Ágota Steinert

Sándor Márai and His World

 

Márai was, however, more than a stylist. As a burgher of Kassa (Kos©ice in Slovakia), who regarded himself as a citizen of Europe, he despised all that was cheap and tawdry, trusting only the moral values of the spirit. That fragile sense of worth, of character and fastidiousness gave his prose its significance and its unmistakably individual flavour. He was uncompromising and unforgiving, in politics as well as in his tastes and culture. For him, respect for form in life and literature meant the same thing: the chance to preserve our self-realisation and our very selves.
He was born in Kos©ice in 1900 into a well-to-do middle-class family. Kos©ice was the industrial, commercial and cultural centre of the northern part of the old kingdom of Hungary, what was known as Felvidék or the Upper Country since the Middle Ages. It had always been considered a hospitable town, where in addition to Hungarians (and originally in greater numbers) there lived Germans and, later, a much smaller number of Slovaks and Jews. The Kos©ice middle class maintained their traditions, and tolerance was as much a feature of the community as their colourful cultural life. Kos©ice had a university as early as 1660, the first independent Hungarian-language periodicals were published there in the eighteenth century as well as the first Hungarian serialised novels, and it was this town that later established itself as the centre of a famous printing industry. The town also gained a reputation as one of the cradles of the Hungarian-language theatre where, in 1833, the most celebrated Hungarian classic, József Katona's Bánk bán, was first staged.
Márai spent his childhood and early adult years in Kos©ice, and there he formed that attitude and outlook which determined his life and writing. He considered himself first and foremost a member of the bourgeoisie, and that awareness and tradition finds expression in all his work, in his moral stance and outspoken aestheticism alike.
As Márai conceived it, to be of the bourgeoisie means possessing tastes that are creative, sovereign and refined, particularly in morals. It means being cultured and, through culture, serving the common good. Creativity for such a person is not merely manifest in the creation of a piece of work, but its nature, moral quality and capacity also define the quality of everyday life. In the sequence of novels A Garrenek műve (The Work of the Garrens) Márai declares:

The bourgeoisie established a civilisation after the feudal social order... What was the Garrens' work?... Atmosphere. Something atmospheric, in which human life found value and status beyond mere existence... If we ask a biologist "What is life, where is the threshold at which inorganic matter changes and becomes organic?" he replies, "Life is a chemical reaction." And that is true from the point of view of a biologist. But life is something more still: it needs atmosphere. The Garrens knew about this and when they built towns and houses they also produced atmosphere...

His native Kos©ice and his paternal home were for him the embodiment of that and to the very end of his life he was unable to come to terms with their loss (not only the disappearance of childhood but a physical loss, as the Treaty of Trianon, which followed the First World War, awarded Kos©ice to Czechoslovakia).
For a true representative of the bourgeoisie creativity according to Márai should be intertwined with sovereignty as the guarantee for the feeling of freedom, the preservation under all circumstances of spiritual and moral independence. As he writes in Füves könyv (Herbal):

Sovereign is the man who has staked his life on the proclamation and practice of truths that he has acknowledged and, come what may, espoused.

This is what, all his life and in all his art, he strove at all times to adhere to. He made no concessions to the ephemeral and he did not bow to dictators. Characteristically, he condemned Hitlerism at its first appearance. In 1933 he attended one of Hitler's rallies in Berlin as an accredited correspondent, and produced an account of National Socialism and its leaders in a denunciative article "Messiah in the Sports Hall". His voice was raised against Nazism later too, and with increasing vehemence. In the meantime he saw clearly that Russian domination was inevitable for Hungary and at the outset of the Communist takeover, in 1948, he decided to leave the country. He noted in his diary:

One morning in the city. The news, which I can't help hearing, makes me feel sick. It's as if I were going about in a medieval plague city, with unburied corpses rotting in the streets. I talk to friends and sometimes I feel that I ought to hold my handkerchief to my mouth. For days now two lines of Karinthy's have been going round in my head: Better that the worms eat me / Than that I should eat worms.

To Márai's understanding, culture and morals are closely interrelated. Culture is not merely a maintenance of traditions, a constructive aggregation and utilisation of experience, but a moral force, reasonableness and acceptance of responsibility. "Because culture amounts to the revelation and toleration of truth, of the true awareness of everything.