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CSABA HORVÁTH topos. In the 1930’s he looked at Kassa from Budapest and during this period the city was the subject of nostalgia towards a Hungarian city of the AustroHungarian Monarchy. After the Second World War he wrote from Italy, and then later from America, where he was using the city as the metaphor for the lost 19'* century. Even in his language and style Marai referred to the century which he wanted to save and evoke. That these writers build up cities of their own from personal memories helps them to avoid the conflicts and contradictions among different ethnic groups, cultures and languages. According to Bhabha different cultures, the difference between cultural practices, the difference in the construction of cultures within different groups, very often set up among and between themselves an incommensurability (...) it is actually very difficult, even impossible and counterproductive, to try and fit together different forms of cultures and to pretend that they can easily coexist.” Simko had left Kogice after the Prague Spring and then Basel some decades later. It was in Basel where he formed a city of the interwar period’s collective memories. Just as Marai wanted to rebuild a 19 century image, Simko makes a small town with a Hrabalian touch. Márai and Simko made a city from their personal past. Marai evokes the age of the Monarchy, Simko that of post-Trianon Kosice. So the personal memories give the literary rebuilt cities a diachronic character, and the cultural circumstances give them a synchronic one. Both writers seemed to draw a social map with the ethnic constellations and the social hierarchy of the city. Both of them build the city with a special literary identity. They go beyond the national narratives — thus realizing the Dissemination of Bhabha!*— and they create a narration based on the special identity of a multicultural city. This kind of narration is defined by the multilingual and multicultural characters of the region, but it is also made of the authors’ personal nostalgias. The literary city is put into the narrative crossroads of the collective identity of cultural studies and the personal memories and expectations of Marai and Simko. Jonathan Rutherford: The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 207-221, 209. 8 See: Homi K. Bhabha: DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation, Routledge, London, New York, 1990. * 444 +
