MIHAIL SEBASTIAN'S DIARY - MASK OF DESTINY
MIHAIL SEBASTIAN'S DIARY - MASK OF DESTINY

Summary/Abstract: Sebastian’s diary presents, in an objective manner, without passion or mystification, the position of victims from the interwar period, revealing the attitude of the Romanian authorities towards the Jews in the period of the Second World War, thus dismantling and rebuilding a series of myths and historiographical fictions. The author presents, in a Lucid manner and in a dynamic writing, the collective depersonalization, marked by the metamorphoses of some friends, presenting images of shaky friendships turned into sudden estrangements, depending on Circumstances, Sebastian acutely feeling his status as a victim, the writer, incredulous, sad witnessing some resignations of morals, of ethical disaggregation’s, of the deviation and destruction of previously admired consciences. The image that the diary gives us is that of a Misfit individual, who cannot find one purpose and an ideal, neither outside nor in one's own self. Remarkable is, however, his honest living, undisguised, the drama of a lucid sensibility, with all its human qualities and flaws. In the Journal, the writer records his own mental reactions and discovers that for his closest friend she is completely different, like around some distorting mirrors. In these conditions, the assumption of the Jewish Identity progresses in a revealing parallelism with abandonment to friendship and communication with his friends who see in him only the image of a stranger. Mihail Sebastian is very sensitive to any form of persecution, to fear and the terror that the degrading Anti-Semitism of the era instilled, recording with acuteness hallucinatory images, absurd and tragic scenes of the persecution of the Jews, images of a present abominable that cannot be forgotten or mystified.

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