by various authors

“ Koloman Mikszáth (born in Sklebonya in 1849) is without doubt the best loved writer of Hungary. Why should he not be? He has something of the witty descriptive powers of Heine, the fluent unforced narrative of Dumas, and a peculiar charm which is all his own. He is a painter of inimitable miniatures, glowing with color, truthful in action, a veritable Meissonier of the pen. In these, spiritedly drawn, richly peopled, diminutive little pictures we see all Hungary pass before us: the burger class, the petty nobility, the church, the state and the peasant. ”

“ He has tried his skill at every sort of writing, but it is as poet that he is greatest, although it is not easy to pass stable judgment upon such a many-sided, changing accomplishment. He belongs to a certain period of Bohemian renaissance which is sometimes spoken of as the movement of the sixties, a movement fruitful and far reaching. ”

“ Sometimes these stories are ironic—because Mikszáth is numbered among the humorists—sometimes idyllic, sometimes realistic, and sometimes they are bitter and incisive, and strike home with a certain fatal touch of intimité, telling truths from which we can not get away. ”