Suchergebnisse

Article english title:Sándor Márai on the reannexation of Upper Hungary (1938). History, literature, and emotions This paper aims at reconstructing the image of Felvidék (Upper Hungary) present in Sándor Márai's works and, at the same time, reflects on the writer's relationship to his native land before and after its reannexation to Hungary under the First Vienna Award signed on November 2, 1938. By highlighting the experiences and thoughts that the event evokes in Márai, an attempt is made to understand the dialectics with which in 1938 and in 1939 his writing moves between reason and rationality and emotions and affective states in relation to the political circumstances and to its historical dimensions. The characteristics of the emotional discourse and the words that designate emotions are investigated in Márai using his specific concept of 'family' – referring to the inhabitants of the region reannexed to Hungary and therefore 'returning to their homeland' – and the descriptions of the material and spiritual landscapes of Felvidék in which the writer reveals particularly informative connections between the rational and emotional spheres. ; Il contributo restituisce l'immagine del Felvidék (Alta Ungheria) presente nelle opere di Sándor Márai e, insieme, riflette sul rapporto dello scrittore alla terra natale prima e dopo la sua riannessione all'Ungheria ai sensi del Primo arbitrato di Vienna del 2 novembre 1938. Mettendo in rilievo le esperienze e i pensieri che l'evento rievoca in Márai, si tenta di comprendere la dialettica con cui negli anni 1938-1939 la sua scrittura si muove fra ragione e razionalità ed emozioni e stati affettivi in relazione alle circostanze politiche e alle sue dimensioni storiche. Le caratteristiche del discorso emotivo e delle parole che designano emozioni vengono indagate in Márai utilizzando il suo specifico concetto di 'famiglia' –riferito agli abitanti della regione riannessa all'Ungheria e quindi di 'ritorno in patria'– e ricorrendo alle descrizioni di paesaggi materiali e spirituali del Felvidék in cui lo scrittore disvela nessi fra sfera razionale ed emotiva particolarmente informativi.

La mujer justa

Two Hungarian authors, Sándor Márai and Péter Nádas, seem to have one thing in common: their attraction to triangular relationships. Written between 1935 and 1942 and portraying human relations in pre-World War II Hungary, Márai's two novels and one drama all turn on a very specific triangular structure between two close friends and the woman whom they both love(d). Now they conduct a painful tête-à-tête to decide on the final ownership (or simply fate) of the woman. Written in 1979 and portraying human relations in communist Hungary, Nádas's play has only two actors on stage, a woman of aristocratic descent and a young man, the son of a high-ranking communist official, the woman's long dead lover. This exchange between the two characters opens into an encounter of three, where the woman and the young man each use the other as a mediator to reach the third, the lover/father. Bollobás argues that the triangles displayed by the two authors represent two distinct types: the former is informed by fixed, hierarchical, subject-object power relations, while the latter by fluid, non-hierarchical, subject-subject relations.

The time Sándor Márai (1900–89) spent in Switzerland, France and Italy in the winter of 1946–7 gave him the opportunity to observe and note the differences existing in 'frozen, destitute Europe' between East and West, Easterners and Westerners. The diary that Márai had already started to keep in 1943, Föld, föld!…, first published in Hungarian in 1972 in Toronto, and Európa elrablása (1947) represent interesting sources to reconstruct his experiences and thought about a Europe bisected by the Iron Curtain from the perspective of a 'traveller venturing forth from the ruins of Eastern Europe'. In these works, he shares with us his impressions and depicts Western Europe, as represented by neutral Switzerland, France and a 'defeated Italy' in opposition to and in comparison with the East, represented by a 'dismembered Hungary'. In analysing Márai's account, the article focuses on the differences he perceived, on the way he reports them and also on how the West and Westerners viewed the East and the Easterners.

Márai, Sándor. 2013. The Withering World (trans. John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott). Richmond, Surrey, UK: Alma Books. 242 pp. Reviewed by Paul Sohar, Freelance Writer