Albumy utraconej rodzinności – o doświadczeniu środkowoeuropejskości w prozie Sándora Máraiego. Kilka przybliżeń

The article focuses on the reflection of the Hungarian writer, Sándor Márai (1900-1989), about the family and Europeanism as identity traits. His novels, prose miniatures, essays, travel reports, and a diary, are analysed. The aim is an attempt to describe the experience of the Central-Eastern Europe in prose and intimate writing of the author of "Embers", as well as to diagnose the specific nature of private (family) and European identity of the character in such geopolitical map. For Márai Central Europe is a multicultural project of shattered identity, written project of space, far from the status of a federation of states. In his fictional worlds the writer – as if in the layer of language and plot – constructs Hungary, the former glory of the monarchy and the identity of Central Europe. The categories differentiating return to the sources, the collection of "lastness" (i.e. past experiences, meetings, reports, events) and melancholy as textual presence of a "lack" of language and search for space, which can be invoked as its own (a kind of "uterine myth"), form the writer's reflection on the trauma: "nothing that hurts". Márai's melancholia is both an existential experience, as well as the writing process – narrative and linguistic. These experiences contribute, through the prose and intimate works of Márai, as an album of "impossibility", showing a record of trauma of the Central-Eastern European experience, and displaying the impossibility of participation in family and culture.