Preface

Summary

There have been memoirs written by any number of politicians who have played a part in the unfolding of history and have thus felt the need to explain and justify the ideas and motives that stood at the foundation of their actions.

There have been memoirs written also by men of science, literature, and the arts to clarify their process of creation and have their work better understood. In the beginning there were Rousseau and Goethe, and the example they set was followed not only by Van Gogh, Gide, Thomas Mann, and Lucian Blaga but also by less important figures whom history, in all likelihood, will forget.

Exceptionally valuable, however, are notes written on the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci and Eminescu, which will be commented on throughout the centuries.

Testimonies—not just memoirs—about events and turmoil in a given era have also been written by eyewitnesses without great merit in political and cultural life, meant to facilitate the later judgment of history, which can be written sine ira et studio only when that era is over. This is the case with my modest person. And I am sure that this is the case with others who were the victims of Hitler and Stalin's dictatorships.

I felt the need to begin with the autobiography of my education—following the example of Professor Henry Adams of Harvard University—because a judgment on the century I lived in cannot be derived from my education, which started in my parents’ peasant house and in the school kept by the village, continued in the high schools in Blaj and Orăştie, and ended—only in its first part—at the University of Cluj, where I defended my degree and doctorate. For the second part of my education I went on to specialized studies in Germany, America, England, and France—in that order—which took almost as long as my studies in Cluj.

I didn't experience a feeling of discontinuity in my studies and education in foreign universities because, although the minds of my foreign instructors may have been more enlightened, their guiding principles were not that different from those in my country. Proof thereof that my fatherland's schools had, though younger and more modest, emerged within their century.