980 words
Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher. Cioran was born on April 8, 1911 in Rășinari (Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary and today part of Romania) and died stateless in Paris on June 20, 1995. A nationalist writer in his youth, after the Second World War he achieved fame as a French-language author of essays and aphorisms of a markedly dark and apparently nihilistic bent. (more…)
4,994 words
Of peasant ancestry on his father’s side and boasting aristocratic (boyar) maternal roots, the Romanian poet, prose writer, and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) had not put his modest inherited wealth to waste. Educated in the German language since childhood, Eminescu was culturally — if not always geopolitically — an enthusiastic Germanophile. (more…)
5,688 words
Editor’s note: This is the transcript of Charles Krafft’s talk at the 2015 London Forum, November 27, 2015. We wish to thank Buttercup Dew for finding a copy of this video after it had been deleted from YouTube and Hyacinth Bouquet for the transcription. (more…)
1,868 words
I have always wanted to visit Transylvania and Bran Castle, known throughout the world as Dracula’s Castle. Although having little connection to Vlad the Impaler or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the myths behind the castle have inspired countless horror films and heavy metal songs. (more…)
2,108 words
Ash Donaldson
Brother War: A Modern Myth for Those of European Descent
Independently published, 2019
More of Donaldson’s work is available through the White Art Collective.
Ash Donaldson’s latest novel Brother War: A Modern Myth for Those of European Descent combines the best of history, myth, and fantasy to spin an unforgettable story about World War I. Not only is it his best novel to date, but Brother War is also the first in his Mythology Series designed for an adult audience. (more…)
1,472 words
Translated by Guillaume Durocher
Translator’s Note: This article is translated from the French version in Emil Cioran, Apologie de la Barbarie: Berlin–Bucharest (1932-1941) (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). (more…)
1,980 words
Emil Cioran
Apologie de la Barbarie: Berlin – Bucharest (1932-1941)
Paris: L’Herne, 2015
This is a very interesting book released by the superior publishing house L’Herne: a collection of Emil Cioran’s articles published in Romanian newspapers, mostly from before the war. (more…)
Mihai Eminescu
2,285 words
Nineteenth-century Romanian poet and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) studied in Bismarck’s Prussia, where he immersed himself in Schopenhauer and studied under Eugen Dühring. His essays attack liberalism, usury, immigration, and the prospect of Jewish civil rights in Romania. The tone of his philosophically-driven poems, which are modeled after the golden age of German Romantic poetry, ranges from endearing to brutal. Adored in Romania, but without much of a reputation outside of his own country, he was killed by medical malpractice at the age of 39. (more…)
Michael the Brave, savior of Europe?
2,446 words
The history of Romania as a concrete country is generally assumed to have started with the Romanian, or Danubian, principalities, similarly to how the history of Russia as a concrete country starts with Muscovy. Both of these histories are of late medieval origin, having come into being in the wake of the Mongol invasions of Europe. In both comparable cases, however, the concrete starting point is not the same as the ethnologically related spiritual precursor from which the original states derived their patronage. In the case of Russia, the spiritual precursor was the Kievan Rus’, which was situated in present-day Ukraine. (more…)
1,761 words
Translated by Guillaume Durocher
Translator’s Note: The following are excerpts from the preface to a collection of early articles by Emil Cioran translated from Romanian into French. I found this very interesting concerning the young Cioran’s embrace of fascism as embodying the “barbarism” he considered necessary to halt decadence. I have broken up some of the paragraphs. (more…)
2,524 words
Marta Petreu
An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005
‘The Romanians, what have they ever done for us, eh?’ So might Emil Cioran, himself a Romanian, have wondered when he wrote his third book The Transfiguration of Romania, published in 1936. Bewailing Romania’s insignificant past and culture, he proposed a program that would transform the country in parallel with the contemporary national revivals in Germany and Italy then underway. (more…)
3,498 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part One here)
Translated by Tatiana Danilova
The Fight for the Christian Truth
The truth, preached by Jesus, is the love for thy neighbor, with no exception. Against the aberration of the Jews, a deviation from the divine law, for which only the members of their people are their neighbors. (more…)
1,190 words
When Alexandru C. Cuza was born in Iași, Moldavia in 1857, Romania was not yet a unified country fully freed from Ottoman vassalage. Turkish rule had not been as direct or oppressive here as in the lower Balkans, but it left the young state and ancient nation with a host of social problems. Cuza was a child when Wallachia and Moldavia were united in 1866 (more…)
1,364 words
Corneliu Codreanu
Translated by Guillaume Durocher
Translator’s Note:
Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher who, before becoming a noted esthete of nihilism in the Parisian literary scene, dared to be a hopeful fascist. Translated from the French. Improvements from the original Romanian are therefore welcome. The title is editorial.
1,409 words
Mircea Eliade et la Redécouverte du Sacré (YouTube, Romanian subtitles)
Mircea Eliade was a traditionalist Romanian novelist and philosopher. Following the disaster of the Second World War, he moved to Paris and Chicago, becoming a respected and influential historian of religions. He acquired something of the status of a guru, as poignantly told in the 1987 documentary Mircea Eliade et la Redécouverte du Sacré. (more…)
Petre Țuțea
151 words
Translator’s Note:
Petre Țuțea was a Romanian anti-communist dissident. The following is one of the entries from his popular dictionary of aphorisms 322 de vorbe memorabile ale lui Petre Țuțea (“322 Memorable Words from Petre Țuțea,” Bucharest: Humanitas, 2009 [1993]), 45.
* * *
4,369 words
Neagu Djuvara
A Brief Illustrated History of Romanians
Bucharest: Humanitas, 2014
I recently came across a very pleasant read in the form of Neagu Djuvara’s A Brief Illustrated History of Romanians.[1] The book is in fact a series of transcribed lectures meant to introduce young Romanians (or, in translation, the curious foreigner) to the broad sweep of Romanian history. (more…)
1,350 words
English original here
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
The Prison Notes
With Julius Evola’s writings on The Iron Guard
Trans. anonymous
Logik Forlag, 2015
Este delgado volumen (128 páginas, incluyendo muchas con fascinantes fotografías) es una lectura obligatoria no sólo para admiradores de Corneliu Codreanu, sino también para admiradores de Julius Evola, porque también incluye todos los escritos sobre Codreanu y la Guardia de Hierro. (more…)
4 489 думи
English original here
Легионерската доктрина (наричана също легионерство) обхваща философията и убежденията, изразявани от Легиона на Архангел Михаил (известен също, като Желязната гвардия), румънската християнско-националистическа организация, основана от Корнелиу Зелеа Кодряну, който е ключовата фигура в създаването на нейната доктрина. (more…)
1,245 words
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
The Prison Notes
With Julius Evola’s writings on The Iron Guard
Trans. anonymous
Logik Forlag, 2015
This slender volume (128 pages, including many pages of fascinating photographs) is obligatory reading not only for admirers of Corneliu Codreanu, but also for admirers of Julius Evola, for it also includes all of Evola’s writings on Codreanu and the Iron Guard.
3,409 words
Moldova is Europe’s poorest country. Tiny, landlocked, and with a population of about 3 million and shrinking, she is often ignored in modern writing on Eastern Europe. She is one of the many castaways of the 1990s, the imposition of the “free market,” and the “end of history.” Yet she was an important part of the old USSR. But after the breakup of the empire in 1990–1991, she fared even worse than Ukraine, reaching Fourth World poverty levels. (more…)
6,048 words
The car is leading us outside the suburbs of the city, on a long, wretched, provincial street, under a grey and rainy sky. It suddenly turns left, enters a countryside path, stops in front of a small villa with sharp outlines, the ‘Green House,’ (more…)
988 words
A.C.A.B. is a subculture acronym frequently employed by skinheads.
An example of its use can be seen in the short video clip “Saga Live in Finland,” filmed at a skinhead bar in Finland in 2007. (more…)
5,369 words
The Legionary Movement of Romania, also popularly known as the Iron Guard, is for many people today a difficult matter to discuss straightforwardly because of all untruths, deceptions, distortions, and misconceptions surrounding its history. The movement has a great legacy and there is much to learn from it, (more…)
