Searching for Cioran by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston; Kenneth R. JohnstonReview by: Marius TurdaSlavic Review, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring, 2010), pp. 222-223Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25621754 .

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222 Slavic Review

lections (of paintings, books, minerals, coins, plants, and so on) out of the private homes

of the nobility and make them available for the education of the nation. Rather than seek

ing personal aggrandizement or enjoyment from their possessions, the aristocrats Krueger discusses wanted to dedicate their patrimony to the public, for its own good.

But this enlightened style of aristocratic nationalism that Krueger so sympathetically describes would soon be eclipsed by a more Romantic and exclusionary doctrine that

pitted Czech against German. Ironically, the very institutions the Bohemian aristocrats

helped to create, and the very people they befriended and assisted, would be crucial in

this process. After the revolutions of 1848, the nobles themselves would be branded as

reactionary and not sufficiently national.

This book is exceedingly well written and covers a period that has been neglected in

the English-language literature on this region, making it of great use to Habsburg histo

rians. Krueger misses the opportunity to make her story more widely relevant, however.

The book would have been strengthened by either linking it to the explosion of work on national conflict in Bohemia after 1848 or by showing how the Bohemian aristocrats' at

tempts to link science, progress, and nation compared to efforts by nobles elsewhere in

Europe to weather the transition to the modern world.

Melissa Feinberg

Rutgers University

Searching for Cioran. By Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Ed. Kenneth R. Johnston. Foreword, Matei Calinescu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. xxiii, 284 pp. Appen dixes. Notes. Bibliography. Chronology. Index. Photographs. Maps. $27.95, hard

bound.

Next to Mircea Eliade and Eugene Ionesco, E. M. Cioran is one of the most comprehen

sively researched Romanian authors of the interwar period. The majority of these studies

have focused on Cioran's contested Romanian past, and most prominently on his political affiliations during the late 1930s, while relatively little work has been done on Cioran's

childhood and adolescence as well as on his first writings, especially On the Heights of Despair

(1934). Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's book corrects this deficiency. The result of numer

ous interviews with Cioran, his brother Relu, and Cioran's long-time companion Simone

Boue, as well as archival research in Romania, this is a graceful study of a disputed period in Cioran's intellectual biography and personal life. With subtle sophistication and inti

mate knowledge of the subject (having translated two of Cioran's early books into English,

namely On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints), the author has sought to recreate

Cioran's Romanian roots and his local and universal intellectual sources, in what, it was

hoped, would become Cioran's ultimate scholarly biography. Regrettably the author's pre mature death precluded the completion of this ambitious project.

The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with Cioran's childhood, adoles

cence, and formative education in Sibiu, Bucharest, and Berlin. This broad survey is punc tuated by satisfactory incursions into Cioran's existential and cultural crises, all indicating how complex the social and political situation was in post-1918 Romania and how much

it affected Cioran. Trenchant and illuminating insights abound in Zarifopol-Johnston's discussion of these issues, revealing her magisterial command of the Romanian sources.

Her perceptions of Cioran's personal life are most convincing when she contextualizes

them within the upheavals that characterized an entire generation of Romanian intel

lectuals maturing during the 1930s. Related to this was an overriding sense of revolt as

the prime attribute of intellectual creativity, and Cioran excelled in translating his revolts

and frustrations into incisively formulated aphorisms and essays. Zarifopol-Johnston has

an acute awareness of important questions pertaining to Cioran's life and work, and she

answers them unambiguously. For example, the explanations she offers for the dramatic

dichotomy Cioran draws between Romanians' "small culture" and the more advanced

cultures of western Europe, or Cioran's involvement with the Legionary Movement.

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Book Reviews 223

Zarifopol-Johnston's account reveals yet another facet of Cioran's Romanian roots.

Cioran, as is often noted in the book, was constantly grappling with the difficulties of life in Sibiu and Bucharest (as he did during the 1940s and 1950s in Paris), and many of these hardships were reflected in his writings. Cioran needed to write as a therapeutic form

of survival, and one is constantly amazed at the energy and discipline?despite Cioran's

bouts of insomnia and alcoholism?that informed his whole way of life. For those schol ars working on interwar Romania, many of these historical and cultural details are not

particularly new; it is the quality and style of reasoning that is of great interest. Since the

book's stated purpose is not only to present Cioran's biography but to examine how his

life contributed to making him the spectacular writer he became, Zarifopol-Johnston has

deliberately provided detailed descriptions rather than analysis, but the result is satisfac

tory. This study successfully reveals a great deal about some of the lesser known episodes in Cioran's life, and how they contributed to making a marginal Romanian philosopher into the prophet of contemporary cultural despair and doom.

The second part contains the diary that Zarifopol-Johnston kept while researching this book in France and Romania, as well as her conversations with Cioran, Relu Cio

ran, Simone Boue, and a handful of post-1989 Romanian public figures. Considering the

reputation Cioran enjoyed during the last years of his life as well as the republication and translation of his early writings into English and French, one is perhaps not surprised that

Zarifopol-Johnston encountered a variety of conflicting opinions about and struggles over

Cioran's legacy, equally in Bucharest and Paris.

Best read together with Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fas cism in Romania (2005) and Emil Cioran, Luca Pitu, and Sorin Antohi's Le Neant roumain:

Un entretien/Neantul romdnesc. O convorbire (2009), this well-researched and cogently ar

gued book is certainly a major contribution to the vast, if somewhat uneven, literature on

the intellectual history of interwar Romania. Although the author's untimely death pre cluded the book's completion, no one will deny that what Zarifopol-Johnston has achieved is arguably one of the most audacious analyses to date of Cioran's life and writings. One can

only hope that future studies will be as compelling and provocative, and thus complete the ambitious scholarly agenda set up by Zarifopol-Johnston.

Marius Turda

Oxford Brookes University

Yugoslavia: Oblique Insights and Observations. By Dennison Rusinow. Essays selected and edited by Gale Stokes. Foreword, Mary Rusinow. Pitt Series in Russian and East Eu

ropean Studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. vii, 384 pp. Notes. Index. $65.00, hard bound. $27.95, paper.

Dennison Rusinow's The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948-1974 (1977) is one of the most impor tant and useful studies of the history of socialist Yugoslavia. The current volume comple

ments and supplements this earlier work by providing a more detailed analysis of the most crucial moments of that period and adding new insights on Yugoslavia's final crisis in the

post-Tito decade.

The fourteen essays selected for this book were written between 1963 and 1991 as part of a series of reports when Rusinow was a member of the American Universities Field Staff stationed in Yugoslavia. They include observations about social and cultural practices, such as the Serbian slava (saint's day celebration) or life in Kosovo in the 1960s and 1970s, and analyses of economic changes under socialism?from the evolution of Lipizzaner horse breeding in Slovenia to the opening of Yugoslavia's first supermarket in Belgrade. One essay provides a detailed dissection of the anatomy of the 1968 student revolt in Bel

grade. Most of the book is focused on Yugoslavia's "national question" from the change of course inaugurated in 1966 by the fall of Aleksandar Rankovic (the Serb head of the Yugoslav secret police and main exponent of "centralism" in the communist leadership) to the Slovenian and Croatian independence declarations in June 1991. Approximately a

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