CHRONICLE OF A BROKEN FRIENDSHIP*
The “paradisiacal” period (1932-1933) In the National Museum of Romanian Literature’s archive there is a set of photographs remarkably interesting . They depict a group of youngsters, about 25, happy, on a sort of “holiday game” in the Bucegi Mountains. In these photographs, taken in July 1932, we find Mircea Eliade (recently returned from India), Mihail Sebastian (recently returned from Paris), Haig Acterian, Mircea Vulcănescu, Dan Botta, Mihai Polihroniade, Marietta Sadova, Floria and Sylvia Capsali, Mac Constantinescu, Petru Comarnescu, perhaps even Leny Caler etc. Romanians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks and so on. Ethnically heterogeneous as it were, this was an usual group of friends in interwar Bucharest. The typical examples of tolerant and multiethnic towns of Greater Romania include Timişoara, Cernăuţi, Brăila and some others. Bucharest is always forgotten, though it, too, was a multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual and multi-confessional city.
The ‘20s and early ‘30s came after the miraculous date of 1 December 1918. “Romania should be so lucky – P.P. Carp would ironically comment – it no longer needs politicians”. Greater Romania seemed to enjoy a short, quasi-paradisal, period, with a generation of young intellectuals who, as Mircea Eliade believed, for the first time in history did not have a historic mission to fulfill. An “amniotic period”, as Ioan Petru Culianu would call it, referring to the state of the fetus, protected by the amniotic liquid in the maternal womb. In Eliade’s words (as used in The Myth of the Eternal Return), “the terror of history” acted softer. Consequently, “the boycott of history” could also be applied in a softer manner. It was probably the very lack of a common “national mission” (or at least a “common danger”, to generate the syndrome of the “citadel under siege”) that atomized society and led to the brutal “fall from Paradise” and the well known political failure.
The friendship between Eliade and Sebastian was an exceptional one, not just through its depth, but also through its bumpy manifestation. A Dostoievskian friendship, if not also a Eugen Ionescu-type one. For, at a certain point, around Sebastian-Béranger Romania was “rhinoceros-izing” itself in concentric circles, reaching the last, and most intimate, one – that of the friends.
Mircea Eliade (fourth from right) and Mihail Sebastian (second from left), with a group of friends in a mountain cabin in the Bucegi-Carpathian mountains in Romania (July 1932)
First, she is a goddess. She is one today throughout East Asia—although in some countries she is a he. Yes the goddess is sometimes a god, so that's worth a second look, for some a veritable double-take. You can see that even as a woman, she is often ambiguously gendered, where some of the statues are flat-chested and almost indistinguishable from representations of the young Buddha himself.