Mészáros Tibor (szerk.): Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai. Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life (Budapest, 2004)

Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai

His following novel, Western Marches, is not a travelogue. Rather, he writes down the theoretical and philosophical ideas that come to him along the journey. He revisits two cities, Paris and London.

"I want to examine the West, because it is said that Europe is 'fading away'... We take all of ourselves along with ourselves, like ancient sages, and we leave everything behind at home, things that will later draw us back: dreams, our language, secrets - all these things that make up home. Travel, then, once again, I say!"

His two-volume 1937 work The Jealous is a continuation of the history of the Garren family, first seen in The Mutineers. Creating values, invoking the past - the family's creative power that forms the present. These are the values that emerge from Confessions as well, "To die for 'something', they said. Nobody dies for 'something'... After that there was another death, one which could not be resisted, the death that was within us, our own death, when form begins to fade, can go on no longer, when a terrible incapacity begins to cripple the pace of work and life, and the guilt that begins to scream that we are death, we invented it, we spread it."The Bible is one of the main source for the novel's symbolism. Jesus dies not for something, but for someone.

Márai began to turn inward at this point, driven by the spiritual and moral decay he saw around him in the world (that is, in Europe), and by the vanishing of the bourgeoisie, who now only existed as an idea.

This can be seen in his earlier works as well, but his 1938 novel The Four Seasons makes quite clear the writer's withdrawal from the world, his escape into the safety of stoicism. The book is in twelve parts, just like a year: its dense, aphoristic style reflects Márai's inner state: he writes as much as necessary, and does no more than he must. At the beginning of February he was elected a member of the prestigious Kisfaludy Society, an honour which customarily led to being elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as happened in Márai's case.

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