Presence – Donation – Event

The Helikon Publishing House has published (2006–2018) Sándor Márai’s (1900–1989) diaries in eighteen volumes of eight thousand pages under the title The Complete Diary. After Márai left the country for good in 1948 and went into exile, the communist regime eliminated him from the history of Hungarian literature, and generations grew up without reading his books or hearing about him in their literary studies. The diary is a testament to the existential vulnerability of the writer in exile. This major piece of work has four layers: the first is made up of notes on regular readings, the second is about recent Hungarian history, the third is personal memory, and the fourth is the material for the absorption of the host country’s culture. The Complete Diary changes our view of Márai, whose vision of Hungarian history is disturbing. He sees Hungary as a failed attempt to create a modern bourgeois nation. What is unique about Márai’s diary is the way it fuses memories of the personal past with reflections on the present. The recording of daily events goes beyond the genre of the diary: on the one hand towards the essay, on the other towards the novel.