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CSABA HORVÁTH
There are many parallels in the life of Sandor Märai and Dugan Simko.
Both of them were born in the same city into reputable families, and both of
them left the city in their youthand then decades later tried to rebuild the city
they had left behind.
The most important works of the Hungarian Sandor Marai belong to the
middle of the 20" century. Originally named Grosschmied, he was born in
1900 in a patrician family of Saxon origins, so his mother tongue was German.
The city Koëice, Kassa, Kaschau is the largest city in eastern Slovakia, with
a population of approximately 240,000 inhabitants. From the early Middle
Ages the city had been a royal free town of the Hungarian Kingdom. The
significance and wealth of the city was represented by the decision to build
a completely new cathedral in the 14" century. From the late Middle Ages’
glorious past to the era of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy it was a very
important city in the region. After the Treaty of Versailles, the city became
part of the new state of Czechoslovakia. Seventy years later, after the so-called
Velvet divorce, Kosice has become the second-city of Slovakia.
Márai left Kassa when he was 14, during the first year of World War I, when
he was sent to a boarding school. After the war he faced the reality that the
Treaty of Versailles had made his birth town part of another country. In the
chaos at the end of the war and during the differently “colored” revolutions
which followed, he spent almost a decade in Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris. After
coming back from Western Europe he settled down in Budapest in 1928. In
his writings Marai reconstructed the lost world of the 19'* century and put
the myth of his lost city, Kassa in their center. But Märai’s Kassa is a metaphor
for a world of peace forever lost.
The Slovak writer of Koëice is Duëan Simko. He was born in the Czecho¬
slovakian era of the city, in 1945. Like Märai he comes from an established
local family known mainly as medical practitioners. Among them the most
famous was his grandfather, Mudr Ludovit Simko, who had founded the
Ear, Nose and Throat ward at KoSice State Hospital. The family’s house was
situated on Mlynska ulica, the city’s main street.
Dusan Simko left Kosice after the Prague spring in 1968 when he was 23,
but the city has remained ontological in Simko’s life. As he says: “My city of
birth represents an “Archimedean point” in my life. It is also important to my
literary work.”?
Marai’s political opinion was rather typical among the Hungarian intellec¬
tuals of his time. He welcomed the Vienna Awards in 1939, in which Germany
1 Dugan Simko: Kosice is important to my literary work, http://www.kosice2013.sk/en/Dugan
-simko-kosice-is-important-to-my-literary-work. (Accessed on 19 Feb 2018)
2 Dugan Simko: Kosice is important to my literary work,
http://www.kosice2013.sk/en/Dusan-simko-kosice-is-important-to-my-literary-work.
(Accessed on 19'* Feb 2018)
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