People like Sándor Márai

Sándor Márai (Hungarian: [ˈʃaːndor ˈmaːrɒi]; Archaic English name: Alexander Márai; 11 April 1900 – 21 February 1989) was a Hungarian writer, poet, and journalist.

Márai was born on 11 April 1900 in the city of Kassa, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia). Through his father, he was a relative of the Hungarian noble Országh family. In 1919, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and worked as a journalist. He joined the Communists, becoming the founder of the "Activist and Anti-National Group of Communist Writers". After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, his family found it safer to leave the country, thus he continued his studies in Leipzig. Márai travelled to and lived in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris and briefly considered writing in German, but eventually chose his mother language, Hungarian, for his writings. In Egy polgár vallomásai (English: "Confessions of a citizen"), Márai identifies the mother tongue language with the concept of nation itself. He settled in Krisztinaváros, Budapest, in 1928. In the 1930s, he gained prominence with a precise and clear realist style. He was the first person to write reviews of the work of Franz Kafka.