Between "tradition" and interwar modernity

The "Man from the Danube" has a special status in today's literary life.

After decades of relative obscurity - caused by the same circumstances that, before his fatal accident on May 29, 1945, led to his departure from the Communist newspaper România Libera - Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) today enjoys a literary topicality that was once unimaginable. Expressed more through re-editions and heated debates on his private diary (undeniably a best-seller in Romanian literature after 1989) than through notable exegeses, this topicality is not circumstantial. Sebastian's writing, and especially his prose, has not aged in comparison with that of other inter-war authors. While in the case of Liviu Rebreanu or Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, the code of the previous century is immediately perceptible, Mihail Sebastian's texts seem to have been written today. And not just in terms of style or the debate on the condition of the Jew in Romania and in Europe today, although the latter i