A sort of Hungarian Stefan Zweig, sensitive chronicler of a world in the process of collapsing, also in the manner of a Joseph Roth, a Thomas Mann or a Gyula Krúdy (his master, to whom he devoted Last day in Budapest), Sándor Márai (1900-1989) could alone embody a certain idea of Europe, cultured and cosmopolitan.
The existence of this fine specimen of humanist and Mitte-European dandy was marked with a hot iron by two world wars and forty years of exile. Journalist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary translator and novelist, author of Confessions of a bourgeoisof the Embers and of Memories of Hungary reminds us on the occasion of the publication of the third volume of his rich and fascinating Journal: The years of exile, 1968-1989 (the first two are available in paperback).
After the communists came to power in Hungary in 1948, Márai was banned from publishing and public libraries were purged of his works. Exile will be the only possible outcome for him. With Lola, his wife, he first settled in Naples, Italy, then in New York, where he worked for Radio Free Europe for fifteen years, before returning to Italy, to Salerno (1968- 1979), then settling in California for the last ten years of his life.
This last volume, haunted by illness and death, shot through with political and literary analyses, was once again a real “salvation board” for the Hungarian writer. Convinced that literature “has neither purpose nor meaning,” Márai clings to a work ethic that keeps him alive.
Re-reading Goethe, Montaigne or Krúdy, in Hungarian, German, Italian or French, Márai shows himself to be clairvoyant on several occasions. This “left-wing conservative” – the only label he assumed – had grasped at the end of the 1960s the scale and causes of the environmental catastrophe that was coming. Just as he also knew very early how to be critical of permanent economic growth, “without limits and infinity”. Or become an enlightened commentator, since 1973, on an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is still burning today.
Having passed from fame to oblivion, largely ignored by the general public in post-war Hungary, Márai nevertheless continued to write, his books being published in Munich or Toronto by Magyar publishers also in exile. In his eyes, a writer has only one homeland, that of his mother tongue.
Tired, in poor health, feeling like he’s working overtime, he rereads The odyssey and Plutarch. In July 1985: “The great failure in life is not discovering at the end that we were wrong. The most distressing thing is that we can’t do anything but make a mistake. »
A stranger everywhere, Ulysses banished from Ithaca (“The man lost in the world is always tragic”) and now alone in the world in this “kind cave” that the west coast of the United States was for him — after the death of his wife in 1986 and their son the following year — Márai nevertheless found himself at a “calming distance” from what he had always hated: nationalism and ostentatious patriotism.
“The time has come », he noted on January 15, 1989, recording the final sentence of his Newspaper. It was in his apartment in San Diego that he committed suicide with the revolver purchased in anticipation of his last lap, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.