Overview
The Dukays are the oldest aristocratic family in Hungary, and this is the tale of their inexorable decline after the First World War. It is the story of Zia Dukay, youngest of Count Dupi¹s daughters, a modern girl born into feudal splendor in the immense family castle of Ararat, and married with medieval pomp. Not since Scarlett O¹Hara has there been so courageous a heroine, so determined to survive the wreck of family fortunes with the man she loves. It is also the story of Zia¹s sister Christina, romantically involved with the deposed Hapsburg king; of her brother Georgy, who leaves for America; and of Janos, who becomes a Nazi. Told in great richness of detail, The Dukays is a tumultuous and sweeping saga. Lajos Zilahy is the leading Hungarian novelist of the 20th century; among his books are Two Prisoners and Century in Scarlet, also published in the Lost Treasures series.Synopsis
A family pulled apart as tradition meets the changing values and politics of the 20th century. Count Dukay's castles and thousands of acres aren't enough to stem the tides of Nazism, fascism and communism while his sons and daughters are forced to find their way in the strange new world. Historically accurate, filled with universal truths, written with a European flair, The Dukays documents that critical moment in history when power changes hands.
Kirkus Reviews
An enormously readable romantic epic, first published in 1949, traces the precipitous decline of an aristocratic Hungarian family in the years following WWI. Haughty Count Istvan Dukay and his dull-witted spouse Countess Menti ignore the signs that their world is changing, while their four children pursue varying destinies: romantic Christina as a passionate intellectual hopelessly in love with a dethroned and moribund monarch; rootless Georgy in a pragmatic marriage to an American heiress to a meat-packing fortune; troubled Janos in homosexual submission to a malevolent mentor and in the energies of Nazism; and spirited Zia in a conflicted union with a scholarly astronomer who bears a strong resemblance to Tolstoy's ardent humanitarian Pierre Bezukhov. Echoes of Proust and King Lear are also heard, but Zilahy's scattergun plotting and discursive criticisms of the myopic Hungarian nobility dilute the novel's force. The Dukays isn't War and Peace, therefore. But it is an absorbing and highly entertaining chronicle that somebody really ought to consider turning into a miniseries.