Michael Blumenthal
The Loneliness of Hungarians
On Márai's Memoir
Few nationalities on this earth have been more intimate with the oxymoronic companionship of loneliness than Hungarians, and very few Hungarians have known more about that lonely and inexhaustible subject than did Sándor Márai, the recently rediscovered (because once again published) Hungarian novelist, playwright, essayist and autobiographer whose marvelous autobiographical memoir, Föld! Föld! (Land! Land!) is soon to be published in English by Corvina under the title Memoir of Hungary 1944-1948.
Márai, an ardent anti-Communist and defender of middle-class humanistic ideals who committed suicide in San Diego in February of 1989 (and was posthumously both elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and awarded the nation's highest literary honour, the Kossuth prize, that same year), left Hungary for political reasons in September of 1948. By that time, he had already bequeathed to his homeland and mother tongue some forty-six books, mostly novels, and is still considered by Hungarian critics and literary historians to be one of the nation's most influential writers between the two world wars.
From exile in Switzerland, Italy and the United States, Márai added a further sixteen titles to his oeuvre, all in Hungarian, read almost exclusively by an intellectual elite of his own generation who were able to slip his books past customs officials on rare visits to the West. Unlike many of his brethren-in-exile, Márai, whose anti-communism was as virulent and uncompromising as was his anti-fascism, never returned to Hungary, even for a visit, even following the easing of censorship and other restrictions in the 1970s.
Already feeling suffocated by the political situation under Horthy and the growing threats of German fascism, Márai wrote in his 1943-44 Journal that "in Hungary, one can live only in internal emigration. By turning completely inward, toward my work. By emigrating into my work." Márai, the quintessential artist, experienced loneliness not merely as a characteristics of being Hungarian but as nearly an equivalence to it:
The consciousness that being Hungarian meant the same as being lonely, that the Hungarian language was incomprehensible and unrelated to other languages, that the "Hungarian" phenomenon consisting of diverse races but still typically Hungarian was also foreign to those who were next-door neighbours and shared a common fate with the Hungarians for a thousand years - there was something benumbing in this consciousness. Sometimes, for a brief period, at times of shifting currents of civilization, hopefulness befogged this feeling of loneliness. But it did not last long.
[...]
Loneliness, Márai knew, does not bestow happiness. "But the loneliness of Hungary," he added, "was a source of strength, an oasis in the European desert. With its fate, its good and bad characteristics, a people was left tragically on its own between East and West... Some continued to hope. Others were silent for long periods of time. Then, because they could not do anything else, they set about fashioning order in the loneliness."
And so it well may be that what all too often are mistaken by outsiders for Hungarian sullenness or pessimism are merely the outward manifestations of that seemingly fated inner alliance: the alliance of Hungarians with that which has most deeply, and most reliably, earned their trust: namely, their own solitary selves. When one begins to perceive Hungary, and Hungarian culture, through Sándor Márai's eyes - finding there, rather than mere pessimism or dourness, a kind of ordered and dignified solitude - one is able, perhaps, to move away from cliché and stereotype and see, instead, a merely human people, living and surviving in all their joy and pain, in all their merely human loneliness and merely human love.
Michael Blumenthal,
an American poet and novelist living in Budapest, former Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University, is Consulting Editor at the Central European University Press, Budapest.
