A Sentimental Education - A Portrait of Sándor Márai as Traveller and Journalist
A Sentimental Education - A Portrait of Sándor Márai as Traveller and Journalist

Summary/Abstract: ( T h e t r a v e l l e r ) If we were to follow Lawrence Sterne’s whimsy, into which category of traveller are we to place Sándor Márai? Certainly not among the vain, nor presumably was he mendacious, least of all sentimental. Nor was he conceited, though there might have been a touch of the reserved and aristocratic outsider in his temperament. Was he haughty? Or inquisitive? Clearly both, but this is a meagre explanation. Observant, prying? Perchance splenetic? Now we are getting closer. And indeed he was much more, of course. I suggest irony as the key to his temperament because this—an ever-present irony, which nothing can shake or affront—may be what best characterizes his entire course as a traveller. And he was at times a traveller out of inevitable necessity (to cite Sterne again): the entire course of his life and oeuvre was marked out by the changes of address forced on him. At the time of his last departure, on the eve of the Communist takeover in the summer of 1948, when Márai decided to quit Hungary, he was no longer a simple traveller or traveller in transit, but a wanderer, a fugitive persecuted by unfathomable fate. His journeys as an exile were mostly motivated by desperation, or financial and spiritual necessity. The most heart-rending stage was in Vienna in October, 1956, when he waited expectantly, on tenterhooks to return home once and for all. He suffered great disappointment, for reasons we know all too well. From that point on, he lost his sense of irony, until then seemingly indomitable, and a bitter resignation took over. But this is another story to which here we can but allude.[...]

• Details
• Contents