Eugen Ionescu

You like any book if you want to. You dislike any book if you want to. I believe literary criticism is useless, and I believe literature has no metaphysical significance. If I do literary criticism, I do it because I have nothing else to do. I do not feel I am committed

I see literature as a mere social occupation and those who do literature as a mere guild, such as shoemaking, binding books, law, politics, carpentry, and so on. No other guild is as vain and presumptuous as the poets'. The shoemaker does not claim he does a metaphysical

The threshold between the millenniums is an opportunity for evaluation: tributes, jubilees, festivals. Archives are being browsed, masterpieces are reappraised, and writings are redefined in the current context, then recirculated in today's competition. Everything becomes

excerpts The Diary and Its Readers We should not overdo it with diaries and letters. We usually tend to deem them more revealing of the man than his public work. All that is secretive, familiar draws us as if it were a confession. It is the pleasure of breaking an interdiction,

January 5, 1940 On Monday I must get down to work seriously and consistently. Apart from this, my life has become unbearable. I don't know what the devil is the matter with me, I feel as if I were growing old and stupid. I suppose I have some obsessions of my own,

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

Is a diary sometimes tantamount to confession and, if so, is it, most often, a sincere one? Is it also a means of self-liberation? The most delightful diaries, although usually set off by outside shocks, by major events or dramatic situations, reveal above all the confidential

In one of the marvelous spots of Switzerland I met Maurice Béjart, the choreographer that refreshed all forms of movements and made of dance the art of the 20th century. In Lausanne, Maurice Béjart continues to live creating and philosophizing for the synthetic art with

The forms of modern dance, present but not officially supported before 1990, appeared and survived due to the love for them of several choreographers and dancers who used to have the occasional show on various theatre stages. Their importance has been growing since the above

Some time in the autumn of 1994, Sorin Alexandrescu asked in an interview in 22 magazine why, in the canonical battle between the various radical-democrat and nationalist structures of the opposition (and of the government), more attention is not paid to the real traditions

excerpts30th September When I get on the tram, in Zurich, I cross myself. To whom? Not to the tram, of course, but to the Power that gave some people (engineers, technicians, workers) the ability to create such public means of transportation: and to others (the passengers)

The generation preceding us gave several peaks: Ion Barbu, in poetry, Tudor Vianu, creator of aesthetic systems, none of the most refined, but solid nonetheless, Lucian Blaga, in metaphysics and the philosophy of culture, Nae Ionescu, Cezar Petrescu, novelist of failures,