Novel
A rajongók
Not translated into English
Zsigmond Kemény · 1859
Opening lines
Azon nagy vallásháborúnak, melyet, a kik a békekötést megérték, harmincz évesnek neveztek, derekán vagyunk.
We are in the middle of that great war of religion which those who lived to see the peace called the Thirty Years' War.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Transylvania, late 1638. Prince György Rákóczi has the law against the Sabbatarians, a sect that observes the Sabbath, enforced. István Kassai, a counsellor who has risen very high from a commoner's birth, wants to use it to bring down his rival, the former chancellor Simon Péchi, protector of the sect, a parvenu like him but a friend of the sciences and the arts. Elemér, Kassai's nephew, loves Deborah, Péchi's daughter. Kassai discovers that the Sabbatarian preacher István Laczkó is a fugitive serf from his lands and, under threat, makes him his informer.
Context
The novel appeared in Pest in 1858 and 1859, from Ferdinánd Pfeifer, while its author was editing the Pesti Napló. It takes up a real episode in the history of Transylvania: the enforcement, in 1638, of the law that struck the Sabbatarians, and the trial brought against Péchi, their protector, formerly chancellor of the principality. Kemény shows religious designs that hide political aims, and beneath these, personal passions.
Who it is for
A long historical novel, dense with seventeenth-century Transylvanian politics; an extract translated into French, under the title Zélateurs, appears in the anthology D'Etelka aux sabbataires (2021).
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the author's masterpiece, and as the most complex and the most unified of his novels.