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Author | Jules Verne |
---|---|
Original title | Mathias Sandorf |
Illustrator | Léon Benett |
Language | French |
Series | The Extraordinary Voyages #27 |
Genre | Adventure novel |
Publisher | Pierre-Jules Hetzel |
Publication date | 1885 |
Publication place | France |
Published in English |
|
Media type | Print (Hardback) |
Preceded by | The Archipelago on Fire |
Followed by | The Lottery Ticket |
Mathias Sandorf is an 1885 adventure book by the French writer Jules Verne first serialized in Le Temps in 1885. It employs many of the devices that had served well in his earlier novels: islands, cryptograms, surprise revelations of identity, technically advanced hardware and a solitary figure bent on revenge. Verne planned Mathias Sandorf as the Mediterranean adventure of his series of novels called Voyages extraordinaires . He dedicated the novel to the memory of Alexandre Dumas.
In Trieste in 1867, two petty criminals, Sarcany and Zirone, discover a carrier pigeon bearing a ciphered message. Locating the recipient of the cipher, they devise a plan to take advantage of their discovery. Sarcany tells Silas Toronthal, a corrupt banker, that he suspects the cipher is part of a plot to liberate Hungary from Habsburg-Austrian rule. Together they form a plan to unlock the cipher and deliver the evidence to the police in exchange for a reward. The three Hungarian conspirators, Count Mathias Sandorf, Stephen Bathory and Ladislas Zathmar (in their Hungarian form: Sándor Mátyás, Báthory István and Szatmári László) are arrested and sentenced to death. They plot an escape, but Zathmar is captured while trying to escape and Bathory is apprehended the next night. Both are executed. Sandorf flees the police and jumps into the Adriatic where he is assumed drowned.
Fifteen years later, Sandorf, who has survived and taken on the identity of Dr. Antekirtt, a renowned physician, sets out to avenge his friends. Enlisting the aid of two French carnival performers, Pescade and Matifou, he searches the Mediterranean for those who engineered the betrayal of his planned uprising. Wealthy and powerful, he rules an island fortress filled with advanced weaponry. He devotes his life to exacting justice from those whose greed brought his friends to their death.
In the generation after Dumas, Jules Verne wrote a number of Wanderer adventures. Three of the most notable, Michael Strogoff , The Steam House (La Maison à vapeur) and Mathias Sandorf, are set in three of Europe's great Empires: the Russian, the British (in India), and the Austrian. Their plots and themes have a good deal in common, as Jean-Yves Tadié points out. Each one is about the empire's political troubles, each features a pursuer who is himself pursued, each has a trio of characters at its centre, and each eschews granting a major role to machinery, a common feature of Verne's novels. [1]
Verne's book begins on May 18, 1867, as preparations for the rising in Hungary are said to be almost complete. The date reflects historical events: on May 29, 1867, the Diet of Hungary ratified the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, shelving their demand for full independence from Austrian rule to gain instead considerable autonomy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire..
Though the compromise is not mentioned, chronology suggests that the Hungarian conspirators aim to frustrate this ratification, seize control of Hungary's urban centers, and declare Hungary independent, gambling that Austria, enfeebled by its recent defeat in the Austro-Prussian War, would accept this fait accompli . Verne's readers would expect this conspiracy to fail in the novel's early chapters. The novel also provides a critique of imperial administration: the Austrian police act in complete secrecy to arrest, court-martial and execute the radical Hungarians.
Verne said that Sandorf was modeled on his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, a former exile and a fervent patriot with a high moral sense. Dr Antekirtt appears based on Hetzel and his friend Nino Bixio. Others see similarities with the Hungarian freedom fighter Lajos Kossuth, who remained unreconciled to the 1867 compromise and Austrian prince Ludwig Salvator.
The action moves from Trieste down the Adriatic coast to Sicily and the shores of North Africa. Verne wrote: "I wish my readers to learn everything they should know about the Mediterranean, which is why the action transports them to twenty different places". [2] Verne based some of the locations on own travels, including a rescue during a storm off Malta and visits to Catania and Mount Etna. Verne researched the Italian landscape by rereading some of Stendhal's works, notably Promenades in Rome and The Charterhouse of Parma . Verne may have first heard about the foiba beneath the Pisino Castle in Charles Yriarte's works Les Bords de l'Adriatique [3] and Trieste e l'Istria. [4] Yriatre described the old castle and a trip down into the gorge. He also mentioned a young nobleman, Count Esdorff, who lost his life trying to explore the underground parts of a river.
The first edition was dedicated to Alexandre Dumas. Dumas' son was so moved by the love expressed in the dedication that he wrote a letter to Verne: "I've been loving you for so long that I feel like your brother". He said that in literature Verne is Dumas' son more than he himself.
The steam yacht of doctor Antekirtt, Savarena, is an accurate portrait of Verne's own steam yacht, which he bought from the eccentric millionaire the Marquis de Préaulx for 60,000 F.
The novel has inspired discussions of ciphers.
Verne also provided a critique of gambling, mocking those who engage in games of chance in Monaco and citing mathematical expertise against it.
The novel was serialized in 42 chapters in Le Temps , a Parisian daily, between 16 June and 20 September 1885.
The original French-language edition in a single volume included 111 illustrations by Léon Benett. It was published on 19 November 1885.
George Hanna produced the first English translation in 1889.
ROH Press, which specializes in adventure novels, published a revised version of Hanna's translation by Nico Lorenzutti in 2014.
Mathias Sandorf was adapted for the stage as a five-act play by William Bertrand Busnach, a French novelist and playwright who adopted several novels for the theater. It premiered at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique on 27 November 1887.
A stage production was presented at The Boston Theatre in Boston in the fall of 1888 and at Niblo's Garden in New York City in August 1888, a production imported by impresario Bolossy Kiralfy. The New York Times reported: "The spirit and vigor and fancy of a Jules Verne romance are not easily reproduced on the stage, and in this case there has been no attempt to do more than furnish a vehicle for the display of spectacular effects." [5] It employed the scenery, costumes, and effects of the Paris production. [6]
A two-act stage musical in Hungarian was performed in 2022/23 under the Hungarian title Sándor Mátyàs at the Hungarian Opera of Cluj in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. [7] [8]
There have also been three film adaptations of Mathias Sandorf. Henri Fescourt directed a silent Mathias Sandorf in 1921. It starred Yvette Andréyor, Romuald Joubé, Jean Toulout, and in the US it was titled The Prisoner of Zorda. Under that title Verne's son Michel Verne created a novel based on the film. Georges Lampin directed another Mathias Sandorf in 1963 starring Louis Jourdan, Francisco Rabal, Renaud Mary and Serena Vergano.
An internationally co-produced television miniseries aired in 1979. Different versions divided the series into four or six episodes. Directed by Jean-Pierre Decourt it starred Hungarian actor István Bujtor as Mathias Sandorf, Ivan Desny as Zathmar, Amadeus August, Claude Giraud, Monika Peitsch, Sissy Höfferer, and Jacques Breuer.
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is a classic science fiction adventure novel by French writer Jules Verne.
The Voyages extraordinaires is a collection or sequence of novels and short stories by the French writer Jules Verne.
Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, A Journey of Discovery by Three Englishmen in Africa is an adventure novel by Jules Verne, published in 1863. It is the first novel in which he perfected the "ingredients" of his later work, skillfully mixing a story line full of adventure and plot twists that keep the reader's interest through passages of technical, geographic, and historic description. The book gives readers a glimpse of the exploration of Africa, which was still not completely known to Europeans of the time, with explorers traveling all over the continent in search of its secrets.
Off on a Comet is an 1877 science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne. It recounts the journey of several people carried away by a comet contacting the Earth. The comet passes by various bodies in the Solar System before returning the travelers to the Earth.
Dr. Ox's Experiment is a humorous science fiction short story by the French writer Jules Verne, published in 1872. It describes an experiment by one Dr. Ox, and is inspired by the real or alleged effects of oxygen on living things.
In the history of cryptography, a grille cipher was a technique for encrypting a plaintext by writing it onto a sheet of paper through a pierced sheet. The earliest known description is due to Jacopo Silvestri in 1526. His proposal was for a rectangular stencil allowing single letters, syllables, or words to be written, then later read, through its various apertures. The written fragments of the plaintext could be further disguised by filling the gaps between the fragments with anodyne words or letters. This variant is also an example of steganography, as are many of the grille ciphers.
Edouard Fleissner von Wostrowitz (1825–1888), also spelt Fleißner, is remembered as the author of a short book on cryptography and as the proponent of a modified Cardan grille known as a turning grille.
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras is an adventure novel by Jules Verne in two parts: The English at the North Pole and The Desert of Ice.
Áron Tamási was a Hungarian writer. He became well known in his native region of Transylvania and in Hungary for his stories written in his original Székely style.
Édouard Riou was a French illustrator who illustrated six novels by Jules Verne, as well as several other well-known works.
George Roux (1853–1929) was a French artist and book illustrator. His best-known works today are a large number of illustrations he created for the science-fiction novels of Jules Verne, in the series Les voyages extraordinaires. He was the second-most prolific illustrator of Verne's novels, after Léon Benett, drawing the illustrations for 22 novels in the original editions of Verne's works with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. The first of them was L’Épave du Cynthia and the last was L'Étonnante aventure de la mission Barsac.
István Bujtor, born István Frenreisz, was a Hungarian actor, director, producer and screenplay writer. He starred in the TV mini-series Mathias Sandorf based on the novel Mathias Sandorf by Jules Verne as Mathias Sandorf in 1979.
Imre Kiralfy and Bolossy Kiralfy were highly influential burlesque and spectacle producers in Europe and the United States toward the end of the 19th century. The brothers paved the way for many of our modern day spectacles. With backgrounds in music and dance, these performers turned producers dazzled New York City with theatrical wonders. The brothers had a long and successful partnership and even continued to have success in their individual careers. From folk dancing in Europe to directing and producing in the United States, the Kiralfys spent their lives astounding audiences with unseen visual phenomenon and were never afraid to push the boundaries earning them a special place in entertainment history.
Journey Through the Impossible is an 1882 fantasy play written by Jules Verne, with the collaboration of Adolphe d'Ennery. A stage spectacular in the féerie tradition, the play follows the adventures of a young man who, with the help of a magic potion and a varied assortment of friends and advisers, makes impossible voyages to the center of the Earth, the bottom of the sea, and a distant planet. The play is deeply influenced by Verne's own Voyages Extraordinaires series and includes characters and themes from some of his most famous novels, including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon.
Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. Most famous for his novel sequence, the Voyages Extraordinaires, Verne also wrote assorted short stories, plays, miscellaneous novels, essays, and poetry. His works are notable for their profound influence on science fiction and on surrealism, their innovative use of modernist literary techniques such as self-reflexivity, and their complex combination of positivist and romantic ideologies.
Mathias Sandorf is a 1963 historical adventure film directed by Georges Lampin and starring Louis Jourdan, Renaud Mary and Francisco Rabal. Made as a co-production between France, Italy and Spain it is based on the 1885 novel of the same title by Jules Verne.
Jules Verne (1828–1905), the French writer best known for his Voyages extraordinaires series, has had a wide influence in both scientific and literary fields.
Mathias Sandorf is a 1979 historical adventure television series based on the Jules Verne novel of the same title. A co-production between France, Hungary, Italy and West Germany, it debuted on West Germany's ZDF on December 1979 before receiving a French broadcast the following year.
Mathias Sandorf is a 1921 French historical adventure film directed by Henri Fescourt and starring Romuald Joubé, Yvette Andréyor and Jean Toulout. It is an adaptation of the 1885 novel Mathias Sandorf by Jules Verne. A later sound version of the story Mathias Sandorf was released in 1963. The film was distributed in America by Pathe Exchange under the alternative title The Isle of Zorda.