Sándor Márai

(; Archaic English name: Alexander Márai; 11 April 1900 – 21 February 1989) was a Hungarian writer, poet, and journalist.

Biography

Márai was born on 11 April 1900 in the city of Kassa, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia). Through his father, he was a relative of the Hungarian noble Országh family. In 1919, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and worked as a journalist. He joined the Communists, becoming the founder of the "Activist and Anti-National Group of Communist Writers". After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, his family found it safer to leave the country, thus he continued his studies in Leipzig. Márai travelled to and lived in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris and briefly considered writing in German, but eventually chose his mother language, Hungarian, for his writings. In ''Egy polgár vallomásai'' (English: "Confessions of a citizen"), Márai identifies the mother tongue language with the concept of nation itself. He settled in Krisztinaváros, Budapest, in 1928. In the 1930s, he gained prominence with a precise and clear realist style. He was the first person to write reviews of the work of Franz Kafka.

He wrote very enthusiastically about the First and Second Vienna Awards, in which as the result of the German-Italian arbitration Czechoslovakia and Romania had to give back part of the territories which Hungary lost in the Treaty of Trianon, including his native Kassa (Košice). Nevertheless, Márai was highly critical of the Nazis.

Márai authored 46 books. His 1942 book ''Embers'' (Hungarian title: ''A gyertyák csonkig égnek'', meaning "The Candles Burn Down to the Stump") expresses a nostalgia for the bygone multi-ethnic, multicultural society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, reminiscent of the works of Joseph Roth. In 2006 an adaptation of this novel for the stage, written by Christopher Hampton, was performed in London.

He also disliked the communist regime that seized power after World War II, and left – or was driven away – in 1948. After living for some time in Italy, Márai settled in the city of San Diego, in the United States. Márai joined with Radio Free Europe between 1951 and 1968. Márai was extremely disappointed in the Western powers for not helping the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

He continued to write in his native language, but was not published in English until the mid-1990s. Like other memoirs by Hungarian writers and statesmen, it was first published in the West, because it could not be published in the Hungary of the post-1956 Kádár era. The English version of the memoir was published posthumously in 1996. After his wife died in 1986, Márai retreated more and more into isolation. In 1987, he lived with advanced cancer and his depression worsened when he lost his adopted son, John. He ended his life with a gunshot to his head in San Diego in 1989. He left behind three granddaughters; Lisa, Sarah and Jennifer Márai.

Largely forgotten outside of Hungary, his work (consisting of poems, novels, and diaries) has only been recently "rediscovered" and republished in French (starting in 1992), Polish, Catalan, Italian, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, Danish, Icelandic, Korean, Lithuanian, Dutch, Urdu