{"id":1610,"date":"2018-06-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-31T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.newyorkcafe.hu\/new-york-muvesz-paholy-marai-sandor-az-orokos-lazado\/"},"modified":"2026-11-06T13:41:23","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T12:41:23","slug":"new-york-muvesz-paholy-sandor-marai-the-eternal-rebel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/new-york-muvesz-paholy-marai-sandor-az-orokos-lazado\/","title":{"rendered":"New York M\u0171v\u00e9sz P\u00e1holy \u2013 S\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai \u2013 the eternal rebel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\nThe cultural vibrancy characteristic of the New York Caf\u00e9 acted as a magnet, drawing lovers and practitioners of the arts and literature, young and old alike. It was in this circle that the 18-year-old S\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai made his debut in 1918, thanks to his mentor, Gyula Kr\u00fady; under his name at the time, S\u00e1ndor Grosschmid, he broadened the circle of rebellious young men of noble descent.<\/strong>\n\n<\/div>\n
\n\nHe moved to Budapest in 1914 because, although his parents had given him an elite middle-class upbringing and he had studied at the Premonstratensian Canons\u201e Kassai Secondary School in his hometown of J\u00e1sz\u00f3v\u00e1r, he found the strict rules there difficult to bear. At the age of 14, he ran away from home and was sent to a boarding school in Buda, the Archdiocesan Catholic Grammar School of Budapest\u2019s 2nd District. He did not settle in there either, so he returned to Kassa, and in 1917 he took his school-leaving examination at the Catholic Secondary School in Eperjes.\n\nHis talent burst onto the scene at a very early age. His parents did not support his literary ambitions, and the Premonstratensians did not tolerate his defiant, bohemian style of dress; furthermore, they were opposed to pupils publishing their work independently. Nevertheless, even as a young man, he submitted entries to various daily newspapers under a pseudonym. It is said that he used a pen name so as not to bring shame upon the Grosschmid name by choosing an artistic career path.\n\nIn the autumn of 1918, he moved to Budapest. Although he studied law and later arts, his first collection of poems, *Eml\u00e9kk\u00f6nyv* (*Memorial Book*), was published that very year. The work also appealed to Dezs\u0151 Kosztol\u00e1nyi, another \u201dNew Yorker\u2019, who praised M\u00e1rai\u2019s work in the *Pesti Napl\u00f3*. In Pest, M\u00e1rai led a bohemian, extravagant life, regularly frequenting nightspots and cabarets \u2013 and the New York Caf\u00e9. He met his mentor, Gyula Kr\u00fady, there on several occasions.\n\nIt was Kr\u00fady who coined the motto for the New York Caf\u00e9\u2019s cultural programme series, the New York M\u0171v\u00e9sz P\u00e1holy, which reads:\n

\u201eThere is no literature without coffee houses\u201d<\/i><\/p>\nHis youthful recklessness and bohemian lifestyle did not last long, as in 1923 he met his future wife, Ilona Matzner \u2013 known as Lola \u2013 to whom he remained a faithful companion for more than six decades, until her death.\n

Constant wandering<\/h4>\nFollowing the fall of the Soviet Republic, his family felt it would be safer for him to leave the country, so M\u00e1rai continued his studies in Leipzig and then in Berlin, eventually becoming a regular contributor to several newspapers. During these years, M\u00e1rai became a true citizen of the world: he travelled extensively, read widely and kept himself well-informed, drawing on these experiences for the themes of his writing. His talent was quickly recognised abroad, and so he published regularly not only in Germany but also in Prague and in the *Kassai Napl\u00f3*. When the world-famous writer Thomas Mann visited Budapest in January 1935, M\u00e1rai was one of those who showed the writer around Buda Castle.\n\nUntil 1948, wherever he travelled in the world, he always returned to Budapest and Ko\u0161ice. That year, however, the M\u00e1rai family took a major step: they left the country. They went first to Switzerland, then settled in Posillipo, Campania, in Italy. Their fate was followed by several newspapers published in the West, and an interview was also published in the Cleveland-based newspaper *Szabads\u00e1g*. In it, he identified the two most important tasks of the exile as introducing Hungarians to the world without prejudice and preserving the Hungarian language.\n\nM\u00e1rai and his wife finally left Italy in 1952 and moved to New York. It was then that he joined Radio Free Europe, creating a kind of intellectual bridge with his homeland he had left behind. He followed the events of 1956 closely throughout. He expressed his thoughts on those events via Radio Free Europe.\n\nBetween 1967 and 1979, he lived in Italy, before moving back to the United States in 1980 and settling in San Diego. After the deaths of his younger brother and sister, as well as his son and wife, and whilst he himself was suffering from advanced cancer, he took his own life with a gunshot on 21 February 1989. His ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean.\n\nM\u00e1rai was survived by three step-granddaughters: Lisa, Sarah and Jennifer M\u00e1rai, who live in the United States. As they had not been taught Hungarian, they were never able to understand their grandfather\u2019s life\u2019s work.\n

The fate of his works<\/h4>\nS\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai drew up his will back in 1967. He recorded on tape what was to happen to his manuscripts in the event of his death. In the recording, he asked Lola that, once the Russians had finally left the country and democratic elections had been held, she should contact the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and deposit the manuscripts with them until such time as \u2013 as his heir \u2013 she did not wish to dispose of them.\n\nFrom 1948 onwards, Communist cultural policy sought to consign S\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai to oblivion. In the 1980s, attempts were made to coax him back, but he refused to play along and did not authorise the publication of his books. It was only after his death that his works began to be republished in Hungary. In 1990, a year after his death, he was posthumously awarded the Kossuth Prize.\n\nAbroad, he was first rediscovered in France in the early 1990s. Within a short space of time, four of his novels were published in Paris. His Italian publisher, having discovered his works in French translation, decided to launch his M\u00e1rai series with the novel *The Candles Burn Down to the Stump*. *Le braci* quickly made it onto the Italian bestseller list. Since then, the novels \u2013 primarily those published by French publishers \u2013 have been released to huge success in German, Spanish, Portuguese and English-speaking countries, as well as in numerous Eastern European languages; more recently, his other works have also been published.\n\nS\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai is currently enjoying a renaissance; his works are being adapted for the screen one after another, and his plays have been revived on the stage.\n

\u201eWith my very last breath, I thank fate for allowing me to be human, and for the spark of reason that shone even in my dimmed soul. I saw the earth, the sky, the changing seasons.\u201d.<\/p>\n

I have come to know love, fragments of reality, desires and disappointments.<\/p>\n

I lived on this earth and gradually came to my senses. One day I shall die: and how wonderfully natural and simple that is! Could anything else, anything better or more magnificent, have happened to me? It could not.<\/p>\n

\u201dI have experienced the fullest and most wonderful of all human destinies. Nothing else, nothing better, could have happened to me.\u2019<\/p>\n\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The cultural vibrancy characteristic of the New York Caf\u00e9 acted as a magnet, drawing lovers and practitioners of the arts and literature, young and old alike. It was in this circle that the 18-year-old S\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai made his debut in 1918, thanks to his mentor, Gyula Kr\u00fady; under his name at the time, S\u00e1ndor Grosschmid, he broadened the circle of rebellious young men of noble descent.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-muveszek"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3919,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610\/revisions\/3919"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkcafe.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}