Sándor Márai

Born

in Kassa (today Košice in Slovakia), Hungary

April 11, 1900

Died

February 22, 1989

Sándor Márai (originally Sándor Károly Henrik Grosschmied de Mára) was a Hungarian writer and journalist.
He was born in the city of Kassa in Austria-Hungary (now Košice in Slovakia) to an old family of Saxon origin who had mixed with magyars through the centuries. Through his father he was a relative of the Ország-family. In his early years, Márai travelled to and lived in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris and briefly considered writing in German, but eventually chose his mother language, Hungarian, for his writings. He settled in Krisztinaváros, Budapest, in 1928. In the 1930s, he gained prominence with a precise and clear realist style. He was the first person to write reviews of the work of Kafka.
He wrote very enthusiastically about the Vienn Sándor Márai (originally Sándor Károly Henrik Grosschmied de Mára) was a Hungarian writer and journalist.
He was born in the city of Kassa in Austria-Hungary (now Košice in Slovakia) to an old family of Saxon origin who had mixed with magyars through the centuries. Through his father he was a relative of the Ország-family. In his early years, Márai travelled to and lived in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris and briefly considered writing in German, but eventually chose his mother language, Hungarian, for his writings. He settled in Krisztinaváros, Budapest, in 1928. In the 1930s, he gained prominence with a precise and clear realist style. He was the first person to write reviews of the work of Kafka.
He wrote very enthusiastically about the Vienna Awards, in which Germany forced Czechoslovakia and Romania to give back part of the territories which Hungary lost in the Treaty of Trianon. Nevertheless, Márai was highly critical of the Nazis as such and was considered "profoundly antifascist," a dangerous position to take in wartime Hungary.
Marai authored forty-six books, mostly novels, and was considered by literary critics to be one of Hungary's most influential representatives of middle class literature between the two world wars. His 1942 book Embers (Hungarian title: A gyertyák csonkig égnek, meaning "The Candles Burn Down to the Stump") expresses a nostalgia for the bygone multi-ethnic, multicultural society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, reminiscent of the works of Joseph Roth. In 2006 an adaptation of this novel for the stage, written by Christopher Hampton, was performed in London.
He also disliked the Communist regime that seized power after World War II, and left – or was driven away – in 1948. After living for some time in Italy, Márai settled in the city of San Diego, California, in the United States.
He continued to write in his native language, but was not published in English until the mid-1990s. Márai's Memoir of Hungary (1944-1948) provides an interesting glimpse of post World War II Hungary under Soviet occupation. Like other memoirs by Hungarian writers and statesmen, it was first published in the West, because it could not be published in the Hungary of the post-1956 Kádár era. The English version of the memoir was published posthumously in 1996. After his wife died, Márai retreated more and more into isolation. He committed suicide by a gunshot to his head in San Diego in 1989.
Largely forgotten outside of Hungary, his work (consisting of poems, novels, and diaries) has only been recently "rediscovered" and republished in French (starting in 1992), Polish, Catalan, Italian, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Icelandic, Korean, Dutch, and other languages too, and is now considered to be part of the European Twentieth Century literary canon. ...more

Combine Editions
Sándor Márai’s books

Average rating: 3.9 · 31,360 ratings · 3,472 reviews · 140 distinct works • Similar authors

	Embers 3.98 avg rating — 17,871 ratings — published 1942 — 122 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	La mujer justa by Sándor Márai, Agnes Csomos (Translator) 3.99 avg rating — 3,093 ratings — published 1941 — 39 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	La herencia de Eszter by Sándor Márai, Judit Xantus Szarvas (Translator) 3.66 avg rating — 2,515 ratings — published 1939 — 58 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Casanova in Bolzano by Sándor Márai, George Szirtes (Translator) 3.49 avg rating — 1,243 ratings — published 1940 — 55 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Divorcio en Buda by Sándor Márai, Judit Xantus Szarvas (Translator) 3.77 avg rating — 1,130 ratings — published 1935 — 33 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Rebels by Sándor Márai, George Szirtes (Translator) 3.41 avg rating — 791 ratings — published 1930 — 31 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	La hermana by Sándor Márai, Maria Szijj (Translator), J.M. González Trevejo (Translator) 3.84 avg rating — 377 ratings — published 1946 — 16 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Bốn mùa - Trời và đất by Sándor Márai, Giáp Văn Chung (Translator) 4.29 avg rating — 165 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Les Confessions d'un bourgeois by Sándor Márai, Georges Kassaï (Translator), Zéno Bianu (Translator) 4.01 avg rating — 504 ratings — published 1935 — 29 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	La extraña by Sándor Márai, Maria Szijj (Translator), J.M. González Trevejo (Translator) 3.41 avg rating — 252 ratings — published 1930 — 17 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Sándor Márai…

Series by Sándor Márai

Dzieło Garrenów (2 books)
by

Sándor Márai,

George Szirtes (Translator)

3.43 avg rating — 815 ratings

Quotes by Sándor Márai

“No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

tags: acceptance, deire, disloyalty, love

104 likes

“She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable.”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

tags: confidences, fear, secrets, sharing-secrets, writing

50 likes

“Do you also believe that what gives our lives their meaning is the passion that suddenly invades us heart, soul, and body, and burns in us forever, no matter what else happens in our lives? And that if we have experienced this much, then perhaps we haven’t lived in vain? Is passion so deep and terrible and magnificent and inhuman? Is it indeed about desiring any one person, or is it about desiring desire itself? That is the question. Or perhaps, is it indeed about desiring a particular person, a single, mysterious other, once and for always, no matter whether that person is good or bad, and the intensity of our feelings bears no relation to that individual’s qualities or behavior?”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

48 likes

See all Sándor Márai's quotes »

Polls

Lo que este topic propone es genial, e incluso, si nos ponemos ambiciosos, puede verse como un mini reto: si el libro de la categoría 10 esta ambientado en un día ¿Serás capaz de leerlo en sólo un día?
Sea cual sea la respuesta, ¡vota y únete a la lectura!

Al final mueren los dos, de Adam Silvera

10 votes, 20.8%

CUENTO DE NAVIDAD, de Charles Dickens

8 votes, 16.7%

La importancia de llamarse Ernesto ; Vera o los nihilistas, de Oscar Wilde

7 votes, 14.6%

Alicia en el país de las maravillas, de Lewis Carroll

4 votes, 8.3%

Entre actos, de Virginia Woolf

3 votes, 6.3%

El último día de un condenado a muerte - Claude Gueux, de Victor Hugo

3 votes, 6.3%

Las horas, de Michael Cunningham

2 votes, 4.2%

La paloma, de Patrick Süskind

2 votes, 4.2%

Bajo el volcán, de Malcolm Lowry

1 vote, 2.1%

Veinticuatro horas en la vida de una mujer, de Stefan Zweig

1 vote, 2.1%

Mariposa en la sombra, de Gilly Macmillan

1 vote, 2.1%

Cinco horas con Mario, de Miguel Delibes

1 vote, 2.1%

El paseo, de Robert Walser

1 vote, 2.1%

En lugar seguro, de Wallace Stegner

1 vote, 2.1%

Intimidad, de Hanif Kureishi

1 vote, 2.1%

Un día perfecto, de Melania G. Mazzucco

1 vote, 2.1%

Sábado, de Ian McEwan

1 vote, 2.1%

Ve y dilo en la montaña, de James Baldwin

0 votes, 0.0%

La Luz del Día, de Graham Swift

0 votes, 0.0%

Chesil Beach, de Ian McEwan

0 votes, 0.0%

Cosmopolis, de Don DeLillo

0 votes, 0.0%

Un día en la vida de Iván Denisovich, de Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

0 votes, 0.0%

Veinticuatro horas en la vida de una mujer sensible, de Constance de Salm

0 votes, 0.0%

Un hombre que duerme, de Georges Perec

0 votes, 0.0%

El joven vendedor y el estilo de vida fluido, de Fernando San Basilio

0 votes, 0.0%

El corrector, de Ricardo Menéndez Salmón

0 votes, 0.0%

Tuyo es el mañana, de Pablo Martín Sánchez

0 votes, 0.0%

Berlin secreto, de Franz Hessel

0 votes, 0.0%

La caída de Madrid, de Rafael Chirbes

0 votes, 0.0%

El último encuentro. de Sándor Márai

0 votes, 0.0%

48 total votes

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