Deník 1935-1944

When Mihail Sebastian started keeping a diary at the age of 28, he was already a well-known writer, playwright, literary critic and translator who was in the circle of important Romanian authors, including Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionescu, Camil Petrescu and E. M. Cioran. For ten years (1935-1944) he recorded his personal life, hobbies and creative intentions, along with the events that radically changed his position - the rise of Nazism, the anti-Semitic pogroms, the discrimination and murder of Jews in Romania, and the collaboration of most of his friends with the new regime. In a unique way, the diary chronicles the transformation of a successful writer into a Pariah, who realizes with resigned astonishment, but also with a sharp vision of reality, how his belief in friendship and intellectual and cultural values is lonely when confronted with the fact that he was born a Jew in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Mihail Sebastian survived the anti-Semitic terror in Romania and the fall of Hitler's Germany. However, he died shortly afterwards - in an accident on 29 May 1945 under the wheels of a Russian military car. The Diary was published in Romania only in 1996 (in the author's native country it became not only a literary but above all a social sensation), two years later it was published in French and in 2000 in English translation. "The book lives, it has a human soul, and at the same time it reveals all the monstrosity of the last century," Arthur Miller said of Sebastian's diaries.

Czech edition