A New Yorker article titled Dangerous Games describes how the writer Sándor Márai (author of Embers) spent his last year before escaping from Hungary as the Communists closed in:
"When the borders were closing, and the secret police were circling, and the publishing house was telling him to stop writing, and his income had trickled to nothing, and his friends were leaving or being arrested, he spent an extra year in libraries, gulping down second-tier Hungarian literature, like a camel preparing for a desert crossing."
In Márai's memoir he describes his motivation for choosing to eschew the classics while consuming the lesser known Hungarian writers:
"I read the works of Hungarian writers. But not the classics..but those of the less noted..I kept sampling this pure powerful prose like someone who has stumbled on a buried cellar where he discovers a barrel filled with an old vintage.…I began to search the works of “the second set” of Hungarian writers for what I wanted to take with me, because I knew I would never find any trace of them abroad."
Will the second tier of books in various cultures continue to be preserved to be inhaled by future writers to nurture their souls? If you have read Sándor Márai you have to hope this will be the case.
