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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
M√≥r J√≥kai's "In Love With the Czarina, and Other Stories" intricately weaves the fabric of romantic entanglements against the backdrop of 19th-century Europe, particularly highlighting the emotive landscapes of Hungary and Russia. J√≥kai employs a rich, vivid prose style that seamlessly merges realism with the romantic notions of the time. Each story, imbued with passion and cultural nuances, explores the complexities of love, politics, and identity, inviting readers into a world where personal emotions collide with the grand narratives of history. Through his masterful storytelling, J√≥kai reflects the social mores and political tensions of his era, rendering each character's journey both deeply personal and universally relatable. M√≥r J√≥kai, considered one of Hungary's most beloved authors, was profoundly influenced by his experiences as a prominent political figure and a passionate advocate for Hungarian nationalism. His extensive travels throughout Europe, his engagement with cultural movements, and his affinity for romance and adventure permeate his literary works. These elements are particularly palpable in "In Love With the Czarina," where J√≥kai's own encounters with love and loss echo through his narratives, enriching them with a layer of authenticity. This collection is highly recommended for readers interested in exploring the intersection of romance and history, as well as those who appreciate vivid storytelling that transcends cultural boundaries. J√≥kai's stories resonate with anyone longing for the complexities of love and the courage it takes to pursue it amidst societal constraints. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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In Love With the Czarina, and Other Stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers a focused selection of prose narratives by the Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai, offering a compact panorama of his storytelling range. Rather than aiming at a complete or exhaustive edition, it presents a curated suite anchored by a longer, chaptered work and accompanied by shorter tales. The purpose is to introduce readers to Jókai’s characteristic blend of historical color, romance, and adventure in a single volume. It serves both as an entry point for newcomers and a concentrated refresher for admirers. Together, these pieces showcase how Jókai constructs swiftly moving plots within richly imagined worlds that reflect nineteenth-century literary tastes.
The volume is devoted to prose fiction. Its centerpiece is a sustained narrative presented in multiple chapters, a form that allows for broader historical backdrops and intricate turns of fortune. Around it are shorter stories varying in tone and scale, from intimate romantic episodes to briefer adventures. The collection does not include poems, plays, essays, or letters, and thus concentrates attention on Jókai’s narrative art in its most popular medium. Readers will encounter historical romance and adventure as prevailing modes, but also hints of the uncanny and the exotic, filtered through the author’s distinctive sensibility and pacing.
Despite differences in length and setting, the pieces cohere around recurring concerns: love tested by danger, the allure and peril of power, and the individual’s passage through political and cultural upheaval. Imperial courts, contested frontiers, and distant horizons are invoked as stages where private feeling meets public fate. The titles themselves suggest encounters across borders and eras, while the tone balances high drama with humane observation. Jókai’s protagonists often find themselves at the intersection of personal loyalty and larger historical currents, a vantage that allows the narratives to explore moral choice without sacrificing momentum or suspense.
Stylistically, Jókai is known for energetic storytelling, vivid scene-painting, and a confident narrative voice that guides the reader through swift changes of place and mood. He favors brisk dialogue, theatrical turns, and sharply etched character types, yet softens melodrama with humor and an eye for everyday detail. The descriptive passages often conjure settings with painterly clarity, while episodes unfold with the rhythm of adventure romance. Even in translation, his prose tends to preserve a sense of warmth and amplitude. The result is fiction that is both ceremonious and agile, animated by curiosity about people and places.
As a prominent nineteenth-century Hungarian novelist, Jókai brought a distinctly Central European imagination to historical storytelling. His work draws on the mingled legacies of empires, borderlands, and folklore, transposing them into compelling narrative arcs. The collection reflects this breadth: distant courts, steppe legends, and nocturnal mysteries appear not as mere ornament but as settings where character and fate reveal themselves. Yet the historical frameworks do not overwhelm the human scale. The author’s interest in honor, courage, resourcefulness, and tenderness keeps the focus on lived experience, allowing the past to feel immediate without claiming documentary authority.
These stories retain their significance because they balance romance with moral clarity and spectacle with feeling. They address perennial questions—how love survives peril, how ambition reshapes allegiance, how identity persists under pressure—while offering the pleasures of movement, intrigue, and surprise. Readers can savor the designs of fortune and the reversals of chance without needing specialized background. At the same time, the narratives invite reflection on authority, cultural exchange, and the appeal of legend in shaping collective memory. This combination of narrative drive and thematic resonance helps explain their continued appeal across languages and generations.
Approached as a whole, the volume invites two complementary readings: sequential immersion in the longer narrative, and selective encounters with the shorter tales that echo and refract its motifs. The juxtaposition highlights how Jókai scales his craft, from expansive arcs to concentrated episodes, while maintaining coherence of mood and idea. The collection’s design emphasizes variety within unity, foregrounding romance, adventure, and historical atmosphere as mutually reinforcing strengths. For readers new to Jókai, it offers a persuasive introduction; for those familiar, it assembles representative forms in one place, underscoring the durability of his narrative imagination.
Historical Context
Mór Jókai (1825–1904), born in Komárom in the Kingdom of Hungary, wrote across the turbulent decades that reshaped Central Europe. A leading figure of Hungarian Romanticism, he forged a career amid political upheaval, literary innovation, and rapid modernization. His friendship with the poet Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849) and his 1848 marriage to the celebrated actress Róza Laborfalvi (1817–1886) bound him to the cultural heart of Pest. Jókai’s prose, renowned for panoramic storytelling and exotic settings, often refracted Hungarian concerns through distant times and places, a method that connected diverse narratives like In Love With the Czarina, Tamerlan the Tartar, Valdivia, Bizeban, and The Moonlight Somnambulist.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1848–1849, crushed by Habsburg forces with decisive Russian intervention under Tsar Nicholas I, left an indelible imprint on Jókai’s imagination. Experiences from those years—revolutionary hopes, censorship, and exile’s looming threat—shaped his fascination with autocracy, loyalty, and state power. Settings in imperial Russia or among steppe conquerors allowed him to explore the inner workings of rule and resistance while sidestepping post-1849 surveillance during the Bach era. Themes of individual conscience versus despotic authority resonate across the collection, where rulers, rebels, and courtly intrigues mirror the historical struggles that animated Hungary’s trajectory from repression to cautious autonomy.
Nineteenth‑century Hungarian interest in the East—rooted in linguistic kinships, legends of steppe origins, and emerging Turanist currents—provided fertile ground for tales of Tartar and Central Asian grandeur. Oriental studies flourished in Pest and Vienna, and travelogues by figures like Ármin Vámbéry (1832–1913) popularized Central Asia. Against this backdrop, Jókai’s evocations of Timur (Tamerlane, 1336–1405) and other steppe powers could function as mirrors for Hungarian identity, poised between Europe and Asia. The allure of distant khanates, caravans, and desert campaigns carried both ethnographic curiosity and political allegory, enabling adventures that also contemplate empire, mobility, and the precariousness of sovereignty.
The mid‑century European reading public devoured global histories, including William H. Prescott’s widely translated works on the Spanish conquests. Such narratives stimulated a broader fascination with conquest, colonization, and resistance that reached Budapest’s salons and coffeehouses. Placing action in the Americas—through figures like Pedro de Valdivia (c. 1497–1553) and the Chilean frontier—allowed Jókai to reflect on state‑building, cultural collision, and the ethics of rule from a safe distance. These far‑flung settings provided analogies for the dilemmas facing smaller nations in a world of empires, resonating with Hungarian debates on legitimacy, modernization, and the uses of force under Habsburg and wider European power politics.
Jókai’s era saw rising interest in psychology, physiology, and the uncanny—mesmerism, somnambulism, and nocturnal disorders were debated in medical journals and salons alike. Gaslit streets in Pest and Buda, spreading from the 1850s, created new urban nights that intensified fascination with dreamlike perceptions. Romantic literature traded in moonlit tableaux, thresholds between sleep and wakefulness, and the fragility of rational control. In a tale like The Moonlight Somnambulist, these currents animate questions of will, culpability, and desire. The period’s scientific curiosity and stagecraft—shaped by the National Theatre founded in 1837—offered narrative techniques that blended sensation, introspection, and spectacle across Jókai’s fiction.
Jókai matured with the rise of mass periodicals and serialized fiction. He contributed to and edited journals such as Életképek in 1848, honing a style tailored to installment reading: cliffhangers, rapid scene changes, and vivid tableaux. The constraints of censorship during the 1850s encouraged indirection—historical allegory, foreign courts, and remote campaigns—while the expanding book market in Budapest, Vienna, and Leipzig carried his stories beyond Hungary through German translations. The mix of melodrama, political subtext, and ethnographic color suited a broad audience. Such print networks shaped the pacing and architecture of works gathered in In Love With the Czarina, and Other Stories.
After the Austro‑Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Jókai served in the Hungarian Diet, aligned with liberal modernization under Emperor Franz Joseph I and reformers in the Deák tradition. The unification of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda in 1873 and the 1896 millennial celebrations fostered a forward‑looking urban culture that nevertheless mined the past for symbols. Jókai’s narratives, oscillating between heroic antiquity and present ambition, speak to this duality: they parse the costs of centralization, the charisma of rulers, and the durability of national myth. Whether at a Russian court, a Tartar camp, or a colonial outpost, questions of legitimacy and progress remain central.
Hungary’s position at the crossroads of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian spheres lent particular urgency to Jókai’s global canvases. Memories of Ottoman wars, the 1241–1242 Mongol invasion’s devastation, and eighteenth‑century Habsburg reconquest made empire a lived inheritance. Multiethnic realities—Magyar, Slovak, German, Romanian, Serb, Jewish communities—shaped a habit of viewing identity as layered and negotiated. Trade routes linking the Danube to the Black Sea, and scholarly ties to Vienna and Berlin, brought news of distant conquests and courts. These conditions encouraged Jókai to treat the Tartar steppe, the Russian palace, and the American frontier as comparative laboratories for power, faith, and survival.
Synopsis (Selection)
INTRODUCTION
A brief framing of Jókai’s historical-romantic mode, outlining the collection’s blend of adventure, court intrigue, and moral reflection. It situates the stories across varied geographies and eras to highlight universal human motives.
IN LOVE WITH THE CZARINA
A courtly romance set in imperial Russia, in which a loyal courtier’s forbidden attachment to the czarina draws him into intrigue, tests of allegiance, and perilous political crosscurrents.
TAMERLAN THE TARTAR (CHAPTERS I–XV)
A historical-adventure novella that dramatizes the ascent of a formidable steppe conqueror and the destinies of those in his orbit, interweaving warfare, statecraft, and shifting loyalties. The narrative balances sweeping campaigns with intimate vows, betrayals, and reversals.
VALDIVIA
A conquest-era tale set in South America that follows an ambitious commander whose designs confront the land’s hardships, the resistance of its people, and the limits of calculation. Martial enterprise and colonial ambition are counterpoised with personal risk and fate.
BIZEBAN
An Eastern court story centered on a seemingly powerless ‘mute’ whose silence becomes leverage in a world of suspicion and intrigue. Through restraint and cunning, hidden truths surface and the balance of power subtly shifts.
THE MOONLIGHT SOMNAMBULIST
A gothic-tinged romance in which a sleepwalker’s nocturnal wanderings expose a troubling secret that imperils reputations and tender attachments. Observant allies and timely courage steer the mystery toward a measured resolution.
