CONFESIUNILE LUI MIHAIL SEBASTIAN
MIHAIL SEBASTIAN’S CONFESSIONS

Summary/Abstract: Although attracted even in his literary practice by the confessive discourse – illustrated by the proses Fragmente dintr-un carnet găsit (Fragments from a Found Notebook), De două mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years) or by his volume of short stories Femei (Women), his confessions with a documentary character Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became a Hooligan) and Jurnal 1935-1944 (Diary 1935-1944) seem written not by an artistic vocation, but by existential needs and the will of preserving moral integrity in tense historical times. The hostilities bore by the Jewish ethnic writer made him develop in his confessions an existential strategy based on equidistance to any kind of extremism or exaggeration. As a response to Nae Ionescu’s preface to the novel “For Two Thousand Years”, Sebastian decides and announces solitude in public in “How I Became a Hooligan”, and secretly puts it into practice in his Diary..., developing a genuine technique of loneliness, a mechanism of resistance to the political, ideological, or even sentimental temptations. Sebastian’s confessions set off an acute critical spirit and certify a personality of a rare lucidity, moral standing and human dignity.

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