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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Tales From J√≥kai," M√≥r J√≥kai masterfully weaves together a rich tapestry of Hungarian folklore, history, and romance through a series of captivating narratives. Known for his vibrant prose and imaginative storytelling, J√≥kai's literary style reflects the Romantic era's emphasis on individual experience and national identity. Each tale unfolds with vivid imagery and intricate characterizations, transporting readers to a world imbued with the cultural complexities and socio-political dynamics of 19th-century Hungary, while honoring the oral traditions that shaped Hungarian storytelling. M√≥r J√≥kai, often referred to as the 'Hungarian Dickens,' was not only a prolific novelist but also a prominent figure in the political landscape of his time. Growing up against the backdrop of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, J√≥kai's own experiences and deep love for his homeland profoundly informed his writing. His advocacy for Hungarian independence and his engagement with social issues permeate his works, making them not only entertaining but also deeply meaningful reflections of the national spirit. This collection is highly recommended for readers interested in exploring the breadth of Hungarian literature and cultural history. "Tales From J√≥kai" invites both lay readers and scholars to engage with the rich narrative tradition of Hungary, illuminating the heart and soul of a nation through J√≥kai's exquisite storytelling. 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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Tales From Jókai
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume assembles a single-author selection by Mór Jókai, offering a panoramic view of his narrative art within a unified, accessible collection. Its scope is representative rather than exhaustive, bringing together varied prose works framed by an introductory preface and a concise biographical sketch. By presenting shorter fiction alongside multi-chapter narratives, the collection highlights Jókai’s range while preserving the coherence of his voice. Readers encounter compact pieces next to extended tales, each revealing different facets of his craft. The purpose is to showcase the breadth of one of nineteenth-century Hungary’s most celebrated novelists and to provide an inviting portal into his imaginative, historically attuned storytelling.
The collection spans several prose forms. It includes a preface and a brief biographical account for context, followed by a sequence of shorter narratives and longer tales organized in chapters. Among these are historical pieces shaped like fragments of a chronicle, anecdotal yarns cast in a conversational tone, culturally inflected stories drawing on Ottoman-era settings, and adventurous narratives that approach the scale of novellas or short romances. One work develops into an extended speculative journey that evokes a vanished civilization. Together, these texts range from compact short stories to multi-part narratives, unified by prose storytelling with no separate sections of verse, correspondence, or diary entries.
Across these diverse forms runs a steady current of themes: the testing of character under pressure, the working of justice and retribution, the ironies of fate, and the meeting of cultures in contested spaces. Jókai often places individuals at the crossroads of history and personal conscience, staging conflicts where wit, courage, and integrity are weighed against chance and power. His interest in moral causality appears not as dogma but as narrative energy, propelling events toward reckoning. Even when plots turn playful or anecdotal, the underlying concerns—honor, loyalty, mercy, and the costs of ambition—lend the tales resonance beyond their immediate settings.
Stylistically, the collection showcases hallmarks associated with Jókai’s prose: swift, clear storytelling; vivid descriptive set-pieces; and an ease with shifting registers—from the mock-solemn tone of a chronicle to the intimacy of a raconteur and the sweep of adventurous romance. He employs framed situations, episodic architecture, and sharply drawn contrasts—between city and frontier, authority and insurgency, calculation and impulse. Authorial poise and occasional irony temper high drama, keeping characters human even in heightened circumstances. The result is narrative momentum anchored in precise detail and moral observation, a balance that sustains both compact stories and extended sequences without sacrificing clarity or charm.
Although the settings vary widely—some anchored in Central European towns and courts, others glancing toward Ottoman frontiers or northern capitals—the sensibility remains cohesive. History serves as both backdrop and catalyst, a stage on which personal decisions acquire public consequence. A speculative excursion into a vanished world sits naturally beside chronicle-like episodes and domestic vignettes because each is animated by the same curiosity about human motives and the social fabric that binds or frays them. This breadth allows the collection to trace a continuous arc from intimate dilemmas to civilizational questions without losing the distinct texture of each narrative.
The significance of presenting these works together lies in the way they illuminate Jókai’s versatility and consistency. Readers see how a brief tale can crystallize a moral insight that a longer narrative later tests across many turns of fortune; how humor can soften severity without trivializing it; and how historical consciousness informs even lighter episodes. As a group, the pieces offer a compact introduction to a major nineteenth-century novelist while standing on their own terms. They also provide a window onto Central European cultural memory, revealing how storytelling mediates between collective pasts and the lived experience of individuals.
This arrangement invites several approaches: immersion in the longer sequences, sampling of the short pieces for their tonal variety, or a thematic path attentive to justice, deception, fidelity, and the unpredictable workings of providence. The prefatory materials help situate the author and orient new readers, while returning admirers can enjoy the interplay of motifs across forms and settings. What endures in these pages is not merely historical color or narrative ingenuity, but a humane intelligence that keeps faith with ordinary complexity. Gathered here, these tales affirm Jókai’s lasting appeal: energetic, generous, and alert to both the heart’s urgencies and history’s demands.
Historical Context
Mór Jókai (1825–1904), born in Komárom (today Komárno, Slovakia), emerged from the reform-era ferment of the Kingdom of Hungary to become its most widely read novelist. Educated in Pápa, he formed lasting ties with Sándor Petőfi and the radical intelligentsia of Pest. On 15 March 1848, Jókai helped draft and proclaim the Twelve Points, printed at the Landerer and Heckenast press, and married the celebrated actress Róza Laborfalvi the same year. After the 1849 defeat he lay low during the Bach absolutism, then rebuilt a colossal literary career. From the 1860s he served in the Hungarian Diet, dying in Budapest in 1904.
Jókai wrote for a multiethnic kingdom embedded in the Habsburg Monarchy, whose historical horizons reached from Košice/Kassa (Caschau) and the northern counties to Ottoman-ruled Buda and the Carpathians. His fiction repeatedly returned to zones of contact: the Ottoman–Hungarian frontier under Suleiman I (r. 1520–1566); the Polish–Ruthenian marches where the starosta was a familiar magistracy; and the looming presence of the Russian Empire, with St. Petersburg as its bureaucratic and moral center. By weaving these geographies into shared plots, he transformed borderland institutions—ispán, alispán, starosta—into narrative instruments for exploring sovereignty, loyalty, and the malleable identities of Central Europe.
The 1848–1849 Revolution and War of Independence supplied a living matrix for Jókai’s political imagination. Press freedom, citizen militias, and legal equality—demanded in Pest on 15 March—collided with imperial force when Tsar Nicholas I sent Ivan Paskevich’s army to aid Vienna in 1849. The ensuing decade of Viennese centralization under Minister Alexander Bach imposed censorship that Jókai sidestepped through satire (notably as “Kakas Márton” in Üstökös, launched 1858). After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, he embraced parliamentary life alongside Ferenc Deák and Gyula Andrássy. His narratives often convert this arc—from insurgent idealism to negotiated autonomy—into moral parable.
Socially, Jókai’s world straddled the vanishing county nobility and an ascendant bourgeoisie. He detailed county administration, the etiquette of salons, and the code of honor that sustained dueling culture among the gentry. Municipal law and customary justice, heirs to Werbőczy’s Tripartitum (1514), intersected with imperial statutes and evolving criminal procedure. Confessional plurality—Calvinists, Catholics, Lutherans, Greek Catholics, Jews—meant that tolerance was a negotiated habit more than a fixed doctrine, shaped by earlier Habsburg reforms (notably Joseph II’s Toleration Edict of 1781). Jókai mined this mosaic for character, conflict, and comedy, contrasting provincial stubbornness with urban, liberal self-belief.
Economic modernization formed the practical stage on which Jókai set intrigue and transformation. Railways began with the Pest–Vác line (1846), accelerating circulation of goods and ideas; the Budapest Stock Exchange opened in 1864; and Buda, Pest, and Óbuda unified in 1873. The same year’s global panic rippled through the Dual Monarchy, while Danube shipping and speculative finance powered new fortunes and sudden ruin. Monetary change—culminating in the 1892 introduction of the krone—altered everyday value, a theme Jókai folded into tales of exchange, debt, and retribution. St. Petersburg’s chancelleries and bankers often serve as distant levers tugging Central European destinies.
Nineteenth-century science enlarged Jókai’s repertoire beyond national chronicle into speculative antiquity and proto–science fiction. Geology (Charles Lyell), glaciology (Louis Agassiz), and popularized paleontology invited writers to imagine megatheria, drowned continents, and Ice Age peoples. Archaeological sensationalism—from Central America’s chroniclers John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood to Near Eastern digs—popularized vanished cities and gods like Tezcatlipoca. The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) reframed human history as deep time, a horizon Jókai appropriated for moral and political allegory. His panoramas echo European exploration and Hungarian scholarship alike, transforming scientific debate into adventure and metaphysical inquiry.
Public reform and jurisprudence also anchor Jókai’s plots. Edward Jenner’s vaccine (1796) and the nineteenth-century Habsburg public-health apparatus sparked campaigns, mandates, and resistance, emblematic of the friction between Enlightenment reason and folk belief. Ottoman legal order under Suleiman’s kanun and sharia offered a contrasting justice to Habsburg codifications like the Austrian Civil Code of 1811, while Hungarian legal modernization culminated after 1867 in new procedural and commercial statutes. Jókai juxtaposed these regimes to test equity, mercy, and abuse—from county benches to imperial divans—probing how legitimacy is performed through ritual, symbol, and the personality of judges, priests, and officials.
Jókai’s reception evolved with Budapest’s fin-de-siècle transformation and the 1896 Millennium festivities celebrating a thousand years of Hungarian statehood. His novels and tales became a civic archive, aligning national memory with cosmopolitan modernity. English-language readers met him through late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translations, notably by R. Nisbet Bain, which showcased his range from chronicle and courtroom drama to financial melodrama and speculative antiquity. Places central to his imagination—Kassa/Košice, the Ottoman marches, St. Petersburg—later became emblems of shifting borders, but in his lifetime they mapped a single, contested world. The collection distills that world’s tensions into enduring narrative energy.
Synopsis (Selection)
PREFACE
An editorial introduction that situates the collection within Jókai’s wide-ranging oeuvre, noting its mix of history, humor, romance, and speculative fiction.
BIOGRAPHY OF JÓKAI
A concise life sketch of Mór Jókai, outlining his literary career, public life, and the historical milieu that shaped his prolific output.
I THE CELESTIAL SLINGERS
A comic village episode sparked by a striking event in the heavens, where rumor, bravado, and superstition collide with unexpected flashes of courage.
II THE COMPULSORY DIVERSION—AN OLD BARON'S YARN
An elderly nobleman recounts how a forced detour once swept him into a cascade of duels, disguises, and hairbreadth escapes that defined his youth.
III THE SHERIFF OF CASCHAU—A FRAGMENT OF AN OLD CHRONICLE
A chronicle-style vignette of law and honor in Caschau, as a sheriff’s fraught decision pits duty against loyalty amid civic tension.
IV THE JUSTICE OF SOLIMAN—A TURKISH STORY
A historical tale under Ottoman rule in which Suleiman’s celebrated sense of justice is tested, yielding a verdict that blends power with clemency.
V LOVE AND THE LITTLE DOG
A light romantic anecdote where a small dog becomes the unlikely go-between that sparks and sustains an otherwise impossible courtship.
VI THE RED STAROSTA
A political-romantic adventure of the eastern borderlands tracing a feared local chief and his foes through betrayal money, ideological 'inoculations,' and duels born at the card table. Intrigue pulls the drama toward St. Petersburg, a perilous exchange, and an inexorable reckoning.
VII THE CITY OF THE BEAST A CHAPTER FROM THE HISTORY OF A VANISHED CONTINENT
A lost-world romance framed as ancient records, following voyagers and castaways into a luxuriant, idolatrous continent of megatherium priesthoods, dazzling cities, and rival gods. The sweep runs from Hanno’s tablets to polar survivors and culminates in a cataclysm that erases the continent.
VIII THE HOSTILE SKULLS
A morbidly comic curiosity in which the discovery of two antagonistic skulls exposes an old feud and a buried crime, lampooning pseudoscience and petty hatreds.
IX THE BAD OLD TIMES
A panoramic sketch of bygone hardships and cruelties that punctures nostalgia, showing why the past deserved its grim reputation.
