For Two Thousand Years
Mihail Sebastian
FOR TWO
THOUSAND YEARS
Translated by Philip Ó Ceallaigh
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Five
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Six
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS
Mihail Sebastian is one of the most important
Romanian writers of the twentieth century. Born Iosif Hechter to a Jewish family in 1907, he
grew up in Brăila, Romania, an ancient port on the Danube. He studied law in Bucharest from
1927 to 1929 and in Paris from 1930 to 1931, then worked occasionally as a lawyer while
publishing articles, novels and plays, and being part of an influential literary circle that
included the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, the playwright Eugene Ionesco and the
philosopher Emil Cioran (who was the model for Ştefan D. Pârlea in For Two
Thousand Years).
During his lifetime, his most famous book was the
novel For Two Thousand Years. Published in 1934, it sparked a furious debate in the
newspapers for its ambiguous political stance. Critics on the left accused Sebastian of being
anti-Semitic although he was Jewish, while those on the right attacked him for being a Zionist.
At the core of the novel is the year 1923, when a new constitution gave citizenship to ethnic
and religious minorities. The first edition of the novel included a foreword by
Sebastian’s mentor, the philosopher Nae Ionescu, who made a series of anti-Semitic remarks
and was in fact the model for the character of Ghiţă Blidaru. Critics wondered why
Sebastian had decided to include Ionescu’s words and whether he agreed with him or not.
Sebastian replied in an essay titled How I Became a Hooligan (1935), where he explained
why he felt the need to think as lucidly as possible at a time when everything was politically
charged.
His other books, written after this incident,
include less political novels influenced by French modernists, such as The Town with Acacias
(1935) and The Accident (1940), and plays like Holiday Game (1938) and
A Nameless Star (1944). As the fascist Iron Guard rose to power, Sebastian was
prohibited from work as a journalist and was abandoned by his circle of friends – an
experience chronicled in the diary he kept from 1935 to 1944 and which is similar in style and
tone to For Two Thousand Years. Having survived the war and the Holocaust, he was
killed by a truck as he crossed the street in May 1945, as he was going to teach his first
university lecture on Balzac. He was 38.
When his Journal was finally published
in Romania in 1996, it became a bestseller, generating a heated controversy over responsibility
for war crimes and the country’s history of anti-Semitism. The English translation has
been hailed as ‘a humane masterpiece’ and compared to Anne Frank’s diary.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh is the author of two
collections of short stories, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant
Light of Day, both published by Penguin. His work has been translated into ten languages
and adapted for cinema and he has received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He lives in
Bucharest, Romania.
J’ose non seulement parler de moy, mais parler
seulement de moy: je fourvoye quand j’ecris aultre chose, et me disrobe a mon sujet. Je ne
m’aime pas si indiscretement et ne suis si attaché et mesle a moy, que je ne me
puisse distinguer et considerer a quartier, comme un voysin, comme un arbre.
– Montaigne, De l’art de
conferer
I not only dare to talk about myself but to talk of
nothing but myself. I am wandering off the point when I write of anything else, cheating my
subject of me. I do not love myself with such lack of discretion, nor am I so bound and
involved in myself, that I am unable to see myself apart and to consider myself separately as I
would a neighbour or a tree.
PART ONE
1
I believe I’ve only ever been afraid of
signs and symbols, never of people or things. My childhood was poisoned by the third poplar in
the yard of the Church of St Peter, a tall, mysterious tree, its shadow on summer nights falling
through the window, over my bed – that black band slashing across my bedcovers – a
terrifying presence I could not understand and did not try to.
And yet, I walked bareheaded through the deserted
streets of the city when it was occupied by Germans: a white trail in the sky marking the
passage of planes, bombs falling all about, even close by, the short dry thumps echoing across
the open country.
And yet, with cold, childlike curiosity I calmly
observed cartloads of frozen Turks passing by the gates in December, and not even before those
pyramids of bodies stacked like logs in a woodpile did the presence of death make me
tremble.
And yet, I crossed the Danube in a damaged boat,
taking in water, to Lipovan villages, just rolling up my sleeves when it seemed the rotten
bottom could no longer hold out. And God knows what a bad swimmer I am.
No, I don’t think I’ve ever been
fearful, even though the Greeks from the big garden, who pelted us with stones when they caught
us there, shouted ‘Cowardly Jew!’ at me daily from the moment they knew me. I grew
up with that shout, spat at me from behind.
I know, though, what horror is. Horror, yes.
Little nothings which nobody else noticed loomed before me menacingly and froze me with terror.
Vainly would I approach the poplar across the road in the light of day, caressing its black bark
and, with bloodied nails, breaking splinters from the wood exposed between the cracks.
‘It’s just a poplar,’ I told myself, leaning back against it, to feel it right
against me so as not to forget. But by evening I had indeed forgotten, alone in my bedroom,
bedded down as always at ten o’clock. You could still hear the steps of passers-by from
the street, muffled voices, occasional shouts. Then that familiar silence, arriving with the
usual pace, in the usual stages. If I made an effort, I could perhaps recall those three or four
internal beats with which my night began, real steps which I descended physically in darkness
and silence. Then the shadow of the poplar found me once again tensed, with fists clenched and
eyes wide open, wanting to shout out but not knowing how or to whom.
*
Made a curious discovery yesterday at the
second-hand bookshop. George Gissing. La rançon d’Eve. From around 1900, I
think. Absolutely nothing about the author (probably English).
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