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.
Title: Kundera and Ionesco on the Unmistakable Awareness of Being Minor 1
: Deleuze and Guattari’s 1975 text, Kafka, pour une littérature mineure , posited a theory concerning some groups of literary texts including those of Franz Kafka. Their theory was nevertheless highly connected to their own historical and geographical context in France, and much less so with that of Kafka who had himself previously attempted to theorize small literatures. By looking at the context of Kafka and of two other writers who might be considered as belonging to minor literary contexts, I argue that theorists of minor literature tend to view minor literature in a positive way when their own cultural context is further from nation-state building. On the other hand, those writers who are writing from inside nation-building contexts tend to emphasize minor literature’s limits on literary production. Interestingly, Milan Kundera and Eugene Ionesco who had first-hand experience of nation-building contexts, but then moved to France and wrote in French, take more nuanced views of minor literatures as they are further removed in time and space from their original minor contexts.
Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania
Purifying the Nation is a provocative exploration of the Holocaust in World War II Romania. Vladimir Solonari argues that the persecution of Jews and Roma by the Romanian government was not a response to pressure from the country's ally, Nazi Germany, but rather stemmed from the vision of an ethnically pure Romania. Through a rigorous, archive-based analysis of the country's interwar political and intellectual climate and policies and practices during its alliance with the Nazis, Solonari sheds valuable new light on the genocidal activities of one of Hitler's European satellites.