Early Resistance to Fascism in Eugène lonesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism
When in 1932 the young editors of a minor Bucharest newspaper, Axa, joined the fascist Legionary Movement—also known as the Iron Guard—and used the paper to attract other young intellectuals to their ranks, the young Eugène Ionesco who was writing the paper’s literary column became increasingly isolated in his literary and political views. Looking at Ionesco’s articles in the first issues of Axa, we can see that the importance of the newspaper’s editorial shift to the Legionary Movement has been greatly overlooked, as has Ionesco’s resistance to fascism and his criticism of nationalism in literature. He left the paper as its contributors radicalized their positions, but this experience likely served as one of the earliest sources of the metamorphosis staged in his play Rhinoceros. Ionesco’s journalism both exemplifies the complexities of 1930s literature in Romania and those of reading Ionesco’s fiction and non-fiction.
The Romanian extreme right : the nineteen thirties
This fascinating study of the intellectual origins and ideological and political evolution of the extreme right of interwar Romania offers a sensitive explanation of the part played by the Iron Guard in the history of Romanianism-anti-Semitism with university-based ideologies in the late 1920s and the 1930s. The work is largely based on analyses of printed literary and political tracts as well as on the nature of propaganda and the evolution of the doctrines of the Guardist movement.
Carnival of Shame: Doctorow and the Rosenbergs
“Literature can turn language, for the moment at least, against the sentence of death.” Considering the national and international furor provoked by the sensational early 1950's “atom spy” trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, one may be surprised that these dramatic and traumatic events have not inspired more literary artistry than they have. But a prominent playwright, Arthur Miller, did write The Crucible (produced in 1953) in part as a response to the rabid McCarthyism of that era, and two highly regarded novelists in a later decade composed ambitious novels drawing directly on the Rosenberg affair: E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover in The Public Burning (1977). In 1987, Sidney Lumet produced the little noticed film Daniel, based on Doctorow's novel, and still more recently Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, with Ethel Rosenberg as one of the characters, has been playing on Broadway.