Night and Day Terrors: The Discourse of the Exile of the Romanian Surrealist Vanguard in the Face of War

Abstract

The cultural decentering of Romania is well known and deeply studied by its philosophers at least since the nineteenth century. This small country, with its language of Latin ancestry, its architecture and political - cultural structures derived at the same time from France and Italy, is embedded in the midst of nations – even of Slavic powers – and of the imperial political vastness represented by Hungary. Such decentering would, in a sense, propel a vanguard, notably composed of Jews, to structure a broad cultural apocalypse since the beginning of the twentieth century – a revolutionary project that would affect not only Romania but all of Europe. Such a cultural apocalypse, it is necessary to emphasize, was amplified enough by not having roots or forms of identification that arrested him to a country, a landscape. Our article will address the late developments of this project, when the authors of the “Infra-Noir” group faced their exile discourse, the genocidal totalitarianism(s) that successively dominated Romania and much of Europe.