ABSTRACT
This chapter will present an understanding of the modern world that can be gained by studying the works of the Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai, whose novels suddenly became read all over the world in the new century, among others due to the efforts of Roberto Calasso, who is their Italian publisher. Apart from an analysis of Márai’s three main novels, Esther’s Inheritance (1939), Conversations in Bolzano (1940) and Embers (1942), the latter having Krisztina as its twice paradoxical heroine, emphasis will be placed on his wartime diaries, and especially the recollections of his encounters with the occupying Red Army during the last phase of WWII and the ensuing Communist takeover period. It is argued that the liminal time and place enabled Márai to capture some archetypal characters of the modern world, just as the dynamics of the processes that were unfolding, ending a civilisation, that can be understood through terms of political anthropology like trickster, liminality, schismogenesis and imitation.
