Sándor Márai: Striving for Truth (HU)

Márai Sándor: Striving for Truth

Those Who Seek the Genuine…

The one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Sándor Márai offers an opportunity to freely choose from the writer’s rich literary legacy.

The central motif of this selection is the creator’s sense of vocation and artistic credo. In the diary excerpts used, Sándor Márai sets forth a moral and artistic standard according to which compromise is unworthy of the writer’s mission. “You are Hungarian, you are European, and you are a writer; you may not serve any single class, for you must serve the cause of humankind. There is only one class whose spokesperson you may be: the class of those who suffer; and only one party to whose service you have the right to swear allegiance: the party of reason and compassion.”

“I was born a writer,” Márai confesses— a writer who feels responsible for the souls of people. Yet he is driven by a constant urge to escape. He flees from the profession assigned to him, escapes from his marriages, plunges into adventures and then escapes from those as well; for him, a state of perpetual homelessness comes to seem almost natural. In his view, both creative solitude and personal loneliness are fundamental conditions of artistic fulfillment. Without sacrifice there is no calling. “I can only create the human being if I keep my distance from people… this solitude is not arrogance, but the final, the ultimate humility,” he writes in his diary.

Although he breaks with journalism, Márai openly takes a stand against the Second World War and depicts all of its horrors. He judges war criminals harshly: “We wanted to educate, and the educators were struck on the head with clubs, cheerfully and laughing… these people must be forced by every means to disappear from the world…,” yet at the same time he remains profoundly humane: “There is no need for revenge and retribution. Personal accountability before the law is entirely sufficient…”

For the writer, the search for the genuine is not an illusory artistic pose, but the daily practice of his way of life. He strove for perfection, for the attainment of the genuine, in his social relationships, his vocation as a writer, and his private life, and he professed with firm conviction: “the genuine always exists (exists somewhere).”

Performed by: Ágnes Lőrincz and Sándor Tatai

Edited by: Sándor Tatai

Directed by: Viola Török

Set and costume design: Tímea Takács

Lighting and sound: Róbert Incze