Mészáros Tibor (szerk.): Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai. Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life (Budapest, 2004)
Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai
fact that he is not writing a scholarly monograph but a "satirical essay", as one critic put it. The most important thing for him is that anyone living in poverty and following in St. Francis of Assisi's footsteps should discover the richness and beauty of the world, life and women and so on... "God knows no rank. Poor people address him directly in the informal second person...The poor man can turn to God in every small matter, because he has learned that on earth whoever he turns to, it will still be in vain.." Márai believes that it is not possessions that make one wealthy and not wealth that accumulates in the hands of the rich. Rather it is people with contacts who are wealthy - this is not about money. Addressing such a high personage as God in the informal second person is something only for the truly poor. (The philosopher Martin Buber expresses this idea in his work I and You: At the beginning is the contact; the individual can only experience his true substance and self via the relationship between I and You.") By this time he was more than just a widely-read columnist, he was a living a true writer's life. "I'm living my own kind of monk's life. I have a fixed timetable. 1 have three hours for reading every morning. I read everything. Every morning I have some time for writing. A book. That's when I'm not being a journalist...If I have to earn money in humiliating ways, then I'm simply unable to work. That's why l don't write for theatres... 1 didn't describe events, I just described whatever it inspired inside me." His greatest and most lasting work is his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Bourgeois whose first volume appeared in 1935. He remembers his parents, his life, and, thinks of everything he received from them: his culture, the inspiration to create, the desire to preserve the treasures of the past, a way of living and thinking. Everything known as the bourgeois system of values. One of his autobiography's greatest virtues is that it attempts the impossible: to recreate a class and culture that now only exists in his memories - but he knows, that it is only possible "to remember it and pass over it in silence", as he says at the end of his work. He does not create values, he preserves them. The writer was sued for certain chapters of the novel, and thus the novel was suppressed in June 1935: certain of his teachers and classmates featured under their real names or under nicknames, and a couple had recognized themselves. He was ordered to pay a fine and rewrite or omit the 'problematic' passages in his book. NYUGAT HABITS MIHÁLY e» GELLERT OSZKÁR PŰMUNXATAlWAKi KOSZTOLÁNYI DEZSŐ MÓRICZ ZSIGMOND SOKJPFLIN ALADAR LÁTOGASSA A NYUGAT-BARÁTOK IRODALMI SZALONJÁT 9
