Mihail Sebastian pe masa de operatie
Mihail Sebastian on the surgeon's table

Summary/Abstract: Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was one of the most controversial figures of the Romanian culture, admired or fiercely contested both during life and after his tragic death. His diary published in 1996 brought an awkward evidence of the complicity of some prestigious Romanian writers of the interwar period with the far right Romanian movement. Despite the hundreds of pages of published articles starting with the '30s, his intense activity as a journalist remained obscure. The Romanian researcher Marta Petreu studied M. Sebastian’s activity as a journalist, and concluded that, before the anti- Semitic persecutions he underwent, he had shown himself to be a totalitarian, Jewish non-democratic spirit, and a paradoxical follower of the fascism and right-wing extremism (see Diavolul !i ucenicul s"u: Nae Ionescu – Mihail Sebastian [Satan and His Disciple], Ia i, Ed. Polirom, 2009). Laszlo Alexandru restores investigation on Mihail Sebastian’s journalism and shows that Martha Petreu’s libelous assumptions are flimsy, falsify reality, distort and slander the work of a sober, rational, sensitive and deeply democratic Hebrew writer. Below there are excerpts from the book set in preparation for publication.

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