Early Resistance to Fascism in Eugène

Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism

Maria Lupas
Aix-Marseille Université

When in 1932 the young editors of a minor Bucharest newspaper, Axa, joined the fascist
Legionary Movement — also known as the Iron Guard — and used the paper to attract
other young intellectuals to their ranks, the young Eugène Ionesco who was writing the
paper’s literary column became increasingly isolated in his literary and political views.
Looking at Ionesco’s articles in the first issues of Axa, we can see that the importance of
the newspaper’s editorial shift to the Legionary Movement has been greatly overlooked,
as has Ionesco’s resistance to fascism and his criticism of nationalism in literature. He left
the paper as its contributors radicalized their positions, but this experience likely served
as one of the earliest sources of the metamorphosis staged in his play Rhinoceros. Ionesco’s
journalism both exemplifies the complexities of 1930s literature in Romania and those
of reading Ionesco’s fiction and non-fiction.

Keywords: Theater of the absurd / public intellectuals / history / Romanian Young

Generation / Mircea Eliade

INTRODUCTION

I
n the 1950s, as Europe began emerging from the rubble and measuring the con-
sequences of the Second World War, a new kind of theater was also emerging
that seemed to express the experience of this tragic twentieth century. It was
dubbed “theater of the absurd;” Eugène Ionesco became one of its most prolific
and emblematic playwrights, as its fame gradually spanned the globe. Ionesco
also became a public intellectual writing for newspapers and serving as a member
of the French Academy. In later interviews, Ionesco made no secret that one of
his personal dramas was witnessing friends and family members succumb to the
ideology of a fascist political movement in 1930s Romania. Furthermore, in evok-
ing Romanian interwar fascism, it has now become common to make reference
to Ionesco’s 1958 play Rhinoceros, which the playwright loosely based on this and
other experiences.
Just as there is more to Ionesco’s plays than simple farces (Esslin 84), so also
Ionesco’s claim to be a simple witness to fascism should be critically examined. I
Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism 75

argue that in his abundant interwar journalism, Ionesco both resisted one of the
fascist Legionary Movement’s first attempts to gain influence among Romanian
intellectuals and developed a posture of derision. During the Cold War, these
newspaper texts were conserved only in special Romanian depository libraries
difficult to access behind the Iron Curtain, and most have still not been translated
from the Romanian. I analyze some of Ionesco’s stances when as a young literary
critic he was grappling with tensions in Romanian literature between cosmopoli-
tanism and nationalism, modernism and tradition. I demonstrate how in the face
of the editorial shift of the newspaper Axa for which he was writing, Ionesco was
obliged to develop his own literary positions and finally leave the paper. Texts
from the Axa newspaper in particular were conserved in only one library, that
of the Romanian Academy, and classified as extreme-right publications. The
intriguing story of Ionesco’s articles in this paper has therefore not yet been told.
Recent scholarship on Ionesco has taken divergent approaches to his life and
his works. A first group of scholars has focused on Ionesco’s life, particularly in
light of information becoming available with the fall of totalitarian regimes in
East-Central Europe and the opening of archives. These scholars include social
scientists, historians, and sometimes literary scholars. The Romanian poet Marta
Petreu published Ionesco in His Father’s Country [Ionesco în ţara tatălui] in 2001,
after the opening of the archives. She turned her critical attention to several sub-
jects that had been censured in pre-1989 Romania: the 1927 Romanian “young
generation,”1 the Legionary Movement, and Professor Nae Ionescu (no relation to
the playwright) who mentored many young intellectuals in favor of the Legion-
ary Movement. The image of Ionesco that emerges from her study is one of an
exteriorly passive man who reserved his attacks for his diary-writing and never-
published attacks on his friends even when they succumbed to extreme fascist
ideologies (77). While she recognized a certain non-conformism in Ionesco, she
attributed this to sophism and a spirit of negation on his part and she diminished
any role of active resistance. According to Petreu, in 1933 Ionesco did take stock
of a change and lamented the end of literature because of its politicization, but
shortly thereafter “sees to his own needs, he publishes No (1934), becomes glo-
rious and ‘disgusting’ etc. etc.” [« îşi vede de propriile sale preocupări, publică Nu
(1934), devine glorios şi ‘greţos’ etc. etc. »]2 (48). In Petreu’s interpretation, Ionesco
was indeed permanently scarred by what he had lived in Romania in the interwar
and war years and needed to write the play Rhinoceros to exorcise some of those
demons, but she localized the traumatic radicalization of Ionesco’s literary world
only from 1933 onward and particularly between June 1940 and June 1942 (61).
The French social scientist Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s 2002 book, Cioran,
Eliade, Ionesco, discussed Ionesco in the context of two other expatriates from the
Romanian “young generation” and particularly focused on the strategies by which
Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran tried to dissimulate the fascist sympathies they
had held in Romania. Laignel-Lavastine’s work — based on a solid body of docu-
ments and primary texts — has often been unfairly denigrated in heated debates
on the legacies of Eliade, Cioran and other figures of Romania’s wartime history.
76 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 3

Given the study’s larger focus, Ionesco’s own interwar writings were largely
neglected. Laignel-Lavastine relied instead on fragments of Ionesco’s Bucharest
journal published in 1968 and on the play Rhinoceros, but less on texts published
by Ionesco in the interwar years.
The Romanian historian Lucian Boia’s 2011 book benefitted from previous
research and took into consideration Ionesco’s publishing activities during the
interwar years. The book focused broadly on Romanian intellectuals from the
interwar years to the beginning of the post-war period. Boia pointed out with
finesse some of the pitfalls of studying Romanian intellectuals in the years 1930
to 1950. He perspicaciously noted how Ionesco, a left-leaning writer in Romania,
worked at several right-wing newspapers, but he argued, following Petreu, that
Ionesco’s resistance in the 1930s was silent and interior and that his vociferous
resistance in France was an effort to make amends for his previous cowardice (92).
A second group of literary scholars has chosen to deal primarily with Iones-
co’s interwar texts and their literary contexts. The Romanian scholar, not related
to the playwright, Gelu Ionescu’s study first inventoried Ionesco’s articles in the
Romanian interwar press, but since he prepared the manuscript during the time
of the totalitarian censorship, he avoided discussions of the Romanian political
context.
Ecaterina Cleynen-Serghiev’s 1993 study on Ionesco’s literary youth offers
ground-breaking readings of Ionesco’s 1934 book, No [Nu], and of Ionesco’s grap-
pling with the limits of literary criticism. But while Cleynen-Serghiev frames
the cultural life of the 1930s in the context of the politically vulnerable state of
“Greater Romania,” she preferred to separate literary and political debates and to
discuss only the literary ones. The Romanian Academician Eugen Simion also
preferred in his book, The Young Eugène Ionesco [Tânărul Eugen Ionescu], to focus
more on literary debates and happenings rather than on Ionesco’s life. He explic-
itly refused to address larger political question concerning the appeal of fascism
to certain prominent young intellectuals like Mircea Eliade, focusing rather on
Ionesco’s seemingly contradictory literary tastes (176).
Jeanine Teodorescu also focused on Ionesco’s 1934 volume of literary criti-
cism, No, but limited her study to subjects treated in No, with few external docu-
ments witnessing to the politics of the 1930s other than the point of view of No’s
author. Her synopsis of No linked the work to Ionesco’s theater and she argued
for the continuity between No and Ionesco’s later works.
A third group of scholars has argued for taking a mixed approach and study
both Ionesco’s life and his texts. Among them, significantly, is a theoretician of
literary modernity, the Romanian-American scholar Matei Calinescu. In his
study of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Calinescu stated that he approached the text as a
cultural historian trying to understand a specific historical situation (“Ionesco
and Rhinoceros” 395). Calinescu also relied on rare historical documents for
his studies: Eliade’s unpublished diary and pages from Mihail Sebastian’s then-
unpublished diary. Calinescu correlated passages of Rhinoceros with passages
from Ionesco’s Bucharest diary published in 1968 in the volume Present Past, Past
Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism 77

Present [Présent passé, passé present] but rarely used Ionesco’s interwar press in his
otherwise astute interrogations of Ionesco’s fiction and non-fiction. The American
literary scholar Anne Quinney more recently argued in favor of reading Rhinoc-
eros against the backdrop of events in Bucharest and France and of letting the
historical arguments inform literary readings. It is not always clear in her study,
however, what role Ionesco himself played in the Bucharest milieu she describes
and her historical sources are secondary ones or later interviews. Some historical
inaccuracies unfortunately also crept into her text.
Unlike previous studies of Ionesco in the interwar period that have relied on
French texts such as Présent passé, passé présent and No’s French’s translation, as
well as Ionesco’s interviews and on the published anthology of Ionesco’s Romanian
journalism, my research is based on the study of the original Romanian texts in
1930s newspapers. I argue that Ionesco’s resistance was also an exterior one and
that it happened as early as 1932. I do so by first examining Ionesco’s literary posi-
tions at the time of Axa’s shift and comparing them to those of other contributors
and those expressed in the editorials. Ionesco’s type of resistance was character-
ized by humor. Ionesco witnessed the “rhinoceros” phenomenon much earlier
than 1938, as is often claimed. He was among the first to witness it when the very
first young Bucharest intellectuals adhered to Codreanu’s Legionary Movement
in 1932 and tried to bring those around the Axa newspaper into the Legionary
Movement, which was then relatively unknown in the capital. Ionesco responded
first with humor, then by leaving the newspaper. It was in this right-wing paper
that some of Ionesco’s aesthetic thoughts were first expressed. His spirit of nega-
tion, far from being a mannerism, should be seen instead as an act of resistance.
Understanding Ionesco’s particular use of humor in his Romanian journalism may
also offer some interesting readings of Ionesco’s later theater, a theater not so much
of the absurd — a term Ionesco repeatedly refused — but of derision.

IONESCO AND THE ROMANIAN LITERARY CAMPS OF THE 1930S

Eugène Ionesco entered the world of Romanian letters in 1927 when he was just
eighteen by penning art reviews for his high school’s literary journal. He had
been back living in Romania since roughly age thirteen after having spent his
childhood in France. His parents moved to France when Ionesco was an infant.
By 1927 Ionesco had re-learned his native Romanian language well enough to
publish articles and soon poems.3 Seven years later, in 1934, he published a volume
of literary criticism whose title was simply the Romanian negation “no,” Nu. By
age twenty-five, Ionesco was an established professional of the Romanian literary
world, albeit a young and controversial one. He had already published more than
one hundred twenty five articles in the Romanian press and in all would publish
more than two hundred articles in Romanian journals and newspapers between
1927 and 1946.
A published anthology of Ionesco’s Romanian journalism bears the sug-
gestive title War with Everyone [Război cu toată lumea]. This title would seem to
78 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 3

confirm Marta Petreu’s thesis that Ionesco at this point in his life adopted the
posture of contradiction as a sophistic mannerism and that he disagreed with
all the camps out of a certain need to do so. Indeed, in 1930s Romania, literary
currents and debates were thriving. A closer look at the debates and at Ionesco’s
journalism shows that while he did not neatly fit into any established literary camp
and seemed to mock all of them, he generally maintained coherent positions in
favor of modernism and cosmopolitanism.
The modernist-traditionalist debate in 1930s Romania was taken up by liter-
ary journals and circles. The literary critic Eugen Lovinescu headed the modern-
ist literary circle “Sburătorul” and for several years edited the literary journal of
the same name. Lovinescu’s advocated a position called “synchronism” in which
Romanian literary culture would catch up to literary developments in Western
European cultures through creative imitation (Cornis-Pope 81). Lovinescu him-
self was said to write novels in the style of Marcel Proust.4 The traditionalist camp
was represented among others by the “Sămănătorul” circle and the journal of the
same name. The circle’s title means “the Sower” and it is from the rural aspects of
Romanian life that the circle believed poetic inspiration should come. In the early
1930s, Ionesco’s tastes lined up more with the pro-modernist Sburătorul circle
rather than Sămănătorist one. Ionesco was among the first to introduce Marcel
Proust to Romania — as early as 1932 — through his reviews (Goga 264).5 He also
attended meetings of Sburătorul and reviewed works by Lovinescu. Yet Ionesco
did not become a regular of Sburătorul and his reviews of the established Lovi-
nescu’s works were peppered with witty remarks at his elder’s expense.6 Ionesco
nevertheless agreed with many of Sburătorul’s modernist positions.
Related to the modernist-traditionalist debate was debate on the legacy of
the 1848 revolutionaries. Its poles were an all-inclusive cosmopolitanism on the
one side, and a protective nationalism on the other. The 1848 revolutionaries had
headed uprisings that led to independent Romanian principalities and eventually
to the modern Romanian state. Similar to Polish, Russian, and other revolutionar-
ies in Europe at about the same period, many Romanian revolutionaries including
Nicolae Bălcescu had studied in Paris. In Romania, the institutions the 1848ers
set up resembled French institutions.
In the late 1920s, their legacy was questioned by Mircea Eliade and others
of Eliade’s generation. In a series of twelve articles for the newspaper Cuvântul,
published between September and November 1927, entitled “Spiritual Itinerary,”
Eliade posited the existence of his generation, sometimes called the “young gen-
eration” and its uniqueness with respect to all the generations that came before.
Eliade argued that the experience of the Great War had been foundational for
their generation (“Itinerariu spiritual V. Experienţele” 1). Since the war had
destroyed the previous century’s confidence in rationalism, a legacy of the French
Revolution, Eliade argued that a new synthesis was necessary that would take
into account the totality of the human experience (“Itinerariu spiritual, I. Linii
de orientare” 2). Abandoning the old nineteenth-century rationalism, the “young
generation” could achieve this synthesis from the variety of human experiences
Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism 79

available to it, such as religion and philosophy, but also from ethnic qualities
(“Itinerariu spiritual, VI. Cultura” 1). Eliade criticized the 1848 generation for
trying to create a new Romanian culture from a “suspicious French seed imported
at a time of crisis” [“un suspect germen franţuzesc importat într-o epocă de criză”]
(“Itinerariu Spiritual, VI. Cultura” 2).
The young Ionesco, two years Eliade’s junior, also had critical words about the
1848 revolutionaries but for very different reasons. Ionesco criticized the 1848ers
for letting their political projects blind their literary and cultural tastes. For
example, he chastised the revolutionary Ion Heliade-Rădulescu for the naiveté of
his taste in saying that the minor Romanian poet Văcărescu was equal to Goethe
(Nu 49). For Ionesco, the 1848ers were too nationalistic in their tastes, but they
had the advantage of energizing the culture and of being open to any foreign
influence and borrowing that would create a new Romanian national culture.
The debate over the legacy of the 1848 generation brought to the fore the
debate about cosmopolitanism and nationalism in Romanian culture (Ornea 7).
This debate thrived after the First World War, when Romanian had more than
doubled its territory and many cultural minorities became part of the new nation.
Ionesco’s position on 1848 shows that he was for cosmopolitanism and for foreign
borrowings since Romanian culture could only profit from overtures to other
cultural influences.
Ionesco has sometimes been assimilated to the Romanian “young genera-
tion,” also called the 1927 Generation, which included Mircea Eliade. Several
factors make this assimilation problematic. First the term Romanian “young gen-
eration” coexists along with others terms, all covering slightly different realities.7
More importantly, Ionesco’s positions consistently diverged from those of many of
the Romanian “young generation,” which he often mocked in his interwar texts.
Ionesco’s outward attitude toward the “young generation” and Eliade’s calling
them to arms was often derisive.
Indeed, studies of Ionesco’s 1934 No have largely overlooked how the book
parodied Eliade’s 1927 “Spiritual Itinerary.” Ionesco integrated the words “itin-
erary” and “spiritual” into his own text, but in a comic way. He titled one of the
chapters “False critical itinerary” and discussed the words “spiritual” and “spiri-
tuality.” Whereas Eliade argued for the creation of a Romanian culture in his
“Spiritual itinerary,” Ionesco parodied this claim in No, saying:
The Romanian essence is inapt and resistant to a cultural existence. I do not wish to
imply however slightly that our spiritual substance is inferior; on the contrary, it can
be superior and I believe this precisely because I believe it to be a-cultural.

Îmi vine să cred că substanţa românească este inaptă, refractară unei existenţe în cultură. Nu
vreau cîtuşi de puţin să spun că substanţa noastră spirituală este o substanţă inferioră;
dimpotrivă, poate fi superioară şi cred aceasta tocmai pentru că o cred aculturală. (Nu 149)

Like Eliade had done in “Spiritual Itinerary,” Ionesco also provocatively

suggested that there was no Romanian culture. But whereas Eliade believed
80 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 3

the time had come for the “young generation” to create an authentic Romanian
culture, Ionesco remained reserved about its capacity to do so. “Up until this
day,” Ionesco wrote, “the most remarkable work of the young generation has been
the discussion about the most remarkable work of the young generation” [“Pînă
astăzi, opera cea mai însemnată a tinerii generaţii a fost discuţia asupra operei celei
mai însemnate a tinerei generaţii”] (Nu 153). Throughout the 1930s, when many of
the “young generation” favored traditionalism over modernity, nationalism over
cosmopolitanism, and what they called “the spiritual” over the cultural, Ionesco
was for modernity, cosmopolitanism, and the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere.
Ionesco therefore coherently reserved his praise for two trends in Romanian
literature. First, he praised the great literary critic of the late nineteenth-century,
Titu Maiorescu (1840–1917), his literary circle “Youth” [“Junimea”], and their
publication Literary Conversations [Convorbiri Literare]. It was Maiorescu who
discovered the master poet Mihai Eminescu as well as the Romanian dramaturge
I.L. Caragiale, some of whose works Ionesco would later translate into French.
Maiorescu argued against certain tendencies of 1848 culture. First, he argued for
the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere, independent of the political one: “art for
art’s sake” was a Maiorescan motto. He also denounced certain excesses in cultural
borrowings from foreign sources, what he called “forms without content” [“ forme
fără fond ”] (Maiorescu 135) or the copying of exterior forms and institutions
without assuring that the interior content followed. Ionesco praised Maiorescu
for being an authentic critic and lamented that his critical recommendations
had not been followed later on, particularly the autonomy of the aesthetic. In
the same line, Ionesco also praised some representatives of the avant-garde cur-
rent, although many of its chief figures were emigrating to France and to other
countries. Among them, Ionesco particularly admired the Romanian avant-garde
writer Urmuz.
Ionesco did not easily assimilate into any formal literary camp in the 1930s,
but his texts against Eliade’s “young generation” and his own background grow-
ing up in France made him inclined to favor cosmopolitanism over nationalism,
modernity over tradition, and left-wing politics over right-wing politics. But
political orientations were rapidly changing in the Europe of 1932 and 1933.
In Romania, the quest for synthesis, experience, religion, purity, expressed by
Eliade’s “Spiritual Itinerary” would cross paths, mainly due to the influence of
philosophy professor Nae Ionescu, one time member of the King’s Camarilla,
with the extreme-right Legionary Movement/Iron Guard.8 But even before Nae
Ionescu’s support of the Legionary Movement/Iron Guard beginning in 1933,
the movement found support already in autumn 1932 from the editors of the
newspaper Axa.

AXA’S SHIFT TO THE FAR RIGHT

Several studies have noted the range of ideological positions among Bucharest
intellectuals in the 1930s and the ease with which they shifted. The novelist
Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism 81

and playwright Mihail Sebastian wrote in 1935 that in Romania nothing was
incompatible (243). The short-lived “Criterion” circle boasted members both on
the extreme right and the extreme left. The Romanian-American literary critic
Matei Calinescu has argued that for the 1927 generation, friendship trumped
ideological choices, which were less important than personal ties (”The 1927
Generation” 676), while the Romanian historian Lucian Boia recently noted that
the right-wing Axa newspaper counted Eugène Ionesco among its contributors
and suggested this as an example of the mix of ideological views (40). A closer
look at Axa’s beginnings, however, reveals that far from being another example
of opposite viewpoints coexisting in the same institutions, Axa’s editors deliber-
ately hid their radical political agenda at the beginning of the paper’s run in an
effort, successful in some cases, to lure young intellectuals into the Legionary
Movement.
Axa’s shift to the right was not unique. Many newspapers evolved toward the
right during the 1930s and for varying reasons including the personal positions of
their editors and the political shift of the ruling political parties during a series
of right-wing dictatorships. Axa’s shift is significant because it happened as early
as 1932. It was the first time young Bucharest intellectuals joined the Legion-
ary Movement/Iron Guard. Axa’s editors, Mihail Polihroniade and Ioan Victor
Vojen, were the first Bucharest intellectuals to do so, and in their wake, other
influential young men joined, including the Acterian brothers. Many months
before Nae Ionescu would support the Iron Guard and long before Mircea Eliade
did so also, the Axa editors prepared the way. Significant, too, is the process by
which Axa shifted right: not a sudden upheaval but a gradual radicalization. As
one of the founding literary columnists for Axa, Ionesco perceived the first signs
of this gradual metamorphosis from within.
At its inception in 1932, Axa posed as a general “young generation” publica-
tion whose politics leaned right and featured some well-known cultural figures as
contributors. It was not openly advertised as a Legionary Movement/Iron Guard
publication. It tried to appeal to the “young generation” of writers as an alternative
to the more established newspapers and was part of a publishing boom period for
Romanian periodicals. In the short, eleven-year period following the constitution
of Greater Romania in 1918, Romanian Academy researchers count 7,316 titles in
print. This is more than double the number of periodicals published in the Roma-
nian lands from the beginning of the press in the eighteenth century until then.9
Axa represents one of several thousand periodicals to come to light in early 1930s
Romania.10 Its stated agenda appeared in its subtitle: “Art, literature, politics.”
Axa appeared on newsstands for the first time on October 20, 1932. It was
co-edited by Ioan Victor Vojen and Mihail Polihroniade, a friend and former
Spiru Haret high school classmate of Mircea Eliade. The front page featured an
article by the Romanian theology professor and poet, Nichifor Crainic. Crainic
was active in several newspapers at the time. He sat on the board of the prestigious
Gândirea, contributing many articles to it, and had himself launched the same
year the paper Calendarul (Clark 112).11 Crainic’s article on the first page of the
82 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 3

first issue of Axa not only lent his cultural authority to the publication but also
announced the program of the new paper: in favor of Orthodox religious heritage
and of “native spirit.”12
Crainic’s seemingly moderate article entitled “To the right or to the left?”
claimed to give a voice to the voiceless. It described the harsh situation of the
“young generation” of intellectuals and pointed to the only revolution suitable
for the Romanian state: the political right. It praised the newspaper genre as a
privileged vantage point for looking at the state of society’s inner soul and as a
remedy for social ills:
The newspaper is to the movements of the social soul what the meteorological insti-
tute is to the atmosphere. The recording of events that represent the temperature of
a society, the noting of its quakes, the examining of the interests of different social
groups, the listening to individuals standing isolated in the multitude like grains of
light in the nebulous Milky Way. [It is] a lay confessional where the confession of
known and unknown pains are collected in the despairing hope of a remedy.

Ziarul e pentru mişcările sufletului social ceeace e pentru atmosferă institutul

meteorologic. Înregistrare de evenimente care reprezintă gradul de temperatură a societăţei,
notare a cutremurelor ei, scrutare a intereselor feluritelor categorii sociale, ascultare a
in[ş]ilor izolaţi în mulţime ca grăunţii de lumină în nebuloasa căii lactee. [. . .] confe-
sional laic [. . .] în care spovedaniile durerilor ştiute şi neştiute se colectează în nădejdea
desnădăjduită a unui remediu. (Crainic 1)

These lines in the first issue constituted Crainic’s endorsement of Axa and of its
potential to be, in Crainic’s view, a remedy to Romanian national problems.
The paper’s orientation began to shift within two months of its debut. The
first and most prominent change was the paper’s subtitle. The first three issues
were published with the description: Axa, bimonthly publication of art, literature,
and politics [Axa, Publicaţie bilunară de artă, literatură, politică] and carried sev-
eral articles on art and even literary prose by well-established authors such as
Anton Holban and Camil Petrescu. In issue four, however, Axa’s subtitle became:
Bimonthly political, artistic, and literary publication [Publicaţie bilunară, politică,
artistică şi literară]. The change in word order expressed a real change in content.
It eloquently reflected the reversal of priorities: art and literature had taken a
backseat to politics — or worse, they became subservient to it.
The change of orientation was also reflected in the paper’s contributors and
in its editorials. Mihail Stelescu, a high-ranking member of the Legionary move-
ment/Iron Guard joined the staff writing a front page article on the Romanian
right and the proletariat. Stelescu had just arrived in the capital from Moldova
following his election to the Romanian Parliament on Codreanu’s list.13 The back
page editorial of the same issue of Axa invited contributions from those “who hold
the same views as those expressed in these pages [toţi acei cari gândesc asemenea cu
cei ce scriu în aceste pagini]” (Axa, 22 Dec. 1932; 8), thus discouraging the possibility
of intellectual debate and divergence of opinion. Axa had become an ideological
Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism 83

and exclusivist right-wing paper. The particular right-wing movement to which

it adhered is suggested by an advertisement on the same back page of issue four
stating: “Read Ancestral Ground” [  “Citiţi Pământul strămoşesc”], the Legionary
Movement’s official paper.
The timeline of radicalization continued beyond issue four, but the essential
change had been accomplished. In issue five, the young Vasile Marin, who would
later lead Legionaries to fight in the Spanish Civil War, joined the staff. The paper
also began including more drawings and other graphics that would have larger
mass appeal. By issue ten, Axa ran an article on Iron Guard captain and founder
Corneliu Codreanu’s support of Nazi Germany and expressed the desire that
Romania follow the German model of anti-Jewish measures. In issue fifteen, Axa
gave a full speech of Codreanu, praising Codreanu’s superiority to the politicians
in power. At last, in issue twenty the reality was clearly stated in a front-page edi-
torial: “Axa has fine tuned its position from issue to issue and has arrived to where
it should have: to the Iron Guard” [“Axa si-a precizat numar de numar atitudinea
si a ajuns acolo unde trebuia să ajungă: la Garda de Fier”] (Axa, 15 Oct. 1933;1). By
issue twenty-four, Axa had become so Iron-Guard-associated that the government
shut it down along with other right-wing periodicals in its crackdown on the Iron
Guard responsible for the assassination of Prime Minister I.G. Duca.
When Axa came back as a paper with a new staff in 1941 under the National
Legionary government, it bore the unambiguous subtitle: “newspaper of politi-
cal struggle, legionary doctrine, information and reporting [ziar de luptă politică,
doctină legionară, informaţie şi reportaj]” (Axa, 1 Jan. 1941; 1). This new series of
Axa had little in common with the paper that had ceased publication eight years
earlier, but the Legionaries in power wished to reconnect with what they perceived
as their beginnings. Mihai Polihroniade, executed in 1938, was named the paper’s
“ctitor,” a Romanian word meaning “founder,” but imbued with a religious sense.
Once Axa’s shift was under way in 1932, Mihail Polihroniade also published
his own positions more clearly in Crainic’s Calendarul and in Pământul strămoşesc,
an official paper of the Legionary Movement/Iron Guard. Polihroniade portrayed
the movement as innovative, but enjoying only feeble support from intellectuals.
For Polihroniade, the movement was the underdog of all political parties: “The
Guard does not have a collection of patented intellectuals that any respectable
party displays with pride in the showcase of its marketplace booth [“ ‘Garda’ nu
posedă colecţia de ‘intelectuali’ patentaţi pe care orice partid ce se respectă o ţine cu fală
în galantarul tarabei lui]” (“Tot Garda de Fier” 6).14 Although it lacked glitzy
intellectual support, Polihroniade nevertheless stated that the movement had the
support of more modest intellectuals whose young age had made them reluctant
to parade in the public sphere. And Polihroniade then reminded the readers that
most members of the Legionary Movement were under twenty-five years old
(“Tot Garda de Fier” 6). Polihroniade’s remarks expressed the image he wanted
to convey of the Legionary Movement in 1932: it was made up mostly of young
people and it was still in search of big intellectual names. The invitation was thus
made for intellectuals of the “young generation” to find their home in Codreanu’s
84 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 3

Legionary movement because young intellectuals needed the movement and the
movement needed them.
Detailed and comprehensive chronologies of the Legionary Movement/Iron
Guard have yet to be published, but the first political success of the Legionary
Movement coming from Axa was the enrollment in the movement of Polihroniade
himself along with his co-editor-in-chief, Ioan Victor Vojen. According to recent
studies on police surveillance files, Polihroniade and Vojen were initiated into
the movement just weeks after Axa’s first issue (Ţurcanu 186). Polihroniade and
Vojen also began the first Legionary “nest” for Bucharest intellectuals. According
to the police surveillance files, the nest bore the telling name Axa (Ţurcanu 186).
“Young generation” founder Mircea Eliade’s own connections to the Legion-
ary movement/Iron Guard were not directly tributary to Axa but to the philosophy
professor Nae Ionescu who began supporting the movement in 1933, after Axa’s
shift. On the contrary, in 1932–1933, the Axa staff generally found that Eliade
was keeping too great a distance from national politics. It reprinted an article of
his from another newspaper where he spoke in favor of “Romanianism,” (“A nu
mai fi român” 5) but highlighted that his publishing career until then had been
full of digressions. The editorial expressed uncertainty as to whether Eliade would
continue to apply himself and be “subordinate” to Romanian realities or move on
to another caprice (“Convertirea d-lui Mircea Eliade la românism” 5). The notion
of being “subordinate” to Romanian realities clearly indicates the traditionalist
and nationalist position that the Axa editors overtly advocated.

IONESCO’S RESISTANCE
For the first (and more mainstream) issue of Axa, Eugène Ionesco penned the
literary column. Already in this issue, Ionesco’s column stood in sharp contra-
diction with the aesthetic views of other contributors. Ionesco’s work was in dis-
cord with the Axa program piece authored by Nichifor Crainic. Where, as seen
above, Crainic praised the newspaper genre, Ionesco denigrated the very medium
through which he was expressing himself: “In other words, I would like you to
understand that I sense perfectly the provisional and the journalistic ephemeral
quality of the columns I am going to write” [“Cu alte cuvinte: vreu să înţelegeţi că
am sentimentul perfect al provizoratului şi al efemerităţii jurnalistice a cronicelor ce vor
veni”] (“Cronica literară” 5). Where Crainic saw the Axa endeavor as serious and
constructive, Ionesco questioned the possibility of such seriousness, just as did
other movements like Dada elsewhere in Europe during and after World War I.
Ionesco’s first article for Axa was in many ways a total misfit with the medium
in which it appeared. The editorial team tacked the heading “Pro Domo” to his
article — a paratextually misleading label since Ionesco’s article was precisely
against “home” or “patriotic” literature and for the opening of Romanian literature
to foreign literary currents.15 This first article reviewed the young writer Lucian
Boz’s book on the masterful nineteenth-century Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu.
In his review, Ionesco argued that Boz was not writing a work of aesthetics, but
Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism 85

rather one of ethnic sociology or ethnic psychology. For Ionesco, the ethnic ele-
ment in literature could never be prescribed as a set of ethnic values to be included
in literary creations. It could at best be described on occasion. To complete the
incongruity with the medium, Ionesco’s article shared a page with an article in
praise of Adolf Hitler, who in 1932 had not yet become chancellor. If, perhaps
surprisingly, this mismatch of article and journal did not hinder Ionesco from
publishing again in the following issues of Axa, this is likely due to the fact that
he responded with humor at the absurd situation.
Ionesco’s contributions to the second and third issues of Axa poked fun at the
newspaper journalists who took themselves too seriously. In issue two, Ionesco
gave absurd reviews of the press using serious newspaper jargon: “Ulysses,” wrote
Ionesco, “is a young [generation] journal that is substantial and varied. Its fourth
number, which will be out at the end of the month, will be a surprise [Ulise este o
revistă de tineri foarte consistentă şi variată. Numarul patru, care va apare la sfârşitul
lunii curente, va fi o surpriză]” (“Vitrină” [10 Nov.] 7; emphasis added). The jargon
here served to misinform. Ionesco showed that one could put serious language
to the service of stating anything, even the obvious. Humor and word plays also
characterized his literary notes for Axa, as they would later his theatrical creations.
A journal named “The Fist” was ironically evaluated as a “weak journal” (Ionesco,
“Vitrină” [27 Nov.] 4). Ionesco wittily reviewed Mircea Eliade’s literary work as
one written “for the personal relaxation of the author and for the fatigue of the
readers [pentru odihna sa personală şi pentru ca să obosească cititorii]” (“Vitrină” [27
Nov.] 5).
Ionesco used his column in Axa to give voice to his literary theories, some of
which directly contradicted those of other contributors to the paper. An article in
the third issue of Axa argued in favor of ethnic music (Olteanu 2). Ionesco in his
column argued against using ethnic identity as part of literary criteria, and against
the idea of art as giving an expression to an ethnic content. This view opposed an
article published in Axa by Edgar Papu, advocating the “native spirit” [“specificul
autohton”] (2). Ionesco’s articles in Axa thus stood out for their non-conformism
to the rest of the paper’s content.
Ionesco did progressively question the company he kept on the Axa staff and
expressed in print his desire to go elsewhere. By issue four, Ionesco announced his
forthcoming study on the poet Ion Barbu but showed incertitude as to whether
Axa would be the place where he would publish it. Ionesco’s brief but significant
text read: “The literary correspondent of this paper will begin to publish here or
in some other place his critical study on the poetry of Mr. Ion Barbu” [“Cronica-
rul literar al acestei foi va începe aici sau în altăparte, publicarea studiului său critic
despre ‘poezia d-lui Ion Barbu’ ”] (“[Untitled Note]” 8; italics added). This simple
declaration constituted Ionesco’s last words in a newspaper that had gone in less
than four issues from being a mainstream paper with right leanings to one that
openly endorsed the official Legionary Movement/Iron Guard newspaper Ances-
tral Ground [Pământul strămoşesc] and claimed to be the paper of the “nationalist
youth”.16 He would publish his study of Barbu only two years later in No.
86 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 3

Ionesco’s brief lines on the last page of Axa’s fourth issue lacked the dramatic
effect of a coup de théâtre and went unnoticed even by the editors of the anthology
of Ionesco’s Romanian journalism, War with Everyone [Război cu toată lumea],
who did not include this text. Were these words too little and, in this case, too
early — December 1932 — to be considered real resistance to fascism?
There are several arguments for reconsidering their importance. First, Ionesco
himself ascribed importance to his departure from Axa and revisited this episode
both in No and on another occasion. In No, he describes briefly but overtly his
struggles with Axa’s new orientation after the first issues. He states that he could
not stay but left the paper for “reasons of principle” [“din divergenţă de principiu”]
(Nu 104), despite the position that Axa gave him and despite being asked for book
reviews by writers such as Camil Petrescu (Nu 91). Elsewhere he develops these
laconic remarks by stating that Axa’s problem was the subservience of intellectu-
als to politics.17 Next, the relief of Ionesco’s decision can be measured against the
quantity of other young contributors who had not originally favored the extreme
right and who nonetheless stayed on at Axa after the editorial shift. Ionesco’s
good friend Arşavir Acterian continued to write for Axa beyond these first signs
of political metamorphosis in issue four, taking over some of Ionesco’s functions.
The young philosopher Constantin Noica joined Axa in issue three as the paper
was moving right and continued on the staff.
Finally, although much ink has been spilled about the meaning of Ionesco’s
play Rhinoceros and about the events to which the central allegory alludes, without
claiming to answer these questions, it is interesting to note some resemblances
with the Axa editorial shift that could have also inspired Ionesco. First, the short
time of transformation resembles the two-month reorientation of the Axa paper.
Commenting on his friends in Bucharest who advocated fascism, Ionesco wrote:
I gave them between four to six weeks to definitely succumb, to yield to temptation,
to the temptation of power, and find excuses for their fear, for letting their arms
fall to their sides and not fighting anymore, for bowing within themselves to all the
reasons of others and becoming like the others, with great relief. They became men
possessed. (Present Past 118)

Axa’s own reorientation hardly took longer than six weeks. Elsewhere Ionesco
claimed that it took between three weeks to two months from the first affinities
toward the Iron Guard to full adherence.
All my anti-Fascist friends have become absolute, fanatic Fascists because in the
beginning they gave in on one little detail. I am well acquainted with this phenom-
enon: the incubation period has begun; these are the first symptoms. It takes them
between three weeks and two months to become part of the system. (Present Past 80)

Furthermore, just as in the play, those close to the protagonist Béren­

ger — including his best friend — become rhinoceroses, just so those intel-
lectuals at Axa who joined the fascist Legionary Movement/Iron Guard were
Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism 87

acquaintances of Ionesco and sometimes his own friends, like Arşavir Acterian.
Of course, Ionesco had other occasions besides Axa for coming into contact with
Legionaries which he sometimes called “rhinoceros” in his diary (Present Past
118), but the Axa case presents the similarities of the length of time and the
unexpected proximity of those involved: fellow collaborators and friends.
Given the incompatibility of Ionesco’s modernist and cosmopolitan views
with Axa’s shift to the ultra-traditionalist and nationalist Legionary Movement/
Iron Guard, Ionesco’s decision to leave for reasons of principle after issue four rep-
resents an active act of resistance. Less than one year after Ionesco’s resignation,
the Iron Guard would assassinate the Romanian Prime Minister, and Axa would
be one of the newspapers shut down in the government crackdown against the
Iron Guard, which would continue down the path of violence. In the two-month
period that Ionesco contributed to Axa, he both affirmed his own aesthetic posi-
tions and resisted with humor as the tone of the paper radicalized. To the serious
tone of Crainic and other contributors Ionesco responded with frivolity, even
mocking the newspaper genre in which he was writing. He opposed the political
trends of elevating race and ethnicity as criteria for judgment by advocating the
liberation of art from non-artistic values. Later horrors of the war would eclipse
this first attempt by the Legionary Movement to attract young intellectuals, but
Ionesco would continue years later in post-war France to express the same stances
against art’s enslavement to ideology that he expressed in his Romanian interwar
journalism.
Eugène Ionesco’s writings from the 1930s, particularly his literary columns in
the newspaper Axa, witness to his unusual and humorous rejection of totalitarian-
ism that foreshadowed his theatrical works. Before becoming a chief representa-
tive of the theater of the absurd (along with Samuel Beckett and Arthur Adamov),
and before some of his friends and acquaintances developed fascist sympathies,
Ionesco found himself in a dramatic situation at Axa when this newspaper shifted
to the extreme right. He responded first with humor, then with refusal to contrib-
ute, thus showing that his preference for the posture of derision that has a long
and deep resonance in his life. The playwright later preferred qualifying his plays
as the theatre of derision rather than of the absurd.
While interpreting Ionesco’s theatrical works without reference to his life
remains a legitimate enterprise and proves the universality to which the play-
wright aspired, examining Ionesco’s experience at Axa sheds light on the public
intellectual that Ionesco was for most of his life and on the complexities of study-
ing his generation. In 1960, when a journalist asked him about the nightmare
world depicted in his plays, Ionesco blamed the world around him for giving him
nightmares, thus suggesting that his fiction was inspired by reality. He went on
to say that the very act of denouncing the nightmare may free the world of them
(“Interview with Eugène Ionesco,” 14 March 1960). A truly modern writer, Iones-
co’s final resistance to real nightmares may have been his fiction, but he equally
challenged real fascist ideology in his non-fiction literary criticism of the 1930s.
88 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 3

Acknowledgements
This article was made possible by funds granted to the author through a Fellowship at the Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The statements made
and views expressed, however, are solely the responsibility of the author.

Notes
1. In current studies on Romania, the term “young generation” is used alongside terms like the
“1927 generation” and the “new generation,” and still others. The lack of consensus reflects both the
elasticity and elusiveness of the subject. Matei Calinescu in the United States and Marta Petreu in
Romania have employed the term “1927 Generation,” grounding the generation in the year Mircea
Eliade published “Spiritual Itinerary,” but the year 1927 is also ambiguously the year of the Legion-
ary Movement’s founding. The term “new generation,” employed by Irina Livezeanu, expresses well
the idea of the rupture of this generation with previous ones and is sometimes used in texts from
the time period. The term “Criterion generation” has been applied retrospectively to this generation
and refers to the influential but short-lived cultural association operational from 1932 to 1934 to
which many elites belonged. Nevertheless, a generation consciousness began before Criterion and
lasted long after the formal end of the organization. I use the more common term from the 1930s of
“young generation” [generaţia tânără], which marks the opposition with the old generation which
it characteristically antagonized. Recently, scholars such as Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine and Mac
Linscott Ricketts have used this term.
2. All translations are mine except where otherwise noted.
3. For a discussion of Ionesco’s Romanian poems see Roman 63.
4. See E. Ionesco, “Jurnal [Journal]” in Război II, 88.
5. See E. Ionesco, “Proust încorporat [Proust incorporated]” in Război I, 37–38.
6. See, for example, E. Ionesco, “Dintr-un ‘Fals Itinerar Critic’ [From a ‘False Critical Itinerary’].”
in Război I, 57–59.
7. See note 1.
8. The double name indicates two of the best known labels used by Corneliu Codreanu’s often
outlawed organization.
9. 3,181 titles published from 1780 to 1918. See Academia Republicii Socialiste România, vol. 2.
10. Some individual efforts to catalog periodicals have produced results, but these focused on
specific groups of publications. Ion Hangiu published a dictionary of the Romanian literary press,
the pre-1989 edition of which omitted the extreme-right titles that he reinserted in more recent
editions. Hary Kuller and Emanuel Aczél have documented Jewish publications, often omitted from
Hangiu’s work before and after 1989. Georgeta Răduică has focused on the years up to 1918. All
these specific bibliographies shed some lights on the vibrant publishing world of the 1930s, without
encompassing its totality.
11. Clark, citing police surveillance files, states that by March 1932, Crainic’s Calendarul had become
an official Iron Guard paper.
12. Translation of “spiritul autohton” in Livezeanu 421.
13. See Police note from 16 Oct. 1932.
14. This article was first printed in Crainic’s Calendarul, 17 Nov. 1932.
15. Gelu Ionescu and the editors of Ionesco’s Romanian journalism anthology mistakenly take “Pro
domo” as the article’s title.
Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism 89

16. So reads an advertisement for Axa on the last page of the 22 December 1932 issue.
17. See E. Ionesco, “Cum trebuie să fie casa scriitorilor?” in Război II, 70.

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