The paper focuses on the category of otherness that can be find in Sándor Mára's novel titled Az idegenek and shows how Márai using the concept of "the other" presented the Spengler's conflict between culture and civilization. In the perspective of cultural studies and cultural literary theory, Márai's concept is confronted with Bernhard Waldenfels' phenomenology of the alien as a concept that expresses a particular connection with the cultural literary theory, particularly the concept of alienation in temporal and spatial terms.
Therefore, the study complements also the analysis of the concept of the city, mythologization of culture and its conditioning in the world of changing values as well as the propagated cultural models.