The Day of Wrath

Jókai wrote this novel in the wreckage of the 1848-49 Magyar revolution, and the bitterness shows. The story opens in the spring of 1831, in the village of Hétfalu, where an old woman called the death-bird goes about prophesying doom and the peasantry believe her. Cholera reaches the county soon after. What follows is the historical uprising it touched off in northeastern Hungary: quarantine measures misread as murder, rumors that the gentry had poisoned the wells, a peasant revolt put down in blood, all traced through the ruin of the Hétfalusy family. R. Nisbet Bain, who translated it in 1900, called it a tale of suffering, crime and punishment, and also a satire on the semi-feudal Hungary that made such a catastrophe possible. Jókai spares neither the ignorance of the mob nor the gentry whose neglect fed it.