Eugene Ionesco Biography
Eugene Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania, in 1909. At the age of two, he was taken to France where he remained until 1925. Returning to Romania, he studied Romanian, which he did not know, and taught French for some time. He also started collaborating with magazines and newspapers in Bucharest. During this period he published a volume of poems entitled Elegii pentru fiinţe mici ("Elegies for little beings") in 1931 and a series of paradoxical articles collected in the volume Nu ("No") in 1934, in which he criticized and reconstructed the myth of greatness of the major contemporary Romanian poets and writers.
In 1938, Ionesco obtained a scholarship to France and settled there permanently. He found work in a publishing house specializing in legal works in Paris. In 1950 he wrote La cantatrice chauve, a one-act anti-play, followed in 1951 by La leçon and in 1952 by Les chaises. Thanks to these works, Ionesco has been recognized as one of the most valid exponents of the theater of the absurd, a movement that expresses the fundamental themes of metaphysical anguish and the irrationality of the human condition through the abandonment of logical and rational means of expression.
In his subsequent output, Ionesco continued to explore similar themes through an exasperated exploration of language. Among his most representative works are Le roi se meurt, Le piéton de l'air, La soif et la faim, Jeux de massacre, Macbett and L'homme aux valises. Ionesco defended the validity of his theater in numerous essays and polemical articles published above all in the Nouvelle revue française and in Arts, and then collected in the volume Notes et contre-notes in 1963.
In addition to the theatre, Ionesco also published in two subsequent volumes a sort of spiritual diary entitled Journal en miettes (1967) and Présent passé, passé présent (1968), as well as a novel entitled Le solitaire in 1973, from which he based the comedy Ce formidable brothel! in the same year. Ionesco became a member of the Académie française in 1970.
