COURAGE

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This is a manuscript of an article written in 1954, in which Ciliga critiqued  Tito's policy on the national question. Ciliga believed that the national question which tore apart the first Yugoslavia had not been solved in the new Yugoslavia, either, and that Serbia was again predominant over the other Yugoslav republics. The federal state model, which Tito and the communists propagated in the post-war constitution, never took hold, and that in reality, strong centralism existed, not allowing more liberal and autonomous development in the other republics. Ciliga asserted that despite the  socialist revolution, the national question continued to permanently ravage the unity of Yugoslavia. In fact, a symmetric federation declared by Tito and the Communist Party did not exist at all,  but there was Serbian hegemony in the constellation of federal members. This was also an obstacle to the creation of the Confederation of the South Slavs after the war, since the Bulgarian presence in this league would have threaten this Serbian predominance.

In this letter Emil Cioran reacts to the news received from his parents who had written to him about the conviction of his brother Aurel Cioran for his involvement in the Legion of the Archangel Michael. He was to spend the following seven years in political prisons. In this context, Emil Cioran approaches in a critical manner the former involvement of them both (he and his brother) in the Legionary Movement. The importance of the text consists in the insights it gives us into the process of critical evaluation of his former allegiance to the Romanian fascist movement. Emil Cioran expresses his disappointment that his brother continued to support the Legion after 1945. He states that this political movement “led only to the unhappiness of its followers” and mentions that he had warned his brother about the possible consequences of his involvement in the Legion. Finally, he ends his argument by saying that: “This is the consequence of an absurd faithfulness.”  Nevertheless, Emil Cioran had been a supporter of the Legion at least until 1941. Cioran’s critical evaluation of his former political sympathies was a process that occurred gradually after 1945 (Zarifopol-Johnston, 10). Besides the valuable information to be found in it, the letter has literary value in itself. The literary style characteristic of Emil Cioran is recognisable in some sentences of the letter, such as: “Life is a sinister comedy written by the Devil.”
Taking into account the tragic situation of his family, Emil Cioran felt embarrassed to speak about his editorial success in France and he starts the second part of the letter by presenting his news as a consolation for his parents. This news concerned the publication of his first book in French, entitled Précis de décomposition. This book was published at Gallimard Publishing House in 1949 and a year later it received the Rivarol literary award. This part of the letter also reflects the difficulties encountered by a foreign writer in his endeavours to be integrated in the French contemporary literature milieu and to write in a foreign language.

Ce pot învăţa în timp de o zi (What I can learn in a day) is a three-page essay written in March 1927, when Emil Cioran was sixteen years old. The manuscript reflects the sources of Emil Cioran’s intellectual formation and the way the experiences of his youth shaped his personality. The text is written by hand in black ink. On the first page of the document there is a comment by his brother Aurel Cioran with the question: “Has he published it [the manuscript]?” and his answer: “Probably, not.”
The essay offers an insight into Cioran’s inner world as a student of Gheorghe Lazăr High School in Sibiu, Romania. The text gives us a picture of the everyday concerns of the teenage Emil Cioran. Although for the young Emil Cioran, born in Răşinari, a traditional village in the Carpathian Mountains, Sibiu offered the first experience of a cosmopolitan cultural milieu, the bourgeois character of the Transylvanian town made him at the same time feel restricted. Starting from this feeling he questions himself about his capacity to overcome the routine of everyday life and the moral values of a petty-bourgeois social milieu. One of the limits that the teenage Cioran has to face is that of the severe programme of the high school. This makes him to compare the school with a “boring refrain” and with “bad prose” (Manuscript, 3). Consequently, his interest in school is pale in comparison with independent reading. He ends his essay by highlighting the contrasts and paradoxes of his everyday life, a topic which he was to develop later in many of his mature essays.

The cover of the classroom samizdat  was designed for the matriculation of students from class 4K in 1989. It parodies the exceptional case of the Educational Centre for Languages, which retained the teaching of Latin and Greek despite the Šuvar school reforms by using the very popular comic strip Asterix.

The cartoon paraphrases the first sentences of the popular comic: “In the year 1974 AD, all schools in Croatia were subject to the so-called Education Reform . All? Well, not entirely. One small school north of Andautonia [an ancient Roman town near Zagreb] has been mounting resistance to this reform persistently for years. This is a story about a generation of its dwellers…“

The victorious Roman eagle carries a flag with Šuvar's slogan “School and factory” and beneath it there is a plaque, which instead of the Latin SPQR (senatus populusque Romanus) carries the abbreviation for Yugoslavia, that is, SFRJ (Socijalistička Federativna Republika Jugoslavija).

The last poem in the samizdat is “Don't give up, our Classical School, don't give up, our youth,” which pays a tribute to the school's classical curriculum and its exceptional status (“Oh, our reformed Classical School/Hold on tight!/We know that it's not easy/in this world./In this world of strictly directed heads.”)