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

Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai

reveals that "originally I planned Casanova as a play, but I nonetheless wrote it as a novel. It's not impossible that I'll rewrite it for the stage later." (The theatrical version was finally written in exile, and was first published and performed in Washington in 1960. It was entitled The Gentleman from Venice.)

His first drama was The Adventure, which was performed on 17 October at the National Chamber Theatre. Its extraordinary success is shown by the fact that it ran into several hundred performances and was performed in almost every major city in Europe.

Sinbad Returns Home is a tribute to one of his heroes, the writer Gyula Krúdy. There is little in the way of action in the work: a steam bath, wine- drinking. It reenacts the lost and longed-for world of Confessions of a Bourgeois, but this old Hungary only lives on in people's minds. As Márai puts it,

'"Only in the old Hungary could people listen,' thought Sinbad. He recognized this other world in people's faces, in their attire, which was silken and dignified, like their hearts and their feelings. He saw them walking their dogs amongst the houses at dusk, so lonely that the returning soul shudders in the old cemeteries. He knew their hearts and he knew that sadness is in the noblest hearts. Only Sinbad and those like him knew that at heart, the country was sad."

The writer's humanism was irreconcilable with war and its blind destruction. Thus appeared in 1941 his novel The Kosice Marches, in which he examines the question of guilt in war. He revisits the scenes of his childhood and reflects.

"The bourgeois and the bourgeois order is one of the most useful, most elevated products of humans living together. Up until the point, at least, that it is creative and heroic. The bourgeois in his slippers, listening to the radio, cursing taxes and the proles, is of value to noone...The truth is simply that writers failed to say the magic words at the right moment with enough force... The writer is the measure."

The increasingly hellish war caused him to become ever more introverted. His works of 1942 are about seeking a path, a future, about mapping genuine values. Sky and Earth was a series of short, rational essays born of the exile of stoicism. Tract on the Raising of the Nation outlines the task of education that must follow the war.

"It is the conviction of Europe's greatest minds that bolshevism cannot become the life of the Western

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