SUNFLOWER, Gyula Krúdy's 1918 novel, sets turn-of-the-century Budapest hustle and the timeless, "peacetime" mode of the Hungarian countryside as backdrops for this sensually observed episode in Womanhood's ongoing, ever-variable encounter with the male principle. A richly quintessentialized cast of characters offers a fivefold bevy of females, variously engaged with a trio of males. World-weary, proto-feminist Miss Maszkerádi sojourns at her friend the introspective ingenue Eveline's country estate; the provincial hetera Risoulette assists as they confront the amorous, cantankerous hunk of Magyar manhood, Mr. Pistoli, flanked by a duo of younger men: the dangerous, entrepreneurial gambler Ossuary, and the hermit-like country gentleman Álmos-Dreamer. But this is also a novel of the land, a paean, to the primal powers of Mother Nature as observed and worshipped in the birch-studded marshlands of North-east Hungary, a land teeming with sites and relics of the Old World Goddess. This powerful ancient Deity illumines the women in SUNFLOWER and so becomes the major character in one of the roundest and most fully realized works of Gyula Krúdy's commending oeuvre.