Lázár

Lázár (2025) is a multi-generational historical novel by Swiss author Nelio Biedermann. Originally written in German, the novel charts the decline of the aristocratic von Lázár family over more than half a century of turbulent Hungarian history, including two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Biedermann, a young writer of Hungarian noble descent, published his debut novel, Anton Will Bleiben, in 2023. Lázár, his second novel, became an international success and received praise from established authors such as Daniel Kehlmann and Patti Smith.

The novel is an expansive family saga that examines themes including The Decay of the Aristocracy, arguing that the Lázárs’ downfall is caused by their own internal rot and moral compromises. It also analyzes The Interaction of Macro and Micro in Understanding History by showing how the family’s private traumas mirror Hungary’s national tragedies. The theme of The Weight of Inherited History explores how each generation is trapped in cycles of emotional cruelty, cowardice, and despair that are passed down from father to son. The family’s inability to confront its own past secrets leaves it vulnerable to the larger forces of fascism and communism, which ultimately strip them of their wealth and identity.

This guide refers to the 2026 Summit Books hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, child death, death by suicide, graphic violence, sexual violence, rape, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, bullying, racism, religious discrimination, gender discrimination, mental illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, addiction, substance use, and sexual content.

Plot Summary

On the evening of Epiphany in the final years of the 19th century, a child named Lajos von Lázár is born to Sándor and Mária von Lázár at their Hungarian manor house. The infant’s skin is so thin that his organs seem almost visible, and the country doctor Török can offer no explanation beyond declaring the boy healthy and warning that sunlight may be dangerous to him. Sándor doesn’t know that the child is not his. His wife, Mária, who quietly self-harms with his razor each morning to feel alive, conceived Lajos with Pál, a blue-eyed young groom whose water-blue eyes have been passed down to the boy. When Sándor eventually notices that his son bears no resemblance to him, he asks the question Mária has been dreading. Having practiced for this moment, she deflects him with the bold lie that Lajos resembles the legendary family patriarch Hayo the First, a claim that no one can disprove because Hayo left no portrait. Pál dies shortly after the birth, and Mária spends six weeks bedridden with grief. Thereafter, she never fully returns to herself, talking aloud to the dead groom and carrying the weight of loss through the rest of her marriage.

The von Lázár household is haunted by fragility. Sándor’s elder brother, Imre von Lázár, once a quiet naturalist, deals with mental illness after their father disappears in the nearby forest. A mysterious hunter appears on Imre’s bed one evening, leaving behind a copy of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s collection of tales, Night Pieces, which Imre reads obsessively until he’s found pacing and gesticulating alone in the drawing room, addressing no one. He is sent to a Swiss sanatorium, returns with yellow eyes and a venereal disease, and is installed in a blue-painted room in the western wing of the Lázár manor. In this room, he studies the forest and sees Hoffmann’s characters moving between the trees. Imre becomes an unlikely companion to young Lajos, sneaking fried potatoes into the boy’s bowl of detested semolina pudding and filling his childhood with stories of forest creatures. Meanwhile, Sándor finds emotional refuge in the city of Pécs with a working-class woman named Mrs. Virág, whose body offers him a blissful oblivion from the empire’s gathering anxieties, though he continues to perform the rituals expected of a baron.

The family’s precarious position shatters during a spring holiday in Hévíz when adolescent Ilona von Lázár, Lajos’s six-years-older sister, follows what she believes is an injured fawn into the forest. She’s found unconscious hours later by a peasant named Pavlović, who carries her out. She wakes after 26 hours with a ferocious appetite for meat, despite previously not liking it. She recalls an encounter with a forest creature that her parents refuse to believe. This incident marks the end of life at the manor house. The family relocates to a smaller town, and Sándor commutes between his estates and Mrs. Virág. In the new house, Ilona falls deeply in love with the children’s new tutor, Jonathan, a poet from Vienna with extraordinary fingers and a careful book in which he records the names of his lovers. When Ilona realizes that Jonathan’s perfumed poems scattered around the house are addressed to her mother rather than to her, she falsely accuses him of attempted rape by lying to her father. Jonathan is dismissed, walks into the winter countryside with his luggage, and is found three days later frozen and beaten beyond recognition.

Lajos, meanwhile, is taught by a gentle former military scribe named Jakub Jakubowski, who spent 40 years writing love letters for a frontier captain. Jakub arrives in the village hoping to find one of the women to whom he wrote these letters, only to be told that she’s dead, but he decides to stay in the community. Under Jakub, Lajos discovers an almost physical compulsion to write, as though things only achieve legitimacy when set down on paper. He grows into a pale, sensitive young man at boarding school in Vienna as the Habsburg Monarchy totters toward World War I, all while dealing with humiliations from classmates. These include a traumatic assault with a white candle at a ruined chapel whose details he will carry for years before finally disclosing them to a psychoanalyst. 

Lajos first meets Lilly Grünfeld at a Hévíz promenade when he’s a teenager. They exchange a few charged sentences, but then her father’s business calls them back to Vienna, splitting them apart. In 1912, the sinking of the Titanic is devastating for Lajos, who had imagined himself aboard the ship, escaping his family heritage. That same evening, he encounters Lilly again by the thermal lake, where they walk once around the shore before her father takes her away again.

Mária, meanwhile, loads the pockets of her cardigan with stones, wades into the pond, and drowns herself. After slipping into alcoholism and depression, Sándor, alone in the manor house, reads through a pile of correspondence and falls down the staircase on his way to bed, fracturing his skull and dying of the hemorrhage. The last image he sees is the face of the water-eyed groom. Their deaths liberate Lajos and Lilly, who finally kiss in the brick house in Hévíz after a fire forces Lilly and her father to take refuge there. They marry and honeymoon as far as Zagreb before the telegram about Sándor’s death calls them back. They return to restore the manor house and the Lázár name through shrewd business investments and convivial banquets that bring impressionist painters and fiddlers together with aristocrats.

Their son, István “Pista” von Lázár, is born into this restored prosperity. From a young age, he worries his mother when he seems to commune with shadows, speaking to them as though they’re friends. He’s fascinated by darkness and dyes his hair with sage infusions on his 16th birthday. When the family moves to their seasonal Budapest house, Pista is placed into a monastery school, where he’s bullied until a systematic program of push-ups and weightlifting transforms his body. A girl named Matilda Telkes slips him a love letter, and their subsequent courtship is conducted entirely in perfumed paper. They exchange letters in a two-day rhythm, eating each other’s letters. They’re too anxious to speak to one another until a single afternoon on a bench beneath a linden tree, where they finally hold hands. Mathilda’s mother, spotting the duo, punishes her daughter and forbids the pairing. With the political situation in the city causing change, a meeting is arranged covertly by the family’s compassionate housekeeper, Dora. Pista and Mathilda share a brief embrace in a winter square before Pista is sent away.

World War II fractures the family along both moral and physical lines. Lajos, who had supported Hungary’s Tripartite Pact alignment with cautious complicity and who harbored a passing admiration for Adolf Hitler that changed into fear, serves as an officer in Pécs. His duties include overseeing the ghettoization of the city’s Jewish population and their deportation to Auschwitz. He stands in the shade of a linden tree, watching the procession pass, and feels unable to meet anyone’s eyes. He hides the persecuted Benedictine chaplain Edmund Pontiller—whose trenchant sermons condemning Hitler had made him a Gestapo target—in the manor house’s western wing, where Pista spends months following the priest everywhere and pressing his ear to a wall to hear a mysterious rasping voice speaking an unusual German. When the Gestapo comes for Pontiller, he is taken without resistance. He’s later guillotined in Munich’s Stadelheim Prison, his final thoughts being regret at his loneliness. During the Soviet advance, the family flees westward on horse carts in the chilling cold. They take refuge with a fellow family of aristocrats but are caught by Red Army soldiers, who rape a maid while Pista sits helplessly in the drawing room. Lajos and the count escape by luck when the soldiers are ordered north toward Budapest. Eva von Lázár, Pista’s younger sister, witnesses the assault and carries the image of the maid’s face in her mind for years.

After the war ends, Pista searches Budapest for Matilda and her family. A neighbor tells him that the Telkes family no longer lives there, and Dora, now working elsewhere, reveals what he had never guessed: The Telkes family was Jewish, and on New Year’s Eve, ultranationalist Arrow Cross troops stormed the refuge where they were sheltering and shot all three of the family members dead, including Mathilda. Weeping, Pista wanders the ruined city.

The communist expropriation of 1948 strips the family of the manor house and forces them to work a collective farm in the east. There, Eva discovers her body through physical labor and begins a sexual affair with a field hand named Milan. Upon returning to the city, they share an apartment in Budapest that sits adjacent to the half-demolished ghetto wall. Lajos, now a postman, slides into depression. Developing an interest in feminism and politics, Eva clandestinely reads Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf. She attends underground gatherings of dispossessed young aristocrats organized by the stuntman János. There, she meets Ákos, a shy young writer whom Pista calls “the new Petőfi” (223). One evening, he invites Eva to his room and rapes her. Eva is shocked and deeply affected by the assault, remembering the maid. 

While she’s dealing with the emotional shock, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution erupts across the country. Crowds tear down Joseph Stalin’s statue, the prime minister is reappointed and then arrested, Soviet tanks roll back into Budapest, and János is taken by secret police and tortured. Pista spends days hunting Ákos through the rubble-strewn city, turning over corpses in doorways, never finding him. The siblings visit Imre in a psychiatric institution and come to see their great-uncle in a new light.

In December 1956, Eva and Pista decide to flee Hungary. They pack leather backpacks with two sweaters, bread, photographs of their parents, and the Johannes Vermeer book that Pontiller hid under his mattress before his arrest. They cross the Yugoslav border by wading a frozen, ankle-deep river in the dark, are briefly intercepted by Yugoslavian soldiers, and spend a week in a henhouse with a pregnant woman named Nicolette and her husband, Lászlo. They survive on goulash soup and Red Cross donations. Nicolette asks Eva to be her child’s godmother. On the train to Zurich, while passing the snowy rooftops of Zagreb where their parents spent the only night of their honeymoon before Sándor’s telegram ended it, Pista watches his sleeping sister and understands at last that he will never be able to protect her, only be present for her. The novel closes as the train carries the two Lázár siblings west toward Lake Zurich and its snow-covered mountains, leaving behind the entire world they have known.