Abstract
The paper discusses the outlook on European history, culture and society in the 20th century that can be find in the works of Hungarian prose writer Sándor Márai. The author himself is often called the witness of the 20th century and his novels can be read as a peculiar view on how Europe has changed during the 20th century.
This aspect of his oeuvre is one of the key features in the comprehensive understanding of Márai's work and it's significance in the History of European Literature. The paper includes a detailed picture of Márai's approach based on two groups of novels.
The first one is the novel series entitled Garrenek műve, in which, through the parabolic story of the fictional Garren family, the author shows what processes and changes have influenced the Hungarian and European society and their mutual relationship in the first decades of the 20th century, namely from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy to Hitler's rise to power. The second group includes a so called essayistic novels (Egy polgár vallomásai, Föld, föld! ..., Hallgatni akartam), where the author makes an attempt to create the description, analysis and finally summarization of historical events that influenced not only his own life, but the life of Hungarian and European society and the life of the social class he belonged to.
Special focus will be given to Márai's attitude towards concepts such as humanism, culture, democracy, nation and nationalism. The paper will also include remarks on Márai's notion of writing as such, his views on the social role of the writer and his relation to the reader seen as a peculiar leadership and finally on the literature entangled in ideology.