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THE Lost LAND OF OURS forced Czechoslovakia and Romania to give back parts of the territories which Hungary lost in the Treaty of Versailles. Nevertheless, Marai was highly critical of the Nazis and was profoundly antifascist. And because he also disliked the Communist regime that seized power after World War II, the writer was driven to leave the country in 1948. After living in Italy for years, Márai settled down in the U.S.A, in San Diego, California. He continued to write in Hungarian till his death. Marai wrote forty-six books, mostly novels, in the course of his career, and there is a consensus in Hungarian literary criticism that there are several masterpieces among them, including The Confessions of a Haut Bourgeois’, Sinbad goes home“, and Embers’. The latter, written in 1942, expresses a nostalgia for the bygone multi-ethnic, multicultural society of the AustroHungarian Empire, reminiscent of the works of Joseph Roth. As for Simko, he lives now in Basel, Switzerland, and writes his novels in Slovakian. In his first book, Juan Zabal’s Marathon’, he built a city of memories from the interwar period of Czechoslovakia. The book was published in 1984 by the exile-publishing house Rozmluvy based in London. He worked among authors such as Milan Simecka, Jan Bene, Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera. When he illegally emigrated from communist Czechoslovakia, it seemed certain he would never see the city of his birth again. But history was merciful and he was able to visit Kosice 1989 — the same year Marai died. So Kosice is a city of the past for Simko as Kassa was for Marai. Each writer supposed they would never return, so both made an attempt to rebuild the city they left behind as a fictive place of literature. The following lines from Simko could be taken as this ars poetica: At these times, always over a pint of beer, he would tell anyone willing to listen that if someday an earthquake, flood, fire, or similar act of God destroys Kassa, he’ll redraw the map of the city with his eyes closed. He’ll draw the same Kassa, with the same city park, town hall, theatre, and homes of the bourgeois; and running down main street once again will be the same rundown tram, the product of the Kolben & Dank Czech-Moravian assembly line’ And to top it all, real cities, real small towns are always characterized by a mixture of freedom and the feeling of closeness; the cultural incentive is always accompanied by the fear of provincialism. As Märai wrote about 3 Márai, Sándor: Egy polgár vallomásai, Budapest, Révai, 1934. Márai, Sándor: Szindbád hazamegy, Budapest, Révai, 1940. Márai, Sándor: A gyertyák csonkig égnek (literary: The Candles Burn Down to the Stump), Budapest, Révai, 1942. Dusan Simko: Maratón Juana Zabalu, Rozmluvy, London, 1984. Dusan Simko: The Kosice Marathon, translated by M. Zwecker, 12. Special thanks to Michael Zwecker for the translation of Sandor Marai’ s and Dugan Simko’s quoted details. 4 5 ° 44) +
