The Battles on the Eastern Front, 1914-18.
London: BPC Publishing (Unit 75), 1971.
Cruttwell, C. R. M. F.
A History of the Great War, 1914-18.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936.
Czebe, Jeno, and Tibor Petho.
Hungary in World War II.
Pamphlets of “New Hungary,” Budapest, 1946.
Edwards, Tudor.
The Blue Danube.
London: Robert Hale & Co., 1973.
Erdei, Ferenc.
Information Hungary.
Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1968.
Faludy, George.
My Happy Days in Hell.
London: Andre Deutsch, 1962.
Horthy, Admiral Miklós.
Memoirs.
London: Hutchinson & Co., 1956.
Ignotus, Paul.
Hungary.
London: Ernest Benn, 1972.
Illyés, Gyula.
People of the Puszta.
Budapest: Corvina Press, 1967.
Kállay, Miklós.
Hungarian Premier: A Personal Account of a Nation’s Struggle in the Second World War.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1954.
Liddell Hart, B. H.
History of the First World War.
London: Cassell & Co., 1970.
Listowel, Judith.
The Golden Tree: The Story of Peter, Tomi, and Their Family.
...
London: Odhams Press, 1958.
Macartney, Carlile A.
October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929-1945.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1956-57.
Newspapers of the First World War.
Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970.
Roth, Ernst.
A Tale of Three Cities.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.
Seth, Ronald.
Caporetto, the Scapegoat Battle.
London: Macdonald & Co., 1965.
Shirer, William L.
Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941.
______.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.
Taylor, Alan J. P.
War by Time-Table: How the First World War Began.
New York: American Heritage, 1969.
Watt, Donald C., Frank Spencer, and Neville Brown.
A History of the World in the 20th Century.
New York: William Morrow & Co., 1967.
Zeman, Z A B.
Twilight of the Habsburgs.
London: BPC Publishing (Unit 75), 1971.
The incident described on pages 140-145 (
here
) is based on a factual reportage from the First World War, although the place and time have been altered. This reportage appeared in
20 Riport Bemutalja a Vilagot
and was written by Pásztor Arpád.
An epic, bestselling historical saga, following the fortunes of an aristocratic Hungarian family through two World Wars.
Csardas
– taken from the name of the Hungarian national dance – follows the fortunes of the enchanting Ferenc sisters from their glittering beginnings in aristocratic Hungary, through the traumas of two World Wars.
From the dazzling elegance of coming-out balls, feudal estates and a culture steeped in romance, to terror and starvation in the concentration camps – no story could be more dramatic than that of Eva and Amalia Ferenc, whose fate it is to be debutantes when the shot which killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo plunged Europe into the First World War. Their story is enthralling, tragic, romantic – and absolutely unputdownable.
‘A story you won’t easily forget, on the scale of
Gone With the Wind
’
Sunday Mirror
‘I defy anyone to remain unaffected’
London Evening Standard
‘Immensely readable... has all the fire and dash of the national dance from which it takes its title’
S
unday Telegraph
D
IANE
P
EARSON
worked in publishing for four decades and is the author of seven novels, including the bestselling
Csardas
. She was President of the Romantic Novelists Association for twenty-five years. She lives in South London.
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The story starts here.
First published in 1975 as a Fawcett Crest Book by Ballantine Books
This eBook edition first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Diane Pearson, 1975
The moral right of Diane Pearson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781781857502
ISBN (TPB) 9781781857519
Head of Zeus Ltd
Clerkenwell House