Sándor Márai’s The Seagull in the Context of A. P. Chekhov’s Poetics

Abstract

Sándor Márai is one of the most significant Hungarian authors of the twentieth century. His career started in the second half of the 1920s, in the late modernist era, and then suffered some sharp turns when he emigrated to Italy in 1948 and then moved to the United States. From that time onwards, his works were not published in Hungary until his death in 1989. To a large extent, the recognition of his oeuvre, in certain part for the second time, occurred in the 1990s. In the reception of his work, a more prominent emphasis fell on his autobiographical prose and his diaries. Although his fiction, both his short novels and novels, was exceptionally successful among readers in Hungary and abroad, Hungarian critics produced ambivalent responses to it. Until now, relatively little attention has been paid to the poetic characteristics of these works, and in terms of other literary influences, usually western authors are mentioned. In all the research devoted to Márai’s oeuvre to date, the role of Russian literature has not been discussed yet. Nonetheless, the influence of the Russian classics whose legacy Márai was well-acquainted with can be clearly detected in his pre-emigration works. It is from this particular aspect that this paper examines The Seagull , a novel which was published in 1943 and has received scant attention in Hungarian literary criticism. The hypothesis presented here is that this was an experimental novel, which is demonstrated through the background of Chekhov’s poetics. Firstly, the author considers an intertextual link with Chekhov’s eponymous play, primarily on the level of the system of relationships between the characters themselves and the relationship between the characters and the symbol of the seagull. Secondly, there are clearly manifested examples of certain features that were typical of Chekhov’s later prose. Following an exploration of Márai’s novel’s poetic features, the author attempts to place the work within the context of the author’s oeuvre.