He spent part of his childhood in Szatmárnémeti (today Satu Mare, Romania), the local urban center, where he attended Catholic school and then the Kölcsey Calvinist College.

[7] Also according to Markovits, the column of Hungarian captives (including much of the 12th) was ordered to the transit camp of Darnytsia (Kiev), then his contingent was carried by train to Kineshma and by boat to Makaryevo.

[13] From this location, the entire group of Austro-Hungarians witnessed first hand the mutiny of Russian soldiers from the 30th Regiment, its repression by the White Army, followed by the mass murder of all disarmed rebels and the selective killing of Hungarians who supposedly helped them.

[16] According to his own fictionalized account, he volunteered to help with the coal transports organized by the Red squadrons, and was rewarded with repatriation (through the Baltic states, East Prussia and then Poland).

He decided to settle in Satu Mare, where he opened a law practice and continued work for the local Hungarian press—as editor of Szamos daily and correspondent for Cluj's Keleti Újság.

[1] The former prisoner had remained a committed follower of Leninism, as described by Ungureanu: "Taking his place on the left's barricades, living intensely the utopian illusions of communism, Markovits was to illustrate, in the early 1920s (like Malraux, Wells, Shaw, Panait Istrati, Gide etc.

"[5] In the early to mid-1920s, Rodion Markovits came into contact with the socialist art magazine Ma, published in Vienna by Lajos Kassák and other leftist writers who opposed the regimes of Regency Hungary.

"[18] Between the Constructivist cells of Ma and Contimporanul, and ensuring that the Hungarian and Romanian avant-gardes remained in contact, there was a cosmopolitan group of Transylvanian leftists: Markovits, Aurel Buteanu, Károly Endre, Robert Reiter and Julius Podlipny.

The puzzled and (according to Sanders) envious Ligeti noted that Markovits did not live up to the respect of his "penniless" fans, did not show any interest in Helikon's educational agenda, and only "opened his mouth" to impart "droll anecdotes".

[2] After February 1931, Rodion Markovits moved to the Banat's cultural center, Timișoara, having been granted an editor's position at Temesvári Hírlap (the Hungarian and liberal daily of László Pogány).

Their common agenda, also shared by Timișoaran intellectuals Virgil Birou, Zoltán Franyó, Andrei A. Lillin and József Méliusz, defined itself around notions of multiculturalism and class conflict.

"[2] Ligeti, who recalled that Markovits fared badly in his journalistic career, mentions that Reb Ancsli... required its author to peddle his way back to the publishers' attention.

[1] He resumed his journalistic activity, writing for various Magyar papers in Romania and the Republic of Hungary (Képes Újság, Szabad Szó, Utunk, Világ), gave public readings of his newer works, and lectured at the Béla Bartók Summer University.

It is a second-person narrative focused on a Budapest lawyer, very likely Markovits' alter ego,[21][24] who interprets things around him through the grid of objectivity, common sense and boredom.

[21] Szibériai garnizon, Chinezu notes, lacks all the formal qualities of a novel and veers into "clicking monotony", but, "for all its longueurs, is lively and propels itself into the reader's awareness.

"[24] Similarly, La Quinzaine Critique columnist André Pierre reported: "The work is located outside the frame of literature, and constitutes a seething document of life, rich in hallucinatory visions.

[24] Characters fall into two main categories: those who conveniently forget their countries of birth for the duration of their ordeal, and those who miss them so much that they risk escaping and making the perilous journey across Asia.

Markovits retells the dramatic failure of their honor system, and the ridiculousness of their cultural endeavors, with subdued irony (over what Chinezu calls his "many acid pages").

Dwinger and the Hungarian author depict "the same destitution, the same sexual perversions, a disruption of ideas and convictions after the Russian Revolution, the camp's transformation into a workers' phalanstère.

"[29] With Reb Ancsli és más avasi zsidókról szóló széphistóriák, Markovits alienated his Hungarian Romanian public, a fact noted by Ivan Sanders.

"[2] In Communist Romania, Rodion Markovits' overall work was considered for translation and republication during the mid-1960s—a project of the state-run ESPLA Publishing House, with assistance from his former Timișoaran colleagues Zoltán Franyó and József Méliusz.