Emil Cioran

Author profile

born

in Răşinari, Romania

April 08, 1911

died

June 20, 1995

gender

male

website

http://www.cioran.eu/

genre

Philosophy

influences

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Thomas C. Schelling, Henri Bergson, Georg Sim...more

About this author

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Born in 1911 in Rasinari, 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)...more Born in 1911 in Rasinari, 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(less)

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Average rating: 4.19 · 4,941 ratings · 325 reviews · 68 distinct works · Similar authors

	On the Heights of Despair by Emil Cioran, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Translator) 4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 avg rating — 883 ratings — published 1933 — 19 editions	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 Trouble with Being Born by Emil Cioran, Richard Howard (Translator) 4.29 of 5 stars 4.29 avg rating — 560 ratings — published 1973 — 20 editions	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 Cioran, Richard Howard (Translator) 4.31 of 5 stars 4.31 avg rating — 583 ratings — published 1949 — 19 editions	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 by Emil Cioran, Richard Howard (Translator), Susan Sontag (Introduction) 4.22 of 5 stars 4.22 avg rating — 359 ratings — published 1956 — 13 editions	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 Cioran, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Translator) 4.18 of 5 stars 4.18 avg rating — 296 ratings — published 1937 — 13 editions	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 Cioran, إميل سيوران, آدم فتحي (ترجمة) 3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 avg rating — 257 ratings — published 2003	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 gandurilor 4.18 of 5 stars 4.18 avg rating — 227 ratings — published 1991 — 8 editions	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 by Emil Cioran, Richard Howard (Translation) 4.13 of 5 stars 4.13 avg rating — 204 ratings — published 1960 — 11 editions	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 Cioran, إميل سيوران, محمد علي اليوسفي (ترجمة وتقديم) 3.7 of 5 stars 3.70 avg rating — 182 ratings — published 2008	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 by Emil Cioran, Richard Howard (Translator) 4.27 of 5 stars 4.27 avg rating — 226 ratings — published 1987 — 14 editions	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 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

215 people liked it

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Emil Cioran

tags: suicide, writing

147 people liked it

“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

128 people liked it

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Exceptional Books: Top 100: XX century authors	4	114	Oct 05, 2011 08:44pm
Around the World ...: Romania	8	171	Sep 09, 2012 12:06pm

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