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

Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai

for decades. "I will not allow any Hungarian publication whilst the Russian occupiers remain. And, if they leave, there should be democratic, free elections with foreign monitoring. Until then I will not allow my writings to be published in any form."

In November, he was shocked to receive the The Garrens, a novel of a family and of generations, which was published in a presentation box by the Toronto publisher Vörösváry-Weller. This fusion of novels was not entirely the product of an overall harmonic vision, since The Mutineers, The Jealous and The Offended Trilogy (The Voice, Badge and Meaning, Art and Love) were reworked to produce the series. The Garrens is the final confession of a bourgeois preparing to die. He became increasingly preoccupied with death, writing at the end of the year to Zsuzsa Szőnyi in Rome with some irony that: "Death, which I do not yearn for too greatly, is not a problem but a necessity. Up until now everybody's gone through it and nobody has complained afterwards. But dying can be a problem, especially nowadays, now that they've discovered all these tricks for artificial existence."

In 1989, in what was probably his last letter he writes to his friend and publisher, István Vörösváry. "I'm trying, but it can't go on. This weakness doesn't end, and if it continues, then I'll soon be needing hospital care. I'm trying to avoid this. Thank you for the friendship. Take care of each other. I think of you both with the best wishes. Sándor Márai."VJe read his final diary entry on 15 January, written, exceptionally, not with a typewriter but by

hand. "I'm waiting for the invitation, I'm not hurrying them, but I'm not just waiting. This is the time." In the early afternoon of 21 February (probably around 2pm) he shot himself in the head with a pistol. His ashes were scattered in the ocean like his wife's and adoptive son's, in accordance with his wishes.

"Everything that gave meaning to his life was lost: the cause to which he swore himself, the person whom he served, the women whom he loved," he wrote in the 1940s of a Hungarian writer, and this became his fate as well.

After forty-one years of exile he died in loneliness, depressed from illness and from the deaths of his loved ones, never to see the Soviet troops' departure from his homeland and the re-publication of his works in Hungarian.

He was unable to see the improbable success that began in Italy, which has spread by now to the whole world, making this wandering bourgeois's works accessible in most languages. "Everything dies as soon as people forget it," he wrote in Dead Cemetery. Márai lives on in his works, which are being read once again. Even he was unable to change the world, like the hero of The Blood of San Gennaro, but in his works he is present everywhere and through his works he teaches endurance, the will to fight for values, using the example of his life.

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