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

Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai

Tears in Berlin and other German towns, where 1 used to believe that 1 could get to the end of every­thing, and then years in Paris, where I realized that I'm still at the beginning of everything." He and his wife moved back home from Paris in 1928, and became the lead columnist of the left- wing newspaper Újság. One piece, A Pessimist, clearly shows the kind of writing he did. A blind man, upon seeing again, almost goes mad, plead­ing for help: he does not want to see. "Oh! Man. I understand you and I pity you, but at the time somehow I do not pity you. Imagine a humanity from whose eyes all prejudice, misunder­standing, arrogance, lies and ignorance have been removed by a catastrophe or a concussion...See yourself, that is how you are - naked, unveiled. Open your eyes, see! Imagine how humanity would be trapped by such truth, entrapping that yearning in happy blindness, prejudice...lies, twilight, where everyone can imagine himself as beautiful as he likes. This blind man, he began to see, not wanting to know anything about the world which we think so beautiful. A pessimist. Tragic for a per­son, immortal as a human symbol." It's almost as if we were reading the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge's The Well of the Holy when Mary Doul, the blind wife says at the end: "Leave me alone, Holy Mother, I'd prefer to live blindly with him until the day / die than that I should see more suffering." His psychological novel Baby or first love was published in the same year. A provincial teacher narrates the story of his love for his student in his diary. His affection for the diary form reappears in his later works The Sister, The Blood of San Gennaro and the Diaries. He was at his most productive as a writer in the 1930s. In 1930 he edited the album 1914-1930 alongside László Dormándí, which was published in Germany, France and Italy. The volume con­tained seven hundred photographs some of which hint at the horrifying military destruction that its readers would shortly see for themselves. The Mutineers is the novel most characteristic of this period. The work shows remarkable parallels with Jean Cocteau's Les enfants terribles. The novel asks how the world can regain its harmony after a conflagration, and whether growing up must lead to sin. The work argues that the end of childhood and the loss of innocence are becoming the same. This is the first genuinely literary work of a mature and skilled writer. In his 1932 novel Csutora, Máraí discusses a "master and dog" situation. This device gives us a closer look at an individual and his limits. How does the individual behave when he encounters a being that knows only unlimited freedom, and can he himself choose this, or is order the only thing that can shape his life? School for the Poor is a two hundred-page essay from 1933. He discusses the idea and meaning of poverty in terms of a person's state of mind, and admits that he, too, is poor. The text is shot through with irony, betraying the 8

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