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 son Kristóf was bom on 28 February 1939. Despite being a retiring man. the writer created an extraordinarily beautiful canapy around his wife and the newborn child. His cousin remembers, "What I remember is that we went into the room, where Lola was lying on her own. in the middle of a field of flowers. The bed was barely visible, It looked like a stage set. He had arranged it with the nurses so that Lola should He on the canapy alongside little Kristóf."

The child lived for only seven weeks, dying of internal bleeding. He writes of this "Day of Loss" in a diary published posthumously in 1997.

"Every year something bad happened on this day. Like for me on 6 April. That's the day my son Kristóf died."

The writer expressed his anguish in the third poem of his verse cycle Thumb Exercises: l don't understand why they did this to me?

1 won't argue, I'll live and keep silent.

Now he Is an angel, if angels existYet down here everything Is bland and brutish.

I won't forgive. Nobody, never.

He regarded the outbreak of World War 11 with skepticism, despite the pain he felt. Parting, 'inspired' by the outbreak of war, begins thus:

"Now when darkness falls on the dear land that was my second home and whose geographical name is Europe, now I close my eyes, so that for a moment l should see more clearly, yet l don't want to believe that this is a parting. I don't want to believe, because I saw, not long ago, perhaps yesterday or the day before, as Europe awoke to the delirium of this war, that blessed hands were repairing damaged decorations and masterpieces. In the hospitals they were still curing the crippled and wounded. I don't want to believe, because I still hear the pacts of the statesmen, the politicians, the writers, the priests, the populists - the oaths they swear on the mass graves, that never more shall this be!" His article ends thus: "and as long as l live and can speak. I want to believe that the power of sense and solidarity is greater than the nightmare rule of instincts."

In the 1940s, as in the previous decade, he was very productive. Casanova in Bolzano (1940) uses the story of Casanova to discuss the relationship between life and adventure. One of his statements

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