In fact, dear niece, I tried long ago but soon abandoned the line of investigation noted above. Most of the authors concerned wrote their books during the previous century and died before my birth. (You must have observed that I learned my own style of writing from those worthies.) I read just enough about the lives of the authors of my admired books to learn that they were vain and arrogant persons and much given to pettiness. But what of the present century? A great change has occurred in books during this century. The writers of those books have tried to describe what they had better have left unreported. The writers of the present century have lost respect for the invisible. I have never troubled myself to learn about the writers themselves. (I exclude from these remarks a certain writer from a small island-republic in the North Atlantic. I learned of the existence of his books by a remarkable chance and read several in translation, but I could not bring myself afterwards to compose any message for him in his cliff-bound homeland.)
I have come to hope, dear niece, that the act of writing may be a sort of miracle as a result of which invisible entities are made aware of each other through the medium of the visible. But how can I believe that the awareness is mutual? Although I have sometimes felt one or another of my beloved personages as a presence nearby, I have had no grounds for supposing that she might even have imagined my possible existence.
On a day long ago, when I was somewhat cast down from thinking of these matters, I wrote my first letter to you, dear niece. I sought a way out of my isolation by means of the following, admittedly simplistic, proposition: if the act of writing can bring into being personages previously unimagined by either writer or reader, then I might dare to hope for some wholly unexpected outcome from my own writing, although it could never be part of any book.
How many years have passed since then you and I alone know, and this, as I have told you, is my last letter. However little I may know of it, I remain hopeful that something will come of this writing.
Something will come of this writing. I was born in Transylvania in the seventeenth century of the modern era. I became in my youth a follower of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi. When the Prince went into exile after the War of Independence, I was one of the band of followers who went with him. In the second decade of the eighteenth century, we arrived at the port of Gallipoli as invited guests of the Sultan of Turkey. Shortly afterwards, I wrote the first of my letters to my aunt, the Countess P—, in Constantinople. We followers of Prince Rákóczi had hoped that our exile might not be for long, but almost all of us remained for the rest of our lives in Turkey, and even those few who left Turkey were never allowed to return to their native land, my native land. For forty-one years, until almost the last year of my life, I wrote regularly to my aunt. I wrote to her almost a full account of my life. One of the few matters that I chose not to write openly about was my solitary state. Only a few of the exiles were women, and all of these were married. Most of us men remained solitary throughout our lives.
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Dear Reader
The following is adapted from one of the seven pages about the life and the writing of Kelemen Mikes in the Oxford History of Hungarian Literature, 1984.
The Letters from Turkey were regarded by critics for a long time only as a source for the history of the exiles. Much futile research was done in an attempt to find traces of the mysterious Countess P— who proved never to have existed. Mikes never sent his letters to any ‘aunt’ but copied them into a letter-book, which was found after his death.
Publisher’s Note
The authors of the books referred to in ‘A History of Books’ are believed to include Miguel Ángel Asturias, Giorgio di Chirico, Charles Dickens, Margaret McKenzie, Mikhail Petrovich Artzybashev, James Joyce, Frank Wedekind, R.C. Sherriff and Vernon Bartlett, George Borrow, John Clare, Christopher Brennan, Thomas Hardy, Herman Hesse, Gerald Murnane, Roger Longrigg, Joseph Conrad, Elias Canetti, Brian Aldiss, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James T. Farrell, François Mauriac, William Styron, Frederick Exley, George Gissing, Henry Handel Richardson, Frank Dalby Davison, D.M. Body, Roy Campbell, Robert Musil, Gyula Illyés, Emily Brontë, André Maurois, Jack Kerouac, Sándor Márai and Halldór Laxness.