Miklós Jósika
1794–1865
Biography
Miklós Jósika (1794–1865) was a Hungarian baron, soldier, journalist and politician who is remembered above all as a novelist. He was born at Torda in Transylvania. After several years as an officer during the Napoleonic wars he took up the life of a landowner and public man in Transylvania and Hungary. He introduced himself as a novelist with Abafi in 1836, and Hungarian literary histories count him as the creator of the Hungarian romantic novel.
Abafi is rooted in Transylvania, the region of the author's birth, and it follows the pattern of the Romantic historical fiction that Walter Scott had made popular. Reviewers welcomed it when it appeared, and Jósika went on to write further historical novels, among them Zrínyi, a költő (1843), a novel about the seventeenth-century poet and soldier Miklós Zrínyi. In the Transylvanian and Hungarian assemblies he backed the joining of Transylvania to Hungary, and in 1848 he joined the National Defence Committee that carried on the revolutionary government.
After the revolution was defeated his estates were confiscated, and he was condemned to death in his absence. He spent the rest of his life in exile, first in Brussels and then in Dresden, where he died in 1865. Abafi, the book on this site, remains the work for which he is best remembered, and it is the place to start with his writing.
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Books
Abafi: regény
by Miklós Jósika
Olivér Abafi, a young Transylvanian nobleman wasting his life in idleness and dissipation, is changed by love and by service to Prince Zsigmond Báthory in the 1590s. One of the first Hungarian historical novels, written in the manner of Walter Scott.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.