Seite 444 [444]
OCR
THE Lost LAND OF OURS our sensitive nerves we were puzzled to find that it was not the same to be bourgeois in Nantes as in KoSice. Up there, in our great urbane cities of the Uplands, we somehow lived our bourgeois lives in scrupulous unease.””” For our writers in question, the city (whether Kassa or KoSice) has become a city of lost paradise which can be regained only through the act of writing. It is the only way to redeem the city which is not only a real existing phenomenon of space but also a created phenomenon of the time in memories. And this latter defines the paradigms of living. Thus, for Marai, this is not only a ceded area of Hungary but also part of the missing world of the 19" century: “Writers nowadays attempt to testify to the future that the century of their birth once championed the triumph of reason.” * And for Simko the Koëice of his books also has a temporary character. In one of the fragments of “My very brief encyclopedia of Kosice” he remembers the multilingual city of the past: “Lola Marai was a friend of my grandma. They were chatting in Hungarian.” It is an interesting literary fact of our topic that the mentioned Lola was Sandor Marai’s wife. This fragment is not a simple postmodern roleplay; Simko’s grandmother really was friends with Marai’s family. By interesting coincidence, the term “cross-cultural”!° emerged in social sciences in the 1930s, when Marai wrote his famous confessions about Kassa, and became well-known in the late 1960s, the period when Simko fled from Kosice. Though both writers left the same city, the cities reconstructed in their works differ from each other not only because of each writer’s language. When Marai had left the city at the age of fourteen he thought he would never return to his small town. After the Treaty of Versailles, he decided not to return to Czechoslovakian KoSice. Due to the Second World War and postwar political events, he was forced to leave first Hungary and then Europe. During both exiles Marai recreated his home town as a topic which became a "Zavartan éreztük, nagyon finom idegekkel, hogy polgárnak lenni nem egészen ugyanaz Nantes-ban, mint Kassán — s mi odafent, a mi "nagy urbanitású" felvidéki városainkban, valahogy kínos-lelkiismeretesen voltunk polgárok, úgy iparkodtunk, mint az eminens diákok, valósággal szorgalmi feladatokat végeztünk polgáriasságból, ernyedetlenül civilizálódtunk." Márai Sándor: Egy polgár vallomásai, 247-248. "Aki ma ír, mintha csak tanúságot akarna tenni egy későbbi kor számára...tanúságot arról, hogy a század, amelyben születtünk, valamikor az értelem diadalát hirdette." Márai Sándor: Egy polgár vallomásai, 502. Dusan §Simko: Az én nagyon rövid Kassa enciklopédiám, translated by Ildikó Forgács, Vol. 59, No. 4, Jelenkor, 2016, 409-413. http://www.jelenkor.net/userfiles/archivum/ JELENKOR 2016-049620(teljes).pdf (Accessed 194 Feb 2008) "Márai Lola nagyanyám barátnője volt. Magyarul beszélgettek." Ibid, 411. 16 See: Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.): Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts, Routledge, London, 1995. * 443 +
