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Solitude et destin
Réunissant plus d'une soixantaine d'articles publiés dans la presse roumaine entre 1931 et 1943, ce recueil constitue une pièce maîtresse pour une meilleure compréhension de l'œuvre de Cioran.
À propos
«Cioran avait vingt ans. Vingt ans quand il publiait dans les journaux roumains, en 1931, les premiers articles qu'on trouvera dans ce recueil. Grand dévoreur de philosophes allemands, il jargonnait un peu à leur manière, mais, quels que soient les sujets abordés, il s'interrogeait - avec quelle maturité pour son âge ! - sur la condition humaine et il en reculait les frontières. Déjà, le Cioran que l'on connaîtra par la suite en France commençait à s'annoncer là : considérations paradoxales, éclairage inattendu des questions traitées, jeu de massacre avec les idées reçues. Amertume et dérision... Déjà, son pessimisme foncier étouffait les rares élans porteurs d'espoir, car "y a-t-il sur cette terre quelque chose qui ne puisse pas être remis en question ? Vraiment, Dieu est trop loin." Cioran d'avant, pour mieux comprendre Cioran d'après.» Alain Paruit.
À propos
«Cioran avait vingt ans. Vingt ans quand il publiait dans les journaux roumains, en 1931, les premiers articles qu'on trouvera dans ce recueil. Grand dévoreur de philosophes allemands, il jargonnait un peu à leur manière, mais, quels que soient les sujets abordés, il s'interrogeait - avec quelle maturité pour son âge ! - sur la condition humaine et il en reculait les frontières. Déjà, le Cioran que l'on connaîtra par la suite en France commençait à s'annoncer là : considérations paradoxales, éclairage inattendu des questions traitées, jeu de massacre avec les idées reçues. Amertume et dérision... Déjà, son pessimisme foncier étouffait les rares élans porteurs d'espoir, car "y a-t-il sur cette terre quelque chose qui ne puisse pas être remis en question ? Vraiment, Dieu est trop loin." Cioran d'avant, pour mieux comprendre Cioran d'après.» Alain Paruit.
434 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
7 people are currently reading
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About the author
Emil M. Cioran
179 books4,334 followersBorn in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest.
A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).
Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.
After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive 'A Short History of Decay' (1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).
Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.
Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by Thomas Cousineau
A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).
Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.
After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive 'A Short History of Decay' (1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).
Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.
Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by Thomas Cousineau
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 31, 2017
Fiecare poartă o altă singurătate, toţi umblă cu capul în nori şi nu cred să existe vreo prietenie în această aparentă sociabilitate. Mă gândesc, însă, la ce mi-au folosit toţi oamenii pe care i-am cunoscut, i-am iubit şi i-am urât. Când fac bilanţul în ceasuri de singurătate, înţeleg că n-am iubit pe nimeni niciodată, că iubirile şi prieteniile nu-s nici măcar iluzii, că n-ai fost niciodată decât tu însuţi, singur, bolnav de singur, condamnat şi nefericit.
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December 29, 2014"A fi consecvent înseamnă, într-un anumit fel, a te închide pt. multiplicitatea aspectelor vieţii, reacţionînd identic. Dar mai înseamnă si altceva: sărăcie lăuntrică."
August 29, 2025
cioran m’est vraiment antipathique. si j’ai pu me laisser aller par le début du livre et me retrouver dans certaines réflexions, la seconde moitié m’a drainée, les pensées deviennent redondantes, lourdes. la fin est clairement pathétique, je ne parle même pas des lignes sur nicolae ionescu qui sont à vomir.
April 3, 2024
écrits de jeunesses de Cioran, où l'on peut voir tout son talent et sa force intellectuelle, pas encore totalement des fragments mais des textes courts, le discours et la pensée n'a jamais changée mais l'auteur a fait sa vie et son temps.
September 13, 2017
"Scrisul are valoare şi justificare numai ca eliberare de obsesiuni, ca mijloc de a amâna o distrugere şi o prăbuşire."
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews