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# Memoirs and Personalities

Dávid Rozsnyai was familiar with Turkish, and had served as a clerk to Prince Mihály Apafi. When he offered his services to Ferenc Rákóczi II, Rozsnyai also submitted to the new prince a work entitle Horologium Turcicum. In the event, this Turkish version of the Panchatantra never saw print; people were absorbed in their own problems, and those in need of guidance cared little about tales from the Far East. The dominant forms of prose in this period were journals and memoirs.

Most of the journals and diaries were born of the necessity of office. János Komáromi was bound by his job as secretary to the prince to keep a diary, which he did between 1695 and 1705 at Thököly's court. Diplomatic envoys also kept diaries as part of their job. Among the more significant journals is that kept by Mihály Bay while he was at the Porte (1692–1693). István Vargyasi Daniel did likewise during his mission to the voivode of Wallachia, and both Gáspár Pápay and Mihály Bay kept a daily record while serving as envoys to the Tartar khan (1706).

Another diarist, János Pápai, came from a propertyless family of the lower nobility and studied at the university of Frankfurt an {2-495.} der Oder. He became bailiff on Governor György Bánffy's estate at Ecsed, then was made prisoner by Rákóczi's forces. Pápai soon bounced back to become head of the Hungarian chancellery, and he was sent by the prince on several missions to the Porte. His diplomatic diary was full of Oriental tales, anecdotes, and descriptions of folk customs; indeed, it was so entertaining that it attracted a wide readership (1705–1708, 1710).

There were also diaries written for purely personal reasons. Not trusting their memory, people sought to keep a lasting record of fast-moving events. Over Transylvania's last fifty years of statehood, changes had come hard and fast, and thoughtful people felt a compulsion to note down their experiences, if only to justify themselves. Historical consciousness generated a sense of community and of responsibility for the nation's future. Pál Izdenczy's diary opens in 1660, with the fall of his home town, Várad; it ends with the great fire of 1697 in Kolozsvár. György Czegei Wass, who began his career at the court of Mihály Apafi and ended it as Kolozsvár's military commander under Ferenc Rákóczi II, left a record of the trying times when that town was occupied by the imperial army and besieged by Rákóczi's Kuruc forces. The personal history of György Vizaknai Bereck, who had studied at Franeker and Leiden, adopted Cartesianism, and become a Cartesian doctor and judge at Kolozsvár, is a reflection of the trials suffered by both town and principality. He served as Rákóczi's inspector at the mint in Nagybánya, and participated in diets as well as military campaigns. After Kolozsvár had been recaptured by the imperial forces, Vizaknai was separated from his family for four years; during that time four of his children died, three of them from the plague, and he himself became seriously ill. Judging from his journal, he was more interested in people than in military or political events. He related in undramatic style the steadfast resistance shown by Kolozsvár's soldiers, craftsmen, carters, and vineyard workers, and provided much factual information about the circumstances {2-496.} and mentality of ordinary people. Zsigmond Szaniszló, a Unitarian and chief magistrate of Torda, recorded the apprehensions of Transylvania's nobility, leavening the mournful tale with flashes of wry humour. The stressful life of the people of Kolozsvár was recorded, in colourful Hungarian, by Ferenc Szakál, a prosperous craftsman and the 'Saxon curator' of the Unitarians.

It is difficult to draw a clear line between diaries and memoirs. Journals that record events represent a useful historical source, particularly if they include the texts of official documents, proclamations, and correspondence. Personal diaries that were designed to enlighten relatives or some other small social circle were tantamount to full-fledged memoirs; they were one of the period's distinctive forms of literary activity.

János Kemény's Önéletírás (Autobiography) was written in Tartar captivity, in 1657–59, and explicitly intended as 'a memoir for my dear kinfolk and children.'[176]176. Kemény J. önéletírása, I. One finds, woven through the story of Kemény and his family, a uniquely rich overview of Transylvania's history from the Fifteen Years' War to the beginning of György Rákóczi II's reign. Kemény was educated while serving as a page at the court of Gabriel Bethlen. His career as diplomat (he also spoke Romanian) and soldier spanned the reigns of two great princes, Bethlen and György Rákóczi I, whose policies he helped to fashion and implement. Kemény was familiar with Machiavelli's work and, as Ákos Barcsai attests, had a keen interest in the art of politics. His vivid assessments of politicians and events show him to be an astute observer. Since Kemény adopted a tone that was ironic and devastatingly critical of himself and others, historians have had great difficulty in identifying his political motivation in writing the memoir. He ranked Gabriel Bethlen with King Stephen the Saint and King Matthias as one of the greatest political leaders in the history of Hungary. It is clear from his account of Bethlen that Kemény's ideal sovereign was a modern ruler who creates a strong army, maintains order, and patronizes the sciences and the {2-497.} arts. His autobiography and other, public communications bear traces of Zrínyi's influence, for he places great store by policies that generate national unity. Kemény considered that the greatest Hungarian politicians of his time were Bethlen, Pázmány, and Miklós Esterházy. In his assessment of the events of 1644–48, he took into account the anti-Turkish alliance between Poland, Venice, and Transylvania. Kemény's autobiography is rich in vivid, at times rambling descriptions, and the assessment of its political implications is far from complete.

Another major Transylvanian memoir is that of Gábor Kornis, a Catholic who dwelt on the moral dilemmas of courtiers and was critical of Apafi's style of governance. Thököly's journals recount that extraordinary man's political struggles and defeats. Mihály Cserei, who sheltered in Brassó during Rákóczi's War of Independence, produced a historical treatise that is on the borderline between autobiography and historiography. In the preface, written in verse, the author declares that his only wish is to present the truth. Cserei's record of events, intrigues, and human lives forms a comparatively well-structured narrative. His original intent had been to provide an authentic account of Transylvania in the late 17th century, but the work evolved into something other than pure history: a string of fascinating, at times exciting tales, concerning plots, intrigues, and conspiracies by members of the aristocracy in a Transylvania shorn of its autonomy. Cserei seemed to pander to a taste for trivia; he wove together high politics and love affairs, and devoted less attention to affairs of state than to gossip overheard at hunts and balls. His work offers revealing portraits of aristocrats, men and women, as well as glimpses of concurrent developments in the rest of Europe, and it is studded with documentary evidence; on the other hand, it lacks the necessary degree of detachment. Cserei was a great raconteur, and perhaps one reason his work never saw print was that he had revealed too much.

{2-498.} Miklós Bethlen began work on his Önéletírás (Autobiogra-phy) while imprisoned at Szeben, in 1708, and completed it after he was transferred to captivity in Vienna. Realistic and full of personal insights, his work is one of the finest memoirs in the Hungarian language. It was partly a record, partly an exercise in self-justification; he chose to write in Hungarian because he intended that his wife and children be 'instructed' by the memoir. In recounting his life, Bethlen offers a probing analysis of his motives and actions. He repeatedly affirms that he is not writing history, but as the narrative progresses, he devotes more and more attention to his environment. Bethlen's depiction of Transylvania's aristocratic society is critical but accurate, and he is no more complimentary in his reflections on the Kuruc campaigns. He sympathized with the other captives at Szeben and with the suffering people of towns and villages. Understandably, he saw little prospect in Rákóczi's principality; in 1708, when Bethlen began to write his memoir, Rákóczi had lost almost all of Transylvania. Perhaps the best example of Bethlen's masterful skill at reconstituting events is his evocative account of the last hours of Miklós Zrínyi.

Another Transylvanian aristocrat, István Wesselényi, had served as lord lieutenant of Közép-Szolnok County before being confined at Szeben during the eight-year-long war. His journal, which extends to five volumes, bears testimony to a good observer and a skilled writer. He writes of aristocrats, soldiers, and captives, of individual lives as well as of social groups and their distinctive attitudes, and fashions representative types, such as the woman whose husband is captive, and whose sons are, one a Kuruc rebel, the other a servant of the governor; the harassed prisoner, made ill by food prepared from mouldy grain; the brave soldier from the highlands, ready to sacrifice life for his nation; or aristocrats who, having given up on political action, join at carnival time with the equally depressed German officers to dress up in Kuruc costumes and play silly war games. Wesselényi caricatured Rabutin as the {2-499.} typical, rootless mercenary general and agent of Habsburg absolutism, one who finds himself in a civilized but strange country where he works off his fear in comic rages and perverse, merciless deeds. The memoir reveals more about the world around Bethlen than about the author himself. His remarkably realistic evocation of people and events is leavened by occasional descriptions of nature that carry their own symbolic message. One such passage holds a mirror to the feelings of a man trapped by events: 'Today, just before sunset, as I sat pensively by the window of my prison cell, I saw the first swallow of the year. May God grant that I see my own little abandoned swallows, too, before the swallows leave again, and that, like the birds of summer who fly home in the spring, we can return peacefully to our dear ancestral land'.[177]177. István Wesselényi's diary, 30 March 1704, in Sanyarú világ, ed. by A. Magyari (Bucharest, 1983), pp. 73-4.

Memoirs were this era's most distinctive form of literature. The old-fashioned historical chronicle surfaced one last time with Gerzson Veres Dálnoki's Kurucz krónika; a new style of historiography was beginning to unfold with accounts of urban and church history, and collections of documents. Meanwhile, the personal experience of history was being preserved in memoirs. The latter gave testimony to the achievements and reverses suffered in the period of Transylvania's independent statehood, and to a growing sense of individual responsibility.