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CSABA HORVÁTH
the bourgeoisie of Kassa, “Western culture fitted us shabbily, like a tuxedo
on a negro.”® So the city the two writers establish in their works is rather a
primary subject of literature than a real place to live. The created city was to
be remembered, while the real one was to be left.
Marai and Simko write a Kosice of memories; more precisely each built
their own city: Márai rebuilt his Kassa of the Monarchy, while Simko rebuilt
his Kosice of Czechoslovakia between World War I and II. Both of them
created not only the city of their personal pasts but also the city of their
collective memories.
Márai never saw 19' century Kassa and Simko could know the interwar
periods Kosice only from family stories. By different means and ways, both
overcame the national point of view. They changed the national narration for a
personal and familiar level of story-telling. Marai writes in The Confessions of
a Haut-Bourgeois: “But the myth of the family was still alive, and this mystic
consciousness gave energy to live to those of us who had painted the family
legends with our actions. When the human race is forced to live without well¬
known shared myths, the miniature histories of families become particularly
significant resources of experience.”?
And as for Dugan Simko’s opinion: “our city has all the prerequisites to
become a center of communication between the East, West, and the Pannonian
cultural space”! Moreover, it was always a multicultural space, and this
multiculturalism belonged strongly to its identity. Following Csáky, Kassa/
Kosice has always been a hybrid communication space where different cultures
could coexist."
But the collective and personal identities seemed very flexible during the
problematic years of the city’s history. Real cities are never as tolerant and
open as their ideas are.
Furthermore, although KoSice has always been an important city, using
the language of sports, it has always finished in second place. Within Slovakia
it was second after Bratislava, just as Central Europe feels like it has always
been behind the West. Marai wrote about this special way of being: “With
“A ‘nyugati kulttira’ kissé légott rajtunk, mint frakk a négeren." Márai, Sándor: Egy polgár
vallomdsai, translated by M. Zwecker, Budapest, Révai, 1934, 247.
"De a család mítosza élt, s ez a misztikus öntudat adott életerőt valamennyiünknek, akik
cselekedeteinkkel a család meséjét színeztük. S korszakokban, mikor az emberiség nagy,
közös mítosz nélkül kénytelen élni, különösen jelentős élményforrás a család miniatűr
világtörténelme." Ibid, 138.
Dusan Simko: Kosice is important to my literary work, http://www.kosice2013.sk/en/Dusan
-simko-kosice-is-important-to-my-literary-work, (Accessed 194 Feb 2008)
u Csáky, Moritz: Das Gedächtnis der Städte: Kulturelle Verflechtungen: Wien und die urbanen
Milieus in Zentraleuropa. Wien: Böhlau 2010, 55.
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