The famous Romanian philosopher and essayist Mihai Shora died at the age of 106, his wife Luiza Palanchuk-Shora reported on her Facebook page.

“Boy,

you were pure happiness: not just a beautiful person, but the very Beauty, faith, hope and love, as the apostolic word says. And I will never be grateful enough for everything you have given me over the course of nearly two decades. You knocked me off the rails of my destiny and tied me irreversibly and harmoniously to yours, with such grace that only you were capable of and that not many earthlings can comprehend with mind or heart.

I still don’t know what tomorrow will look like and what will happen next. It is beyond my power to accept. Some people deserve to live forever—not just in heaven, where you’ll surely be standing, but on that blue dot, a blob of water and hum floating in space, on which eight billion other people live—but none like you… they live together, fight or love each other, fight or support each other.

It’s cold without you, baby.

today”

A representative of the Laws of Justice protests

Mihai Shora was selected by Politico in 2018 as an anti-establishment public figure who can influence the future of the country and the future of Europe.

He has become a public figure associated with anti-government protests, often attending street protests denouncing projects with catastrophic environmental potential or changes to justice laws that he says could undermine Romania’s anti-corruption efforts.

The first years of life, education

Mihai Shor, the second son of priest Meletii Shor and Ana (née Bohdan), studied at primary school in Izvin commune, Timiş county, then in Timişoara (1923–1927), graduating from Kostiantyn Diakonovych-Loga secondary school. in the same city (1927–1934), where he studied philosophy and classical languages, Latin and Greek.

He continued his philosophy studies at the University of Bucharest (1934–1938). His teachers were Nae Ionescu and Mircea Vulcanescu, and Mircea Eliade was his seminar assistant for three years. Mihai Shore received a scholarship from the French Institute in Bucharest in 1938 (at the same time as Eugène Ionesco). In 1940, he left German-occupied Paris and arrived in Grenoble, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on the work of Blaise Pascal under the supervision of Jacques Chevalier.

From the anti-Nazi struggle and joining the French Communist Party to the “Library for All”

When the entry of the Germans into Paris was inevitable, Sora went to the south of France and after long wanderings settled in Grenoble. They remain here until the liberation of France in 1944, witnessing the horrors of Hitler’s dictatorship. Driven by militant anti-fascism, Mihai Shora joined the Communist Party of France.

In an interview book edited by Leonid Dragomir, Mihai Shora explains his political choices since then:

“I had a long discussion with my student friends about the Stalinist trials of the 1930s, I knew exactly where their soles were, but during the war there was (at least it seemed to me) some real democratization, open churches, etc. In the end, everything turned out to be nothing more than a maneuver by which Stalin wanted to gain a popular platform; in the Union press, however, everything was presented as a real democratization, as a softening of the regime. An irreversible process, I thought. I didn’t realize that until I got here. And I think that if I had stayed in France, I too, like all French intellectuals, could have frozen in the position of a left intellectual – even a communitarian.”

In 1945–1948, he worked as a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. He made his Gallimard debut with Du dialogue intérieur. Fragment d’une anthropologie métaphysique in 1947.

The book had an echo among the great French philosophers. He refused French citizenship, which was offered to him immediately after the appearance of the book at Gallimard.

In 1948, he went to Romania to visit his parents, but the authorities did not allow him to return to France, where his wife and two children were waiting for him. Later they had to follow him. Forced to remain in Romania after 1948, he did not publish anything for 20 years.

He worked as a reference specialist at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the ministry of Ana Pauker (1948–1951), then as a department head at the Publishing House of Foreign Languages ​​(1951–1954) and as chief editor at the State. Publishing House of Literature and Art (1954–1969), where he has the editorial credit of founding the new BPT series (acronym “Library for All”).

• Reference: Some observations on the “case” of Mihai Shora

After the publication of the Anthology of Interwar Poetry, which included such poets as Ničifor Krajnić and Radu Gir, former political prisoners, as well as from exile Aron Kotruš, Štefan Bachiu and Horija Stamata, he was immediately removed and sent as a simple editor of the Encyclopedic Publishing House.

“Making Sora Pauker’s deputy is cheap rhetoric. Antena3 outrage, criticism or Facebook-type radicalism. Except for a short period when he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an official, the man worked only in publishing houses, initiated collections, published other people’s books, including some of the ideological and political motives that were previously on the list. He worked neither in the propaganda apparatus nor in the Securitate,” explains historian Dorin Dobrincu on Contributors.ro.

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