Sándor Márai

Sándor Márai (Kassa, 1900 – San Diego, 1989) was a Hungarian novelist, journalist and playwright who wrote in a Central Europe shaped by the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the authoritarian interwar years and the communist period after the Second World War. He wrote mainly in Hungarian, and his work stayed largely unknown outside his country for decades. Today he is regarded as part of the twentieth-century European literary canon.

He was born into a middle-class family with a legal tradition, in Košice, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary. His adolescence was restless: he ran away from home, changed schools and ended up in religious institutions. As a young man he published under a pen name, so as not to embarrass the family surname, and his first book of poems appeared in 1918. During the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 he wrote for the communist press, and his parents sent him abroad. He studied in Leipzig, Frankfurt and Berlin, married Ilona Matzner, known as Lola, and worked as a correspondent in Paris.

In 1928 he returned to Budapest. His clear, realist prose of the 1930s brought him fame with novels such as The Rebels. For a time he considered writing in German, but he chose Hungarian, the language he saw as carrying the very idea of the nation. As a chronicler of cultural life in the press, he was one of the hosts of Thomas Mann during the German writer's 1935 visit to Budapest.

After the Second World War he rejected the communist regime and went into exile in 1948. He lived in Italy before settling in San Diego. He worked for Radio Free Europe from 1951 to 1968, and his disappointment with the West after the 1956 revolution was deep. Many of his memoirs and diaries could appear only outside Hungary. After his wife died in 1986 he withdrew into isolation, and in 1989 he took his own life.

His legacy rests on novels, poems and diaries that, after decades of neglect beyond his homeland, have been republished and translated into many languages since the early 1990s. Embers (1942), with its nostalgia for the multi-ethnic world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was staged in London in 2006.