Eugene Ionesco. Biography
Talk about yourself is much more convincing and truthful than talking about others. Speaking of myself, I’m talking about everyone. A true poet does not lie, does not disingenuate, does not want to recruit anyone, because the true poet does not deceive, but invents, and this is quite different.
Eugene Ionesco
The well-known French playwright of Romanian origin Eugene Ionesco lived a long, busy life, in which there were both fame and recognition, and misunderstanding and rejection. His plays provoked heated discussions that determined the fate of the dramatic art of the twentieth century. In the opinion of many theater experts, Ionesco’s work can be regarded as an attempt to create a “ferocious, unrestrained theater – the scream theater”, so he is called the real king of the absurd.
“To live life means to survive the world in its own way, in a different way, unexpectedly,” the writer considered. Did he succeed in this? Reply
He was born on December 26, 1909 in the town of Slatina, which is 150 kilometers from the Romanian capital Bucharest. However, according to some sources, the year of the birth of Eugene Ionesco is 1912. The confusion was due to the fact that in the early 50s of the last century one of the critics greeted in the literature a new generation of young authors, among whom Ionesco was not. After reading this statement, the playwright, whose name has already thundered all over Europe, decided to lie, taking away from his age 3 years.
Almost immediately after the birth of Eugene, the family moved to Paris, and the French’s first language became French. So, throughout life Ionesco will live and create in two countries, and call both Romanian and French relatives. When he was 7 years old, the First World War began. Father returned to Romania and went to the front. After the war, and without waiting for his father and finding him dead, the mother with Eugene and his sister moved to the remote place, in the French village
After a while it turned out that the father of the future playwright is alive, but he has a new family. Thanks to his rank – the chief inspector in the Bucharest police – the father achieved custody of the children. At the age of thirteen, Ionesco returned to Romania and lived in Bucharest until the age of twenty-six. However, relations with the new family and stepmother did not develop in Eugene. Father saw the future engineer in the boy, and the young Ionesco had a passionate desire to study literature.
In 1928, the 19-year-old Ionesco made his debut as a poet: his works were published in the collection of “Notes of the Parrot”, which was published daily and was popular due to its miniature format. In 1929-1933, Eugene studied at the University of Bucharest. He was preparing to become a teacher of French and literature. For himself, he saw a special benefit in this, because for several years after moving to Romania, the French language began to be quietly forgotten. And although Eugene could understand and correctly speak French, his ability to create in this language was gradually lost. Beginning in 1929, he began to teach French. Even in his student years, Eugene proved himself as a talented literary critic. His articles and notes were published in newspapers and magazines in Romania and France. In 1934 Ionesco wrote a cheeky, in a sarcastic manner, the pamphlet “No!”, where he severely criticized the work of Romanian writers. The pamphlet provoked a huge scandal in the Romanian literary world. As the writer later recalled, the main thing in this period of his life was a sense of conflict with the environment, a clear rejection of the “fashionable” ideology of Nazism, which flourished in the early 1930s among the Romanian intelligentsia. In the soul of the young writer, a powerful protest against any ideological pressure, the desire to control the emotions and actions of man.
The Second World War put an end to Ionesco’s peaceful life in Romania. Thanks to friends, he and his family had difficulty in traveling to France. Since 1938, he has lived permanently in Paris. Carefully watching the European society, the writer comes to a conclusion about the inability of realism and, first of all, the drama to bring something new into modern life, to give a new impetus to reconstruction, spiritual revival. “… Every realistic theater is a rogue theater, even especially if the author is sincere. The genuine sincerity comes from the furthest, from the depths of the irrational, unconscious,” he said. Eugene feels an urgent need to create something new. In 1950, Ionesco’s first play “Bald Singer” was published. Strangely enough, the origin of this work contributed to the writer’s studies in English. Here is how he himself said about it: “I conscientiously copied the phrases taken from the English textbook.” Reading them carefully, I learned not English, but amazing truths: for example, that in the week of seven days. “This is what I knew before Or “floor below, ceiling above”, which I also knew, but probably never thought about it seriously or perhaps forgot, but it seemed to me as indisputable as the rest, and just as true.. . “. This play, as if woven from incomprehensible words and ragged, disjointed phrases resembling a phrase book of a foreign language, in fact, in a rigid and sarcastic manner, demonstrated the problems of a society that “went crazy”, experiencing the “collapse of reality”. “The feeling of unreality… I wanted to convey with the help of my characters,
The premiere of the performance took place on May 11, 1950 in the Paris “Theater of the Midnight Eaters”. It is interesting that such a character as a bald singer is not on the list of characters. Originally, the work was called “The Englishman without a matter”. About how the name “Bald Singer” appeared, there is a whole legend. During the rehearsal of the play, one of the actors accidentally made a reservation: instead of the words “too light singer” he said “too bald singer.” The reservation seemed to the playwright so funny and bright that he decided to fix it in the script and use it as the title of the production. The French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre so appreciated the play: “If you start with the Bald Singer, then there is a very sharp idea of the absurdity of the language, so much that you do not want to talk anymore. His characters do not talk, but imitate the grotesque mechanism of jargon. Ionesco “from the inside” devastates the French language, leaving only exclamations, interjections, curses. His theater is a dream of language. “
After “Bald Singer” appeared plays “Lesson”, “Chairs”, “Victims of Debt”, “New Tenant”, “Future in the Eggs”, “Rhinoceroses” and others. However, the viewer does not hasten to the plays of Ionesco’s plays, but, on the contrary, is outraged by the bad taste and illogicality of his works. In 1957, Eugene Ionesco wrote about his path to fame: “It’s been seven years since my first play was played in Paris, it was a modest success, a mediocre scandal. In my second play, the failure was a little louder, the scandal somewhat larger And only in 1952, in connection with the “Chairs”, events began to take a wider turn. Every night in the theater there were eight people very dissatisfied with the play, but the noise caused by it was heard by a much larger number of people in Paris, in the whole of France, he flew to the German border. And after the appearance of my third, fourth, fifth… eighth plays, the rumor of their failures began to spread in giant steps. Perturbation crossed the Channel… Passed to Spain, Italy, spread in Germany, moved to ships in England… I think that if failure will spread this way, it will turn into a triumph. “
Ionesco comes to world fame, he writes several plays a year. The world recreated in the plays of the playwright is like a distorted mirror, which, however, very clearly and logically reveals the vices, immorality and spiritual decline of society. In 1970, the writer becomes a member of the French Academy of Sciences. On his account, there were already a lot of plays, as well as collections of short stories, essays and biographical memoirs. In 1974, Ionesco created the famous novel The Hermit, in which he asserts the idea that it is natural for every person to think about the world, society and his destiny, and to abnormally allow himself to live simply unconsciously.
On March 28, 1994, Eugene Ionesco died as a result of a severe and painful illness. But his works remain relevant today, because he, like no other, best suits our time, the time of madness and chaos. “In order to convey the cruelty of life, literature must be a thousand times more cruel, more terrible,” Eugene Ionesco convinces his readers. You can agree with the writer or refute his thought when you read the play “Rhinoceroses”.
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