When the horrors brought upon humankind by humans themselves in the XXth century transformed reality into an unbearable enviroment, many sought comfort in the realm of the absurd. Eugen Ionesco (1909 – 1994) was one of its masters.

“Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible”. – Eugen Ionesco

Eugen Ionesco was born in Slatina (Olt County) in 1909, although he often claimed that he was born in 1912, as he wanted to make a connection to the year of Ion Luca Caragiale’s death (1912), whose great admirer he was. Others consider that he made himself younger because he wanted to really fit a critic’s favorable opinion about some young writers, who included him and Samuel Beckett.

His mother had French citizenship and, when he was four, he was taken by his parents to Paris, where his father attended the Law University. When the First World War began, his father returned to Romania, while he, his mother and his younger sister, Marilina, remained in France. Those were happy times for young Ionesco, who even wrote a “heroic” play and a comic scenario, while he was in the countryside.

Unfortunately, his father was not very fond of his family. He was supposed to have died on the front, but he actually never fought, but, instead, he developed an ability to side with those who held the power, no matter the political regime. Through his influence, he got a divorce, remarried without his family in France not even knowing and obtained his children’s custody, Eugen and Marilina, who returned to Romania in 1922.

The relationship with his father and his new family were very bad and he moved from their house in 1926. Some say that this troubled period of his life decisively influenced his literary personality.

Ionesco attended the college Sfantul Sava in Bucharest, passed the graduation exam at the Secondary School in Craiova in 1928 and followed the courses of the Faculty of Letters from Bucharest, where he studied French Literature.  That year also witnessed his literary debut, in Bilete de Papagal (Parrot Notes), a magazine famous for its tiny format. In 1934, his collection of articles entitled “Nu!” (“No!”), although very controversial through their iconoclast ideas and criticism of the established Romanian writers, gained him a prize from the Royal Foundations Publishing House. In 1935, he dared mocking Victor Hugo, in Hugoliade, a satirical biography of the great French writer.  In 1936, he married Rodica Burileanu, who he had made acquaintance with in the early ‘30s, and worked as a French teacher in Cernavoda. In 1938, he earned a scholarship in France, but he was forced to return to Romania when the Second World War began.

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