Foreign Classical Romances: Poor Plutocrats

Mric Jkay de sva (Maurus Jokai, 1825-1904) was a Hungarian dramatist and novelist. Poor Plutocrats, or Poor Rich, is the most widely known of all Maurus Jkai's masterpieces, which is set in "the wild, romantic, sylvan regions of the Wallachian and Transylvanian Alps, which is the theatre of the exploits of that prince of robber chieftains, the mighty and mysterious Fatia Negra, and the home of those picturesque Roumanian peasants." Mric Jkay de sva (1825 - 1904), outside Hungary also known as Maurus Jokai, was a Hungarian dramatist and novelist. Jkai was extremely prolific. It was to literature that he continued to devote most of his time and his productiveness after 1870 was stupendous, amounting to some hundreds of volumes. Stranger still, none of this work is slipshod and the best of it deserves to endure. Amongst the finest of his later works may be mentioned the unique and incomparable Az arany ember (A Man of Gold, translated into English, among others, under the title The Man with the Golden Touch), the most popular A koszvu ember fiai (The Heartless Man's Sons), the heroic chronicle of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and A tengerszemu hlgy (Eyes like the Sea), the latter of which won the Academy's prize in 1890. He was also an amateur chess player. His jvo szzad regnye (The novel of the next century - 1872) is accounted an important early work of Science Fiction though the term did not yet exist at the time. In spite of its romantic trappings, this monumental two-volume novel includes some acute observations and almost prophetic visions, such as the prediction of a revolution in Russia and the establishment of a totalitarian state there, or the arrival of aviation. Because it could be read as a satirical allegory on Leninism and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, the book was banned in Hungary in the decades of the Communist rgime. (Its "Critical Edition" was delayed until 1981.)