Searching for Cioran

5. Romania’s Transfiguration, 1935–1937

5 Romania’s Transfiguration, 1935–1937 Negative Passion, Negative Identity Schimbarea la faţă a României (Romania’s Transfiguration) was published in the spring of 1936, almost at the same time as Mircea Eliade’s Yoga. In a letter to Cioran, who was then unhappily teaching high school in Braşov—having served, even more unhappily, his time in the army from fall 1935 to spring 1936—Eliade mentions the imminent publication of their respective books, asks Cioran to send the exact title and money for the printing paper, and recounts a bizarre last-minute snafu: the two typesettings had gotten mixed up. Luckily, Eliade was on hand at the publishing house to straighten 92 The Romanian Life of Emil Cioran things out. Eliade also comments on the political aspect of Cioran’s book, praising his chapter on “workers and Jews” and disagreeing with Cioran’s views on Romanian village life.1 On June 10, 1936, Cioran wrote to Eliade from Sibiu, praising Yoga, which had just been published.2 He did not say anything about his own book, but if it had stayed on schedule, it must have been out by then as well. The publication of Romania’s Transfiguration, which was reprinted in 1941, marks a peak in a highly charged political and cultural context. According to Zigu Ornea, who has studied the cultural scene in Romania of the 1920s and 1930s in two voluminous books, the “young generation” of intellectuals to which Cioran and Eliade belonged passed through two distinct phases: from 1928 to 1936 and from 1936 to 1940.3 Thus for Ornea, 1936 is a pivotal year; indeed, the publication of Romania’s Transfiguration may well have helped him to demarcate his critical chronology. But whereas the first phase was hailed as Romania’s cultural renaissance, the second was characterized by a gradually increasing politicization, which started in 1933 with Nae Ionescu, the generation’s guru, endorsing the fascist Iron Guard movement in the pages of his newspaper Cuvîntul (The Word). The political turn in cultural attitudes among the “young generation” is evident in Eliade’s 1936 letter to Cioran about the publication of Romania’s Transfiguration. In it, Eliade speaks in the same breath of Romanian politics, of Cioran’s book—which he perceives as a political tract—and of a projected weekly, “rightist, political and somewhat cultural as well” to which many of the members of the “young generation” would contribute, and he identifies them by name: “you, I, Ţuţea, Sorin Pavel, Golopenţia, Stahl, Noica, and a couple more.” Politics have taken the upper hand; culture is present only “somewhat,” in name. Alluding to intense political arguments in their group, Eliade comments: “You and Ţuţea have driven me nuts, I shall become a politician in my hours of sleep and delirium. What a horrendous thing is politics in Romania!” This process of intense politicization of Romania’s cultural life, of which Romania’s Transfiguration is both a symptom and a symbol, reflects the country’s increasingly radical political climate in the 1930s. Starting with Prime Minister I. G. Duca’s assassination by members of the Iron Guard in December 1933, Romania gradually slid away from its liberal politics and toward the extreme right. In 1935, the Iron Guard, outlawed in 1931 and then again in 1933, reappeared as a legal party after combining with another extreme right group under the name of Everything for the Fatherland. The new party’s popularity grew, due to the economic crisis and the traditional parties ’ inability to remedy the deteriorating situation. Fear of Communist Russia, the growing strength and prestige of the political right in Western Europe, and a lack of confidence in Western liberalism—all contributed to the balance tilting in favor of Hitler and Germany. In February 1938, under the pretext of solving Romania’s political Romania’s Transfiguration, 1935–1937 93 crisis, King Carol II put an end to Romania’s democratic government by instituting a royal dictatorship. This is the broad social context in which Romania’s Transfiguration appeared, but though it helps to account for some of the book’s rhetoric, it does little to explain what the book itself is actually about. A critical analysis of Romania’s minor-nation status, a long, minute, and merciless inventory of Romanian national flaws, and a reform proposal presented as an “attempt to place a stone on the...