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

Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai

under the pseudonyms Candidus and Ulysses for a programme called Sunday Chronicle. In a 1949 interview he made it clear that his ties to his homeland were unbreakable. For him, the two main tasks of people living in exile were to make the Hungarians known without prejudice and to save the Hungarian language. This latter thought became a kind of leitmotif over his forty-four years of exile, and finds a faint echo in his 1951 poem Funeral Oration, whose title makes reference to the oldest preserved text in Hungarian, which bears the same title.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.—Danolt - PoslIIlpo Disfo dal BelMere

They lived in Italy until 1952, when they moved to New York.

"These three and a half years in Italy were the greatest gift of my life. / loved everything and 1 knew that in their own way the South Italians accepted me." (Diary, 1952)

In the same year, his novel Peace in Ithaca was published by the london publisher Prager. Penelope’s words in the novel are certainly true of Mára! as well: "The common, uniform experience of

the exile is that the truth of their lives is not experience but memory." He had up until now remembered the class to which he belonged, now he had to remember his country as well, because it had become inaccessible to him.

In New York he moved to the northern tip of Manhattan, to Cloisters, near the imported Italian medieval monastery that been bought and shipped over in pieces to be rebuilt in the city. At this time Lola worked in a shoe shop.

He followed the 1956 Hungarian revolution closely. Radio Free Europe devoted a special series

to analyzing the events. "He was tempted," to return home, but he refrained, because although the Hungarian people "has of its own power regained its freedom for a few days, the West will still leave it as prey for Asia."

These words turned out to be prophetic. After the defeat of the revolution he did not return directly to New York, but visited Italy.

In 1958 his latest diary was published, the Diary 1945-1957. He explains why he had to leave his

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