Sándor Márai

Born Sándor Grosschmid de Mára on April 11, 1900, in the Hungarian city of Kassa (now Košice, Slovakia), the son of a lawyer and a relative of the noble Országh family, Sándor Márai grew up speaking the German of Habsburg Kassa as fluently as his Hungarian. At nineteen he supported the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, worked as a journalist, and briefly joined the Communists. When the Republic fell his family thought it safer for him to leave the country; he studied in Leipzig, lived in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris, and considered writing in German before choosing his mother tongue, in which, he wrote, the nation itself is contained. He settled in the Krisztinaváros district of Budapest in 1928. In the 1930s he became the most respected stylist of the Hungarian middle class, the first to review the work of Franz Kafka in his own language, the author of forty-six books. Embers (1942), the title of which means The Candles Burn Down to the Stump, is a single long evening of conversation between two old men in a Carpathian castle, a forty-one-year reckoning over a betrayal and a missed shot. The Communist takeover after 1948 drove him into exile, first in Italy, then in San Diego. He worked for Radio Free Europe from 1951 to 1968 and refused to allow his work to be published in Hungary while it remained communist. After his wife died in 1986 and his adopted son John died in 1987, he retreated into isolation, suffering from cancer. He shot himself in his San Diego apartment on February 21, 1989, at the age of eighty-eight, weeks before the regime that exiled him collapsed.

In the summer of 1936, at the deathbed of his friend and neighbor Dezső Kosztolányi, gravely ill with cancer, Márai heard him whisper two words, hoarse and halting: take care of Hungarian literature. He wrote of it that year, in Pesti Hírlap, unable to shake the charge.