Maria Rybakova

The annual theme of “Space and Place” allows the writer Maria Rybakova to explore the interlocking motifs of location and dislocation in Sándor Márai’s and her own life and work.  She explores three locations: San Diego (the place of Márai’s suicide), Moscow, and the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire of Márai’s youth. The questions she asks are: does a remembered location (a location that is intrinsically linked with important and traumatic memories) create a certain “palace of memory,” into which all subsequent experiences are stored, thereby robbing the subsequent domiciles of their reality as places? What are the links between that central “location” of one’s life and the native language that one retains even in exile and continues to write in? Is there an “idiom of location”?