Sándor Márai: Looking Back from Cultural Crossroads (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
In his prime in interwar Hungary, Sándor Márai became widely regarded as the chronicler of the dying European bourgeoisie, and in particular, its Hungarian subspecies. Most of his novels were set in Hungary, and any outward focus served to illuminate Hungarian cultural concerns. After his emigration in 1948, the settings of his novels ranged widely: Homeric Greece, postwar Naples, pre-Imperial Rome, Rome at the turn of the 16th to 17th centuries, biblical Israel – and, astonishingly, the semi-arid northeastern hinterland of 19th-century Brazil. Focusing on his Judgement in Canudos, we consider how Márai uses this cultural and geographical setting so alien to his own experience. Is it mere cultural appropriation, to use a currently trending term? Or is it something else? Márai uses the Brazilian War of Canudos – incidentally, also the setting of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World, written a decade after Márai’s work – in fact to examine the surprising power of an irrational ideology over even the well-educated bourgeoisie. Its application to modern Hungarian history becomes clear. Márai uses an alien culture in order to illuminate his own homeland’s contemporary woes, and Europe’s. Similar concerns lie behind Peace in Ithaca: an exile’s fear of returning home; San Gennaro’s Blood: an exile’s guilt at not being able to save his homeland; Something Happened in Rome: how people position themselves in a sudden regime change; and The Enforcer: how personal resistance to a totalitarian ideology can take shape.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Peter Czipott (B.A. 1975, physics, University of California, San Diego; Ph.D. 1983, physics, UCSD) has had four decades’ experience in R&D and management of projects, personnel and intellectual property. He has contributed in areas ranging from oceanography of the Arctic Ocean to development of sensors for detection of threats and contraband, medical diagnostics, and nondestructive evaluation. He holds 12 patents and is co-author of over 40 technical publications. He is a literary translator with three book-length publications and two more seeking a publisher, plus over thirty shorter translations and scholarly articles. He is a 2010 Balassi Memorial Medallion laureate.