Max Blecher

Max L. Blecher was the son of a wealthy Jewish businessman from Moldavia. After graduating from college in Moldavia, he went to Paris to study medicine, but soon he got ill and became a cripple, forced to stay in bed till the end of his days because of bone tuberculosis. He traveled to many sanatoriums both in Romania and abroad, in France and Switzerland, these wanderings from a hospital to another, with the cosmopolite amalgam of such places constituting the major source of his largely autobiographic novels. Despite being immobilized, he entertained a very active cultural life, publishing in various publications articles on literature and essays, signed both with his real name and pseudonyms like Mihail Bera, In-Interim, etc. He was permanently connected to the literary novelties of the time, and had correspondence, among many others, with André Breton, André Gide and Martin Heidegger. Blecher published a volume of poetry in 1934, Transparent Body. He translated into Romanian poems by Guillaume Apollinaire. But his name is basically connected to the three novels, the masterwork Occurrences in Current Unreality, Healed Hearts and the unfinished, posthumously published The Lightened Burrow.


by Plural magazine