Mihail sebastian

Un sot n'a pas assez d'étoffe pour être bon. La Rochefoucauld Let alone the characteristics of the genre, Mihail Sebastian's Diary is a confession about relationships with the other set against the background of rising anti-Semitism between the two World

excerptsWednesday, September 30, 1936 Sunday and Monday at Roman. I left the place most disquieted. I had the feeling I should never be able to rejoin life again. Everything seemed futile, absurd (…)Now it's all behind me. In a way, it went clear out of my mind.

Chapter 5. The first and last nightsOne evening they were returning from a concert. It was getting late, but they still lingered on the streets, in spite of the cold, damp weather outside. They wouldn't part with each other after the two beautiful hours they had spent

excerpt  Stefan Valeriu left early in the morning and didn't come back until late at night, after dinner. He wandered through several neighboring villages, smoked a lot and talked, very earnestly, about the harvest and the weather with some peasants he met. 'Perhaps

excerpts  So closeSuddenly, the interwar people make the body visible: men are allowed to shave off not only their beards, but also their moustaches – a facial change that overthrows an aesthetic canon with centuries-old resistance – and women, punished and ridiculed

* The boom of geographic discoveries and trading expeditions that began on the eve of the Renaissance and continued throughout that era developed a new taste for describing remote, if not downright imaginary, countries and peoples. Before being discovered, the savage was

In the nineteenth century, and also in the inner-war period, Romania had one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. Between the wars, its Jewish population was the third largest in Europe both in absolute terms (after Poland and the USSR) and as a proportion of the

If I had had the courage to speak freely, directly, without resorting to these pages in front of me, and without caring about the serious language mistakes I may make in French – and which I will definitely make –, if I had the courage to start my free conversation with

In March 1935 (on Thursday, March 21st, more precisely), Sebastian was invited to hold a conference at the French Institute in Bucharest; the relationship between the writer and the president of the Institute, Alphonse Dupront, was one of mutual regard, as we find out from

excerpts On the art of being a reactionary and a Bolshevik at the same time He gobs democracy and the human rights… The Romanian Life  He insults national security and patriotic feelings. The Commandment of the Times  Not solely is Two Thousand Years Past – as previously

Do you notice, within the framework of your interests, or of culture in its entirety, differences that would justify the confidence in a new spirituality, with a deeper, overall significance? Nicolae Iorga I am an old incurable traditionalist who has completely lost the

In the last decades, particularly after the collapse of the communist regimes, ardent debates have taken place regarding the political commitment of certain great intellectuals and writers, generating even theoretical and philosophical reflections, concerning the relationship