Mészáros Tibor (szerk.): Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai. Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life (Budapest, 2004)
Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai
He was taught by a tutor until he was ten. "He teaches me spelling, the fundamentals of arithmetic and the geography of our country," writes Márai. He attended various schools: in 1909 he was sent to a religious grammar school in Kosice. During his years of study he played a role in student life. He played Archangel Gabriel in one scene, where he declaimed his own speech. He changed schools in 1913 ("the family council decided in favour of my internment; they sent me to an institute in Pest," he writes). He turned up in Budapest, where he attended a school famed for its strict discipline. A year later he returned once again to his school in Kosice, but he took his final exams at the Royal Catholic Grammar School in Eperjes. We cannot say for sure what led to this change of school. One variant has it that he wrote a sharp critique of the teachers in the school magazine. The teachers would punish them if one of the students would stroll down the road smoking a cigarette in the evenings. A more likely reason is that he submitted a short story under a pseudonym to a Budapest newspaper which was then published and for which he won a prize. His teachers were unhappy about this. There is an anecdote to the effect that when he was confronted about the piece, he slammed the door on one of his teachers and the rest of his class, shouting, "One day you’ll be teaching about me in Hungarian literature classes." (And of course, we now know that these words were prophetic, and not just in Hungary...) He then sent a letter without his parents knowledge, thanking his teachers for their work, and explaining that he had no desire to study further. "Stuff your science, and take it up with my father if there are any outstanding fees." His parents found out about this at the dinner table... In a letter to his friend Ödön Mihály written on 17 April 1917, he writes as a lonely and misunderstood young man. "There is nobody, not one person to whom 1 could write, who does not hate me, for whom I am not vulgar...I am completely, perfectly alone. 1 know that 1 am a genius...I am chosen, and 1 will either go far or nowhere at all, but 1 will create. 1 feel, I know that this is unavoidable...! lived my life up until now, and 1 will live it from now on as well." Later in his life he would have great need for this degree of commitment and self-consciousness. In January 1918, just before the end of World War 1, he was called up for the army. He was declared unfit to serve, and moved to Budapest in the Autumn. 5
