VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
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ception of Judaism as inimical to the Christian Orthodox cement of
Romanianism. In a country like Romania, with its predominantly agrar–
ian and illiterate population, with a corrupt and often irresponsible politi–
cal class, the anti-liberal and mystical revolutionary rhetoric of the far
right was bound to excite and galvanize the intellectual elite.
In
Romania's Transfiguration,
published in Bucharest in 1937, the
young E. M. Cioran wrote: "The Jews are unique in every way. Bent by
a curse for which only God is responsible, they are matchless. If I were a
Jew, I would commit suicide immediately." (He would later recall his
words as an expression of a love-hate relationship with the Jewish people
and tradition.) Cioran had triumphantly entered the Romanian literary
world in 1934 with his book
On the Heights of Despair
(recently reissued,
in a masterful translation by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, by the University
of Chicago Press). The book is full of overblown metaphors, linguistic
somersaults, and conceptual precipices. It was not a banal debut. Nothing
in Cioran's intellectual life had been banal. Indeed, the angry young
man's nihilistic creed was crowned with the prize of the Young
Romanian Writers' Association along with
No,
Eugene lonesco's first and
only volume written in Romanian.
The third recipient of this prestigious award was Constantin Noica,
born in 1909, who was to be the only member of the Generation to re–
main in Romania, survive Communist jails and harassment, and become,
at the end of his life in 1987, a cultural model for Romania's young intel–
lectuals. To his credit, Emil Cioran, who left Romania for France in 1938
and never went back, has been the only member of the Generation
to
have dealt, albeit in an delphic way, with his initial Fascist commitment.
In a famous essay, actualJy an open letter addressed to his friend the
philosopher Constantin Noica in 1957, "Lettre
a
un ami lointain,"
Cioran insisted on the Generation's marked hostility to and even scorn
for parliamentary democracy:
Happier than me, you have resignated yourself to our native dust; in
addition, you have the faculty of being able to bear all regimes, even
the most rigid ones. Not that you don't have the nostalgia for fantasy
and disorder, but I don't know a spirit more opposed than yours to
the superstitions of "democracy." True, there was a time when I de–
tested it as much as you did, probably even more: I was young and I
could not admit other truths than mine, neither could I concede to
the adversary the right
to
have his truths, to invoke or to impose
them. The fact that parties could confront each other without annihi–
lating each other went beyond my capacity for comprehension....
The systems that tried to supplant it seemed to me beautiful without
