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Emil M. Cioran

Born

in Răşinari, Romania

April 08, 1911

Died

June 20, 1995

Genre

Philosophy

Influences

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Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest.

A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair). Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest.

A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).

Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.

After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive 'A Short History of Decay' (1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).

Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.

Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by Thomas Cousineau ...more

Combine Editions
Emil M. Cioran’s books

Average rating: 4.07 · 45,612 ratings · 4,992 reviews · 169 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Trouble With Being Born by Emil M. Cioran, Richard Howard (Translator) 4.11 avg rating — 9,040 ratings — published 1973 — 84 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	On the Heights of Despair by Emil M. Cioran, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Translator) 4.16 avg rating — 8,074 ratings — published 1934 — 65 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Short History of Decay by Emil M. Cioran, Richard Howard (Translator) 4.20 avg rating — 5,039 ratings — published 1949 — 78 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	المياه كلها بلون الغرق by Emil M. Cioran, إميل سيوران, آدم فتحي (Translator) 3.74 avg rating — 4,553 ratings — published 1952 — 62 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Temptation to Exist 4.10 avg rating — 2,082 ratings — published 1956 — 62 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Tears and Saints by Emil M. Cioran, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Translator) 4.11 avg rating — 2,056 ratings — published 1937 — 52 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	لو كان آدم سعيدًا by Emil M. Cioran, إميل سيوران, محمد علي اليوسفي (Translator) 3.66 avg rating — 2,013 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 1,678 ratings — published 1987 — 42 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	History and Utopia 3.92 avg rating — 1,460 ratings — published 1960 — 47 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Amurgul gândurilor 4.18 avg rating — 1,235 ratings — published 1940 — 27 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Emil M. Cioran (?)

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

tags: suicide

1357 likes

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Cioran

tags: suicide, writing

922 likes

“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”
― Emil Cioran

906 likes

See all Emil M. Cioran's quotes »

Polls

Nisan 2020 - Modern Klasik Okuması

Nisan ayında aşağıdaki kitaplardan hangisini grupla birlikte okumak istersiniz?

Körlük - José Saramago 1995, 339 sayfa

23 votes 25.8%

Dönüş- Andrei Platonov 1998, 168 sayfa

18 votes 20.2%

Çürümenin Kitabı - Emil M. Cioran 1949, 168 sayfa

14 votes 15.7%

Koleksiyoncu - John Fowles 1963, 304 sayfa

14 votes 15.7%

Solaris - Stanisław Lem 1961, 204 sayfa

12 votes 13.5%

Doktor Faustus - Thomas Mann 1947, 672 sayfa

8 votes 9.0%

89 total votes

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