Short Stories from the Balkans/Koloman Mikszáth

KOLOMAN MIKSZÁTH

Koloman Mikszáth (born in Sklebonya in 1849) is without doubt the best loved writer of Hungary. Why should he not be? He has something of the witty descriptive powers of Heine, the fluent unforced narrative of Dumas, and a peculiar charm which is all his own. He is a painter of inimitable miniatures, glowing with color, truthful in action, a veritable Meissonier of the pen.

In these, spiritedly drawn, richly peopled, diminutive little pictures we see all Hungary pass before us: the burger class, the petty nobility, the church, the state and the peasant. Sometimes these stories are ironic—because Mikszáth is numbered among the humorists—sometimes idyllic, sometimes realistic, and sometimes they are bitter and incisive, and strike home with a certain fatal touch of intimité, telling truths from which we can not get away. He has been a productive writer, and we do not need to go out of his native Hungary for a worthy parallel, when we pause to recall that Maurice Jokai wrote three hundred novels and tales.

Mikszáth is author of a novel, “Mácsik the Mighty,” which reproduces the life of the petty nobility in upper Hungary. His short stories are collected into many volumes, such as “Club and Corridor,” which stories were first published in the daily he himself edited, “Pesti Hirlap” (The Times of Budapest).

Other books are “Slovak Brothers,” “Madame Paul Szontagh,” “The City That Had No Men,” “The Magic Caftan,” “The Miraculous Umbrella.”

We include two stories; one, from the writer’s own experience in a small community where he was made judge at the age of twenty three; the other—“Fiddlers Three,” from that remarkable book of fantastic and imaginative writing, which is strung together in a series of tales under the name of “The Deaf Blacksmith.”

In 1887 he began to take an interest in politics and became a member of the Reichstag, where he threw his influence with the Liberal party.

This union of the poet and the wit, the romantic dreamer and the shrewd and bitter critic of life, is one, of the gifts of Hungary and its neighboring peoples to the world of letters. It is seldom found in the Teuton or the Latin, even in a slight degree.

A volume of the short stories of Mikszáth was published in America some years ago. His first appearance in English was the short story, “The King’s Clothes,” ^[1] which antedated the book.

1. MIKSZÁTH (Koloman). “The King’s Clothes.” See Underwood, Edna Worthley. (“Famous Stories From Foreign Countries.”)