The Poor Plutocrats

A Transylvanian squire of enormous wealth and no occupation, a robber chief in the mountains who is a gentleman, and a girl in a manor house between them. Jókai read out the demands of the 1848 revolution on the steps of the Pest museum and was hunted for it afterwards; he wrote well over a hundred books, and this is the one where his Hungary is at its most extravagant — a country of grandees, brigands and unpaid bills. Sixty paintings of horses at work and war, from Aivazovsky to Hokusai, run alongside Jókai's tale of a Hungary where grandees and brigands ride hard.