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

Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai

Whilst studying at the Faculty of Law in Budapest, he became a writer at the daily Hungary, making the acquaintance of prominent writers, including Gyula Krúdy. His first volume was published in this year, the Book of Memories, containing seventeen poems. It was published in one hundred copies.

"It was a true bestseller - every copy sold out," he wrote ironically to a friend, when he was in his eighties.

In 1919 he took part in the Commune as a journalist. He wrote regular opinion piece for the Red Flag. He would later frequently be attacked for his writings in this paper. But at the time of the dictatorship of the proletariat he was more influenced by the fire of youth (he was still only nineteen) than by any kind of genuine communist conviction. Revolution, as an event, as an emotion, affected him - not left-wing ideology.

After the fall of the left-wing dictatorship he escaped with a friend to Kosice and then went further in October, first to Prague and then to Leipzig, where following his father's advice, he enrolled at the Institute for Newspaper Research. He spent little time here, since he was much more interested in writing journalism. ("What did 1 do in Leipzig? My family believed that I was at the university, being trained with German precision to be a journalist. In truth, 1 was dreaming and adventuring," he writes in Confessions).

He became first an occasional, then a permanent contributor for several newspapers, including the Frankfurter Zeitung. He was already involved with Ilona Matzner (Lola in his writings), who later became his wife, his faithful companion throughout sixty-three years. He met her in his hometown at an ice cream-eating competition. Lola's family was one of the richest in the town. They had a department store and an second-hand bookshop. (One reminiscence has it that the writer smuggled his later wife out of the house in Kosice, following the "classical rules" - bedsheets tied together into a rope).

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