Reference Type: Journal Article
Author: Oișteanu, Andrei
Year: 2007
Title: Mihail Sebastian And Mircea Eliade: Chronicle Of A Broken Friendship
Journal: Studia Hebraica
Issue: 7
Pages: 142-153
Language: English
Keywords: Jewish minority, history, biographies, intellectuals, interethnic relationships, literature, antisemitism, alienaion, Romanian Legionary Movement, politics, ideology, interwar period
Abstract: (En) In the National Museum of Romanian Literature's archive there is a set of photographs depicting Mihail Sebastian and Mircea Eliade, aged 25, amidst a group of friends of various ethnic origins (Romanians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks). They were all young and happy, on holidays in the Bucegi Mountains, in the summer of 1932. This was a quasi-paradisiacal, tolerant, "amniotic" (as I. P. Culianu called it) period, following World War I. Symbolically, this period came to an end in 1934, upon the publication of Mihail Sebastian "Jewish novel", with the infamous anti- Semitic foreword signed by his mentor, Nae Ionescu. At first, Mircea Eliade publicly defended his Jewish friend, Mihail Sebastian. But afterwards Eliade himself began sliding closer and closer to the far right Legionary Movement. The two intellectuals' friendship started meeting with troubles of a political nature, which eventually led to a full crisis. The article follows, step by step, the sinusoidal curve of the special relation between these two great Romanian writers. The evolution (or involution) of Sebastian and Eliade's friendship is symptomatic for the cultural, moral and political life in interwar Romanian intellectual society.