A short life of the author
Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945) was a Romanian writer whose Journal 1935–1944 — published half a century after his death — is one of the most devastating personal documents of the twentieth century: a day-by-day record of a Jewish intellectual watching his friends, colleagues, and country embrace fascism. The journal’s posthumous discovery transformed Sebastian from a minor figure in Romanian literary history into a writer of world importance.
Life and Career
Born Iosif Hechter in Brăila, Romania, Sebastian was a novelist, playwright, essayist, and literary journalist who moved in the highest circles of interwar Romanian intellectual life. His close friends included Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Eugène Ionesco — friendships that would become poisonous as Romania’s intelligentsia embraced the Iron Guard and fascist ideology.
His novel De două mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years, 1934) — a semi-autobiographical work about a young Jewish man navigating Romanian antisemitism — became a scandal when its preface, written by his friend and mentor Nae Ionescu, was revealed to be a declaration of antisemitic principles. The betrayal by Ionescu foreshadowed the larger betrayals to come.
Sebastian was a successful playwright — The Star Without a Name (1944) was his most popular play, later adapted into a beloved Romanian film — and his critical essays were influential in Romanian literary culture. But it is the Journal that secured his place in world literature.
Written between 1935 and 1944, the diary records with precision and mounting horror how Sebastian’s friends and colleagues abandoned him, how Romanian society legalized antisemitism, how he was stripped of his profession, his livelihood, and his rights, and how he struggled to maintain his intellectual life and his love of music and literature in the face of annihilation. Sebastian survived the war but was killed by a truck in May 1945, weeks after Romania’s liberation.
The Journal was published in Romanian in 1996 and in English in 2000, to universal acclaim. It stands alongside the diaries of Victor Klemperer as an essential first-person account of European fascism.
Key Works
- For Two Thousand Years (1934)
- The Star Without a Name (1944)
- Journal 1935–1944 (published 1996)
Collecting Sebastian
The Romanian first edition of the Journal (Humanitas, 1996) is historically significant. The English translation (Ivan R. Dee, 2000) brings $30–$60. For Two Thousand Years was reissued by Penguin Modern Classics with an introduction by Mark Mazower. Original interwar Romanian editions of his novels and plays are scarce and are collected as historical documents of Romanian literary culture.