Born in 1911 in Răşinari, a small village in the Romanian Carpathians, being educated by his father and pop prone to depression mother, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in the Romanian language. Some of them are collections of short essays (mostly one-, two-stronnicowych), others are maintained in the form of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his youth spent in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy at bukareskim "Little Paris." He soon became famous as a prolific writer, gaining recognition among figures such as Mircea Eliade, Constantine noice, and his late friend, Eugene Ionesco (with which he received in 1934 the Royal Foundation Award for young writers for his first book, In the Heights of Despair). Under the influence of the German Romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson Lebensphilosophie Schelling, Russian writers, such as Shestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote extensive lyrical meditation on the metaphysical nature, often moving the themes of death, despair , solitude, history, music, holiness and mysticism (see Saints and Tears, 1937) - themes frequently encountered in the well French works. In his controversial book, Transfiguration de la Roumanie (1937), Cioran, engaged at that time in the Romanian fascist movement, sharply criticized his country and countrymen on the basis of the contrast between the 'small nations', such as Romania, despised from the perspective of universal history, and peoples large, such as France and Germany, which took over its own fate in their hands.
After spending two years in Germany, Cioran came in 1936 in Paris. After the Romanian posted until the early forties (his last article in Romanian wrote in 1943, when she first began writing in French). Moving away from the home language was completed in 1946, when, during the translation of texts Mallarmé, Cioran has decided to discontinue the use of Romanian, as in Paris it is not no one he used. He then began work on his first book in French, which, through multiple revisions, eventually took the form of an impressive outline of Decay (1949) - the first volume of which consists of ten works eksplorującym endless cycle of obsessions Cioran, with increasing distance, which teamed him with the Greek sofistami, French moralists and sages of the East. His invective and destructive existential reflections written in the classic French style recognized as fundamentally different from the tone sflaczałego his native language, French was for him a 'straitjacket', which forced him to control his temperament and lyrical raptures. His books, which he described his radical disappointment appeared with decreasing frequency over the next three decades. At that time, Cioran shared solitude of the Simon Boué a cramped garret in Paris, where he lived as an observer, more and more withdrawn and distancing themselves from the world both in terms of history (History and Utopia, 1960), and ontological (in the Fall of Time, 1964). In his misanthropy extends beyond the boundaries of the subtleties (Birth Of Inconvenience, 1973), appearing sometimes as a humanist, full of irony, bitterness, and moving the richness of expression (Exercise of Admiration, 1986 and posthumously published notebooks.) His works have gained international recognition until the end of his career. Cioran died in Paris in 1995, after he was denied his right to return to Romania during the communist regime.
Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by: Richard Chytrowski
