Mihail Sebastian's diary of the fascist years in Romania, written half a century ago, was at last published only recently, and is here translated into English for the first time. Sebastian was a promising young Jewish writer in prewar Bucharest - a novelist, playwright, poet, and journalist who counted among his friends the leading intellectuals and social luminaries of a sophisticated Eastern European culture. Because of Romania's opportunistic treatment of Jews, he survived the war and the Holocaust, only to be killed in early 1945 in an automobile accident.
"The book offers not only a chronicle of the dark years of Nazism but a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a Jew's diary, a reader's notebook, and a music lover's journal. Above all, it is a measured but blistering account of the "rhinocerization" of major Romanian intellectuals who were Sebastian's friends, including Mircea Elaide and E.M. Cioran, writers and thinkers who were mesmerized by the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europe's "reactionary revolution." In poignant and memorable sequences, Sebastian touches on the progression of the machinery of brutalization and on the historical context that lay behind it.
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