Mihail Sebastian
For Two Thousand Years
About the Author
Mihail Sebastian is one of the most important Romanian writers of the twentieth century. Born Iosif Hechter to a Jewish family in 1907, he grew up in Brăila, Romania, an ancient port on the Danube. He studied law in Bucharest from 1927 to 1929 and in Paris from 1930 to 1931, then worked occasionally as a lawyer while publishing articles, novels and plays, and being part of an influential literary circle that included the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, the playwright Eugene Ionesco and the philosopher Emil Cioran (who was the model for Ştefan D. Pârlea in For Two Thousand Years).
During his lifetime, his most famous book was the novel For Two Thousand Years. Published in 1934, it sparked a furious debate in the newspapers for its ambiguous political stance. Critics on the left accused Sebastian of being anti-Semitic although he was Jewish, while those on the right attacked him for being a Zionist. At the core of the novel is the year 1923, when a new constitution gave citizenship to ethnic and religious minorities. The first edition of the novel included a foreword by Sebastian’s mentor, the philosopher Nae Ionescu, who made a series of anti-Semitic remarks and was in fact the model for the character of Ghiţă Blidaru. Critics wondered why Sebastian had decided to include Ionescu’s words and whether he agreed with him or not. Sebastian replied in an essay titled How I Became a Hooligan (1935), where he explained why he felt the need to think as lucidly as possible at a time when everything was politically charged.
His other books, written after this incident, include less political novels influenced by French modernists, such as The Town with Acacias (1935) and The Accident (1940), and plays like Holiday Game (1938) and A Nameless Star (1944).
As the fascist Iron Guard rose to power, Sebastian was prohibited from work as a journalist and was abandoned by his circle of friends — an experience chronicled in the diary he kept from 1935 to 1944 and which is similar in style and tone to
For Two Thousand Years. Having survived the war and the Holocaust, he was killed by a truck as he crossed the street in May 1945, as he was going to teach his first university lecture on Balzac. He was 38.
When his Journal was finally published in Romania in 1996, it became a bestseller, generating a heated controversy over responsibility for war crimes and the country’s history of anti-Semitism. The English translation has been hailed as ‘a humane masterpiece’ and compared to Anne Frank’s diary.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh is the author of two collections of short stories, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day, both published by Penguin. His work has been translated into ten languages and adapted for cinema and he has received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He lives in Bucharest, Romania.
For Two Thousand Years
J’ose non seulement parler de moy, mais parler seulement de moy: je fourvoye quand j’ecris aultre chose, et me disrobe a mon sujet. Je ne m’aime pas si indiscretement et ne suis si attaché et mesle a moy, que je ne me puisse distinguer et considerer a quartier, comme un voysin, comme un arbre.
— Montaigne, De l’art de conferer
