A Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Levéltár évkönyve 22. 1995 (Debrecen, 1995)
Tanulmányok - Bényei Miklós: Széchenyi István, a bihari katona. I. rész. (1820-1821)
50 Széchenyi István, a bihari katona I.rész (1820-1821) found in the minutes of the general assembly of Bihar county. - Széchenyi was of indifferent health often and his indispositions were usually of psychosomatic and hypochondriac origin. He was serving unwillingly, he wasn't interested in soldiering very much already; he was annoyed by the fruitlessness of his efforts aiming at getting an advancement to be a major. Human weaknesses of his fellow-officers and his commanders; his colonel, the brave baron József Simonyi was also condemned by him first of all because of the faults of character of the baron. He was thinking the retire or even the emigration over but for the time being he was kept in the army by his sense of duty and his conscience. He was also made anxious by the machinations of the society of Vienna and by the disadvantageous changes of his finances. - He was bored on the villagey Diószeg. Thus he was reading a lot, he wrote a horse-race regulation, he often went to Debrecen, to Nagyvárad and to the neighbouring medicinal baths. He visited the land- owners from the neighbourhood one after the other and also visited the sub-prefect and the royal commissioner several times; sermonized the chatterbox Ferenc Péchy of Almosd in a funny anonymous letter. Nevertheless he hardly reacted upon the political conflicts raging in the county. He could settle a three weeks long official travel to Transsylvania - Széchenyi became acquainted with Miklós Wesselényi in 1821 and they decided a common trip to Westem-Europe. The friendship of the baron made a deep impression on forming the sense of national vocation of the young count. At all, he met with the mentality of the smaller nobility, the provincialism here on the Bihar region for the first time and he could firstly feel closely the backwardness of the Hungarian nation here. His notes and letters of that time give evidences of his changing way of thinking and of his increasing interest in politics and history.
