Remembering Sándor Márai

Hungarian Novelist Grows in Fame after Death

It was 20 years ago that the Hungarian novelist, poet and essayist Sándor Márai committed suicide in San Diego, California. Author of nearly 50 works, mostly novels, Márai belongs to an elite club of artists, long forgotten European masters of their craft who were forced out of their countries into exile for political reasons.

He ended his days far removed from where his understanding of life began and was groomed, an understanding that shaped a large portion of his work.

Márai & Politics

What remains so striking about Márai's legacy is how quickly he was forgotten. Considered a leading European writer through the Second World War, Márai clashed with two separate governments, first the Nazis in the early 1930s, then with the Communist regimes that seized power in Europe after the war.

With such powerful enemies, Márai fled, first to Italy, then ultimately to the United States where he died in 1989. Though this year marks the 20th anniversary of his death, most of the reading public wasn't aware of Márai until the 21st Century.

Finding a Legacy Post-Mortem

Three years after his death a French publisher decided to take a chance and print what is now considered Márai's greatest literary achievement, Embers. The book was met quickly with critical praise for its mastery of human emotions, particularly love, betrayal and friendship, themes that were hallmarks of Márai's work.

In 2000 Embers was published in English and since then four other books have found their way into print, each growing in popularity and prestige: Memoir of Hungary (2001), Casanova in Bolzano (2004), The Rebels (2007), and last year's release, Esther's Inheritance.

Márai focuses much of his literary attention on the personal struggles between people, such as in Embers, where two men who have not seen each other in four decades meet one final time to relive the memories of what drove them apart: the love of the same woman.

The Rebels sees four young men, banded together for their remaining few weeks of freedom after exams, before being sent off to the war where their fathers and older brothers already take arms.

As the novel progresses, each young man begins to question the bond between the four of them, even becoming suspicious of the others' true character and ambitions. It is such honesty that has resonated so intensely with a reading public six or seven decades removed from their original scripting.

Present Day Censorship

Much like Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch painter whose work grew greatly in prominence after his death, Sándor Márai has suffered a similar fate. It is only now that he is recognized as an important contributor to the canon of 20th-century literature.

As his publishers continue to shuffle through his output looking for the next manuscript to translate from his native Hungarian into English, one cannot help but wonder at the possibility of lost, forgotten, or never-before-seen works of artistic genius.

These may be being suppressed at present by dictatorial governments around the world who have never seen the value, or understood the need to celebrate the diversity of human beings, and challenge ourselves to do better, to write better novels, and live better lives.