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

Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai

Tibor Mészáros

Once I lived, l, Sándor Márai

(Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life)

S

ándor Márai was born on 11 April 1900 in Kosice. He was the first child of the lawyer Géza Grosschmid (who would later become a senator in the Prague parliament) and Margit Ratkovszky. The family's original name was Grosschmid. His forebears had in centuries past been adherents of bourgeois culture. "The family had served the Elector of Saxony and had worked In the state treasury...My great-grandmother on my father's side was an Országh girl, and the family intermarried with Hungarians over many centuries. They were all officials: lawyers, civil servants, officers," writes Márai in his greatest work, Confessions of a Bourgeois.

After Sándor, his parents had two more boys and one girl: Gábor followed his father into the law, Géza, who as Géza Radványi became a world-famous film director, and Kató. Of the house of his birth he writes in the Confessions,

"There were perhaps a dozen two-storied houses in the town: the one we lived in, the two army garrisons, and a few public buildings...But our house on the Main Street was a real metropolitan house. It was a real apartment block, with two stories, an expansive fagade, wide gates, a broad staircase...and on every level a long row of windows, twelve of them gazing out onto the street."

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