Reading More Was Lost in wartime: A memoir from the hinge of history explains the national identity and territorial struggles of Ukraine
Will Collins
The 20th-century history of one unlucky corner of Eastern Europe sounds like the answer to a bad riddle. What region was once ruled by the Habsburgs, the Czechs, the Hungarians, and the Russians but now belongs to Ukraine? If you answered Transcarpathia, you’ve probably read More Was Lost, a memoir originally published in 1946, and a charming but ultimately tragic account of an American woman’s marriage to a local baron on the eve of World War II. Reading More Was Lost is a bit like stumbling across a very sharp friend’s private diary if your friend happened to live at a hinge point in history.
The mountains and vineyards of Transcarpathia are a romantic backdrop for the adventures of Eleanor Perényi, the young American woman who married the baron and found herself mistress of a sprawling country property. The setup recalls the lighthearted farces that Hollywood produced around the same time the book depicts: strong-willed Yankee marries into an aristocratic Hungarian family, gradually endears herself to the locals, and eventually learns to manage the estate. This seemingly outlandish premise is brought to life by Eleanor’s amusingly direct style and keen eye for local color. But there is also a sense of tragic foreboding, brought on by the reader’s knowledge, and Eleanor’s dawning realization, of the war to come.
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Few areas in Eastern Europe enjoyed a tranquil 20th century, but Transcarpathia’s experience is unusual even by the region’s turbulent standards. At the turn of the last century, this obscure province was the easternmost frontier of Roman Catholicism, the Latin alphabet, and the tottering Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I, it was awarded to Czechoslovakia, one of several successor states that emerged after the empire’s dissolution. The Czechoslovakians administered the province, but the local landowners were still mostly Hungarians, who resented the new regime and dreamed of reuniting with the mother country. The peasants who worked the land and spoke their own peculiar Slavic dialect were known as Ruthenians. Today, we would call them Ukrainians.
Eleanor Perényi (née Stone) is quite a character in her own right. She meets her future husband, the much older Baron Zsigmond Perényi, at age 19 while visiting Budapest. After a weeklong courtship, they decide to marry, and Eleanor spends most of the next three years at the family estate in Transcarpathia. A quick study, Eleanor learns Hungarian and gradually adapts to her new role as lady of the manor.
Eleanor’s marriage into the Perényi family served as a brief but memorable tour of a rapidly vanishing premodern Europe. In 1937, moving to Transcarpathia from the United States was a bit like going back in time. Cash and electricity were suddenly scarce. Horse-drawn transportation was more reliable than Zsigmond’s ramshackle motorcar. The locals, including the august Perényi clan, had to barter agricultural products for essential goods and luxuries. (Wine was the currency of choice for small jobs.) Despite their subordinate status, the baron’s retainers were more like family members than professional servants.
The Perényis’ countryside idyll is short lived. Even distant Transcarpathia can’t escape the shadow of Nazi Germany. The English-speaking, Oxford-educated Zsigmond was a liberal aristocrat who had reconciled himself to land reform and foreign rule, but many Hungarians in the 1930s were fatally compromised by nationalist resentment. An autocratic regime in Budapest obsessed over the recovery of Hungary’s lost provinces, including Transcarpathia, and was willing to accommodate Hitler to further this ambition. Hungary’s fateful entanglement with the Axis powers would eventually lead to the deployment of Hungarian troops on the Eastern Front, the occupation of Hungary by the German army, and the near-total liquidation of Hungarian Jewry.
The idea of national character has fallen out of fashion, but More Was Lost proves that a perceptive observer can capture certain insights about a country or a region’s inhabitants without lapsing into crude stereotypes. Eleanor was clearly charmed by the Hungarians, but she was perceptive enough to identify several of their recurring faults. She notes a narrow provincialism, probably a result of Hungary’s uniquely difficult language, that discouraged even the educated class from taking an undue interest in the outside world.
The Hungarians are still oddly charming, still largely uninterested in the outside world, and still consumed by their own parochial concerns. Memorials to Trianon, the post-World War I treaty that stripped Hungary of many of her historic territories and so angered the interwar Hungarian aristocracy, can be found in small towns and villages across the country. The loss of “Greater Hungary” is often lamented by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has gone to considerable lengths to build ties with Hungarian communities in nearby countries, often irritating his neighbors in the process.
One of those irate neighbors is Ukraine, which has good reason to be wary of restive minorities. The Ukrainians, or “Ruthenians” as they are often called by Eleanor, are a peripheral concern at the beginning of More Was Lost. Partly this can be attributed to the language barrier, as Eleanor was understandably focused on learning her husband’s mother tongue. Class is another factor. Eleanor may have been a no-nonsense Yankee who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, but she was still the baroness. Most of the local Ukrainians were quite literally peasants.
For the early part of the book, the Ruthenians exist to provide local color. Eleanor favorably compares their vibrant folk costumes to the Hungarians’ dour black-and-white palette. As storm clouds gather on the horizon, however, the natives start getting restless. “It began to be said that the Ruthenians were really Ukrainians,” Eleanor notes with surprise about halfway through the book. A virulent brand of nationalism, which had already inflamed many Hungarians against their neighbors, had finally reached Transcarpathia. In the political confusion that follows the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Eleanor and Zsigmond briefly contend with a Ukrainian puppet state backed by the Germans. The cause of Ukrainian independence would be fatally compromised by its wartime association with the Nazis, a legacy that poisons Ukrainian politics even today.
The political maneuvers that followed the dissolution of Czechoslovakia were a prelude to Eastern Europe’s brutal wartime experience. A region that had been historically defined by its mixed character was torn apart by nationalisms and ideologies. “We always fight on the wrong side, you know,” laments a Hungarian to Eleanor later in the book. The tragedy of World War II was that there was no “right side” for Eastern Europeans to choose from. The Allies were distant and largely unconcerned with the plight of small nations caught between great powers; witness the abandonment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the Poles’ valiant but futile stand against Hitler in 1939. The Nazis, meanwhile, cynically played on the national aspirations of their putative allies to divide and conquer. Hungarian revanchists and Ukrainian nationalists were merely tools to be used and then discarded by Berlin.
Bound up in these national struggles are the smaller personal tragedies that make up the second half of More Was Lost: the uncertain fate of the Jewish family on a neighboring farm, the refugee Polish officer and his wife who spend several weeks at the Perényi estate after fleeing the German blitzkrieg, and the magnificent Cousin Laci, a charming but proudly old-fashioned Hungarian landowner who was, writes Eleanor, “certainly hanged” by the communists.
Then there are the Perényis themselves, whose fairytale romance can’t survive the fortunes of war. Throughout the book, Eleanor is admirably direct about her own naivete, her impressions of the locals, and the challenges of managing a semi-feudal estate on the periphery of Eastern Europe. The only thing she leaves to the reader’s imagination is what is said between her and Zsigmond on the eve of her final departure after she has finally been convinced to leave Transcarpathia for the sake of their unborn son. All the reader knows is that the two do not reunite after the war. Maybe this omission is for the best. One book can only contain so much sadness.
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Will Collins teaches at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.