The Enchanted Night

In these stark, haunting stories, Miklós Bánffy evokes the mountain landscapes and cultural traditions of Transylvania in rich detail. These are communities of sharp rivalries and religious superstition: young Borbálka, about to marry an unsuitable man, receives strange counsel from a suspicious figure in her village; four men seek to exploit the captive Gavrila Lung for money, while mountain wolves howl in the distance; when Old Damaskin betrays his stepson to hold on to his land, his wife extracts bizarre revenge.

Translated into English for the first time by the award-winning Len Rix, this collection further establishes Bánffy as one of the foremost European writers of the twentieth century.

The majority of these stories were published in the 1942 volume Farkasok, but this is a new selection of Bánffy’s stories that features work from as early as 1896 and as late as 1946.

Miklós Bánffy was born Count Miklós Bánffy de Losoncz in Hungary in 1873. Over the course of his life, he studied law and wrote plays, novels, and short stories, and he became a groundbreaking set designer, an accomplished cartoonist, a politician, and a diplomat. 

A leading figure in the Transylvanian Hungarian community, in 1943, he urged the Romanian government to cut ties with Germany in the Second World War; two years later, a retreating German army looted his estate. He remained in Transylvania after it was invaded by the Soviet Red Army, and, emaciated and penniless, he reunited with his family in Budapest in 1949. He died a year later.