HSS II.

3 (2013)
DOI: 10.2478/hssr-2013-0015

The «clairvoyants des abîmes»: Cioran,

Reader of F.M. Dostoievsky
Sergio García Guillem*
University of Valencia, Spain

Abstract
The discovery of F.M. Dostoyevsky by young E. M. Cioran marks a turning
point for a better understanding of his first Romanian work and his later
production in French. His first work, Pe culmile disperării [On the Heights of
Despair] (1934) has a tragic breath, typically dostoyevskyan, which reminds us
of the tragical and sick conscience of the (anti)hero of his Notes from the
Underground (1864).

Keywords
Conscience, Sickness, Despair, Existence, Lucidity, Literature, Philosophy.

“I’ll join with black despair against my soul/

And to myself become an enemy”
(W. Shakespeare, Richard III)

“Le poète, conservateur des infinis visages du vivant”

(René Char, Fureur et Mystère)

Encounters in the underground: Cioran & Dostoyevsky1

“[…] Il me semble que tous les héros de Dostoïevski sont ainsi : il leur faut
trouver un vin qui étourdisse et captive leur soif de vie intense, il leur faut
dépasser les limites de l'homme, aller jusqu'aux confins, se brûler les ailes à un
poison quelconque, pourvu qu'il soit plus fort que l'homme : ange ou démon,
qu'importe ! Ils étouffent dans la carcasse que la nature leur a donnée, il leur faut
trouver autre chose […]”2.
                                                            
*
Faculty of Philosophy and Sciences of Education, University of Valencia, Avenida
Blanco Ibáñez 13, Nivel 4, Valencia, 46010, Spain ; s.garcia@latorredelvirrey.es
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These words, fruit of the correspondence between the Dominican friar

Marie-Dominique Molinié and his good friend, the French-Romanian
philosopher Emil Cioran, contain extremely interesting information for a
better comprehension of Dostoyevsky's literary work and, concretely, for a
better intrusion into the tragic soul of his prominent figures. The
metaphor of this framework that suffocates the nature of his heroes is
reflected in much clearer and diverse forms in the figure of “man from the
underground”, the tormented par excellence. It is thus important to
investigate this strange creature endowed with a tragic humanity, so present
throughout the pages of Notes from the Underground, out of the whole
polyphonic amalgam - to use a bakhtinian term3 - that Dostoyevsky offers
us in his novels; young Cioran might represent – as we will strive to prove
– the haughtiest and closest alter ego of this character. This short work,
divided in two parts, will reveal the strong literary and ideological evolution
of young Dostoyevsky, escaped from the Siberian captivity up to becoming
a mature Dostoyevsky worried by the macabre soul and the tragic
conscience of his prominent figures. It is here that young Cioran,
exasperated with the philosophical conjecture of his youth, and sheltering
in a heart-breaking shout, meets the purificating reading of the Russian
writer (“[...] I consider Dostoyevsky to be the major writer of all times, the
deepest”). The reading, among others, as Cioran himself confesses, of The
Demons, The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot awakens a demonic lucidity in
the young Romanian student.
The thesis that we will try to support in this article starts from two
essential risks: first of all, the well-known influence of the Russian
literature on the young Cioran, and especially of the reading of
Dostoyevsky - and his identification with the tragic heroes (and heroines)
of his novels - on his first book in Romanian, namely Pe culmile disperării (On
the Heights of Despair). This work will receive a dostoyevskyan breath, and
we dare to state that, across the deep experiences cased by the insomnia
that Cioran suffered from in his youth, the dostoyevskyan epilepsy,
understood as a way towards lucidity and psychological-existential depth,
reveals to the young Romanian writer a desperate way. On the other hand,
the risk also lies in the fact of justifying a possible reading, on the part of
the young Cioran, of this small novel that marks the transition between the
two stages of Dostoyevsky’s literature. The conception that both writers
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have of the “Bewusstsein als Verhangnis” (“conscience as fatality”) and the

type of “man from the underground” harassed by the romantic
Weltschmerz, in whom Cioran also recognoses himself, and which he
manages to describe in many of his aphorisms, shows signs of identity and
of meeting between the two writings; and thus, the fact of speaking about
Cioran as a deep reader of Dostoyevsky, both in his youth and in his
mature years, is confirmed by the early and deep influence that the Russian
writer had on the young Romanian student.
“Clairvoyants des abîmes” (“clearsighted in depths”), this is the
expression with which another great writer and Russian critic, L. Chestov,
who also had a great impact on Cioran, qualified the intrinsic relation that
exists between the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche and
Dostoyevsky. On this occasion, we have equally adapted the famous
formula in order to give life to this underground metaphor that also
characterizes the life and work of the young Cioran. One century separates
the birth of the two writers, and the cioranian fascination with
Dostoyevsky is not only a literary one, as Cristina Ciudin shows in her
study on the two authors, but also one for a man considered in his
individuality:

Je connais Dostoïevski très, très bien. Je l’ai énormément aimé, c’est l’une des
passions de ma vie. Il est peut-être l’écrivain le plus profond, le plus étrange, le
plus compliqué de tous les temps. Je le mets en tête de tout le monde, avec des
défauts énormes mais avec des éclats de sainteté. 4

In his novels, the Russian writer shows to a young student in philosophy

how a human being can manage to be more than a simple rational being.
Dostoyevsky creates the bottomless undergrounds of the human psyche
and this tragic emptiness is the one which encourages this young
Romanian, tortured by endless crises of insomnia, to write a book among
shreds and shouts. On the Hights of Despair shows the monologue driven to
despair of an underground being, a being “qui ne connaît pas les limites du
désespoir” (“who doesn't know the limits of despair”)5.
Both careers, - as writers as well as thinkers -, highlight the ultimate
tragedy of the human destiny that is revealed across the lucidity of the
astonishment. The fact that Cioran was considered throughout his life the
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“astonished one” cannot be considered as unimportant. Cioran's first book

becomes thus his most personal one, the one which contains all his worries
and future demons. This work is written in the first person, a disturbing
one, revealing thus the fragile voice of an eccentric young man, of a
Romantic figure tormented by world-weariness, by the anguish of
becoming and the conscience of death. Cioran shows thus to be the
dostoyevskyan (anti) hero par excellence, the tormented “caballero de Triste
Figura”6, an expression by which a young and suffering woman - Aglaya -
will poetically name the prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Man, as an excessively
conscious being, his destiny and his tragedy, become the favourite topics of
both writers; a being who would avoid the moral criteria of his social
environment, who “aimerait le chaos, mais qui a peur de ses lumières”
(who would like the chaos, but who fears its lights). And, apparently, this
turns out to be the best definition of a purely subjective, “extremely lyric”
book, which stems directly from the entrails and the crises of the writer.
When reading the two authors, the reader discovers the vulnerability of
human nature, suffering as a sine qua non condition of a fragile existence.
Suffering, as the comparative analysis of the two works will show, becomes
thus the intrinsic reason of the conscience, since finally “les hommes se
partagent en deux catégories: ceux qui ont compris cela, et les autres”7
(Men are divided into two categories : those who have understood this, and
the others). And the above mentioned suffering strongly characterizes the
main topic of the two devilish, possessed works, to use a dostoyevskyan
term; the atheist, but also the “disciple of the saints” (Cahiers), who is faced
with the Russian believer, but the latter is attracted in turn the latter by a
phantasmagoric skepticism that will accompany him - and all his
(anti)heroes - throughout his existence.
“Toutes ces lectures russes, auxquelles il faut ajouter, de toute évidence,
celles de Dostoïevski, Pouchkine, Tchekhov, Gogol et les autres, ont
marqué, semble-t-il, plus profondément la vie de Cioran [...]”8 (“All these
Russian readings, to which one can certainly add Dostoyevsky, Pushkin,
Chekhov, Gogol and the others, have influenced, it seems, more deeply
Cioran's life”). As Eugène Van Itterbeck states, the history of the Russian
literature strongly influenced the anthropologic cartography of the young
Cioran. This Russian world, and its complex prominent figures, always
exercised a strong fascination on the young writer in his early Romanian
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work as well as in his mature works in French. And in spite of the fact that
the great analysis that Cioran proposes of Russia, and of Dostoyevsky
himself, in History and Utopia (1960) is of a historical cut (a paradoxical
attempt at elaborating an (anti)philosophy of history), the ideatic influence
of the big Russian writers strongly influences the cioranian metaphysics of
the early works; it is thus that we can see how the anthropologic depth of
the literary Russian spirit nourishes the young writer. The young Cioran
declares to be “obsessed” or “possessed” by the Russian being9. Cioran
chooses a mystical, dark, nightly Russia ... he finishes chosing by these
masters of the art of “thinking against themselves”10, and the outmost
representative of these worthy masters is obviously Dostoyevsky himself11.
Thus, the young Romanian places the meaning of the Russian writer’s
works between a torrent of becoming and the draining of his possibilities,
“the sensation of being among the ruins of thought and at the edge of the
ruins of the history and of man himself ”12. The painful and tragic
experience of a free intellect places us in a state of revolt against our
conscience. Just as Dostoyevsky, whose novels acquire a new turn starting
with Notes from the Underground, the young Cioran fights against
conventional conscience and they seem to oppose to it the “Bewusstsein
als Verhangnis” that we will identify in the creed of both writers through
the comparative analysis of both works.
The comparative reading, and the great discovery of the Russian writer
in the young Cioran (his influence will continue to cross the spirit of the
mature Cioran), allow us to discover how vulnerable we are and how the
dostoyevskyan fiction can reveal more of the human condition than the
treaties of academic philosophy. Dostoyevsky’s “pathological excesses”, as
Cioran qualifies them, become the “visions” of the Russian writer; epilepsy
in the case of Dostoyevsky, and insomnia in that of Cioran, rise “up to the
status of metaphysics” (Conversations)13. Dostoyevsky turns thus to Cioran
as to “the deepest and most complicated writer of all times [...] surely he is
the deepest writer in interior experiences. He was up to the extreme limit”,
beyond good and evil, the one who talks with his martyrs, his poor devils
and such human characters, and recognizes tragedy and suffering to be the
engines of the highest human feelings. “For me, Dostoyevsky is the writer”
(Conversations. 209).

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Apotheosis of the concience: On the Heights of Despair

in the light of Notes from the Underground
The draft of On the Heights of Despair, young Cioran’s first work, is
certainly particular and comprises specific biographical elements worthy of
being taken into consideration. The work was written in 1932, and
published in 1934; Cioran had graduated that year from the faculty of
philosophy and published some articles in certain philosophical journals of
the time. It is the period when the young Romanian walked every night,
because of successive assaults of insomnia, and it is during these night
walks that he conceived the topics and basic aspects of this first work.
Nevertheless, the lucidity of these aspects is only preceded by these
obsessive crises, by these “white nights” which are also mentioned by
Dostoyevsky14.
It is really strange and worthy to mention how, throughout his life and in
his dialogues with other personalities, Cioran stresses the poetical character
of this first work, how the Romanian language becomes almost
untranslatable in these pages. Cioran's metaphysical anger acquires
particular importance in these acid early pages; the lyricism that
characterises this early writing equally matches the tragedy and the
revelation of the properly human in the works of maturity. On the Heights of
Despair turns, as we have already argued, into Cioran’s most personal book,
but the power of the dostoyevskyan art of writing equally manages to
reveal the interiour ego of the works and the human circumstances that they
put forward. It is also interesting to mention that the title of this first work
“comes from a journal section where the suicides were generally
announced”15, and here we to find another strange coincidence with
Dostoyevsky, who used to find his inspiration in newspapers, magazines
and events (as it happens with the plot of Demons, among others).
“The main phenomenon, the disaster par excellence is the endless
wakefulness, this endless nothingness [...] Insomnia is an excessive lucidity
that would turn the paradise into a place of torture [...] It was during these
infernal nights that I understood the inanity of philosophy. The hours of
wake are, in fact, an endless rejection of the thought for the thought, they
are the conscience exasperated by itself, a declaration of war, an ultimatum
that the spirit gives to himself ”16. It is with these words that Cioran
qualifies his first work, the infernal condition of spirit that the Romanian
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thinker was going through is similar to Sisyphus's tireless task. The work
conveys thus, on the one hand, a diabolical judgment of the conscience
and of the spirit and, on the other hand, an extreme lucidity, the fruit of
the devastations of the thought (“Had I not written it, I would certainly
have put an end to my nights”). The antisystematism that Cioran will
preserve during all his trajectory as a thinker and as a writer17 (we avoid to
qualify him properly as “philosopher”, as we would thus make a conceptual
mistake) encourages him, due to the nietzschean influence, to adopt the
aphorism as a form of writing (“I believe that philosophy is no longer
possible, except as fragment. As an explosion [...] Now we are all
fragmentists [...]”18). As most experts in Cioran’s work assert, it is possible
to identify in his aphorisms thematic lines that we meet with in every work
(death, weariness, the problem of God and the testimony of the saints, the
conscience or his own distress, among others), but we will never manage to
find a clear source of his thought (the source of his philosophical wealth).
But it is here, in this early work, as Cioran himself states, that we can find
all his devils, the expression of “a lyric being” that is crammed between
pages full of adjectives referring to a nature that rebels against human
beings, of an apocalyptic explosion of feelings, aspirations and
disappointments and, first of all, an off voice that crosses the whole work
and leaves an emaciated breath of vitality and humor19.
This work is, as Cioran confesses to Fernando Savater, “the fruit of
circumstances, of fate, of conversations, of nightly ruminations, of crises of
discouragement [...] of intolerable obsessions “20. These crises of insomnia, of
obsession, of weariness and despair are those which helped Cioran to
write, in blood and fire, his first work. Conscience, in this young Cioran,
exasperates itself, appears as an amazing fatality that predisposes the
human being to respect the tragic roots of the human (“the paroxysm of
sensations, the excess of interiority lead us towards an extremely dangerous
region, provided that an existence that acquires a too alive conscience of its
roots cannot but deny itself ”21).
This (auto)denial of the existence can be carried out through the
sublimation of tragedy and of despair, when the life of the individual
seems so full with exasperation and with pain that the only possible issue is
self-destruction. And thus the possession of an enduring conscience would
be equivalent to extirpating all experience and to revealing all its nullity, “it
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is to commit an outrage against the irrational roots of life”22. As Cioran

rightly indicates throughout his writing, an authentic hopeless individual
will never forget his tragedy, his conscience will painfully preserve the
importance of his subjective misery. Almost all the chapters of his work
are full of references to this annihilating, rational conscience, a sick and
finally desperate conscience (“The paroxysm of conscience is reached
through suffering”23). One can thus manage to understand the paroxysm
of this conscience that noisily approaches fatality:

Infinitely complex are the beings who possess the conscience of fatality, these
beings for whom only the insoluble and the irreparable exist, who understand
that the irremediable represents an essential aspect of the world. Since all the
main realities are placed under the influence of fatality, which comes from
life’s disability of overcoming its conditions and immanent limits [...] To live
with the sharp conscience of fatality, of our own impotence when facing the
big problems that we cannot approach without involving ourselves in them
tragically, is equivalent to face directly the main interrogation that is raised on
this world.24

Thus, reality is nourished by fatality, by life; the human being never

manages to overcome neither his condition nor his own limits, we are
condemned thus by this “sentimiento trágico de la vida” (Unamuno's
influence on Cioran will also be a very important one25). The above
mentioned conscience, we are getting closer to Dostoyevsky’s view, turns
the animal, in Cioran's words, into a man, the man into a demon; and he is
thus like the man of the underground who paradoxically begins to see the
light. “Either existence or myself!”26, this is, as we are going to prove, the
motto shared by Cioran and by Dostoyevsky's man of underground.
Notes from the Underground crosses accurately both stages of
Dostoyevsky's literary creations and starts the tragic -and lucid- tradition of
his great novels. In his pages “there is more philosophical content than in
any work of the author. Written in an extremely difficult period of Cioran’s
life, the work reflects the most extreme questions and assertions that a man
can make”27. The contradictory and paradoxical human nature is one of
the leitmotives, probably the most prominent, of Dostoyevsky’s work. It is
also here that Dostoyevsky starts the fearsome stela of his antiheroes,
where, as we have already shown, the “man of the underground” turns
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into a key subject for the comprehension of the mature work of the
Russian writer. This man, as Jacques Catteau asserts, “is the denial of the
type and of its finitude. He is the man without a name, the character who
loses his identity [...]”. He is a marginal man, a misanthrope, who lives far
from the social hustle. The metaphor of the underground turns into a key
for understanding the psychology of the character, a spirit that is nourished
only by his own misfortune, who ultimately finds the tragic disease of
conscience. And it is thus that the confession - statement of the above
mentioned man of the underground would particularly attract the attention
of young Cioran, a great lover of biographies and of memories28.
It is thus that we find in the following pages the first-person reflection
of the man of the underground, a genuine reflection on the false progress
of history, on the decadence of civilization and science and, in the case
that interests us, the serious disease of conscience in the contemporary
human being; a mature Cioran will consider and criticize all the aspects of
the latter with the same skeptical and corrosive acidity. Through this
underground voice Dostoyevsky asks himself where the place is, among all
these factors, for freedom, loneliness, for tragedy or human passions;
science ends up by destroying the devilish essence that defines us, the
conscience of this dissected life develops into a disease and, for this
reason, the man of the underground exiles his conscience as a total and
absolute metaphysical revolt. Notes from the Underground also breathes
history; the history of the revolutions in Saint Petersburg, of the tragic
death of Maria Dmitrievna, Dostoyevsky’s wife, and also that of his
brother Mikhail, with whom he kept exchanging an intense
correspondence about the production and birth of this peculiar tragic
sonata. This is the reason why the content of the work is tragically
enriched with the personal experience of Dostoyevsky himself and with
the virulent situation of a Russia in a process of socio-political transition.
“To possess a permanently awoken conscience, to define again and gain
our relation with the world, to live in a perpetual tension of knowledge is
equivalent to be lost for life”29. We shall be focusing on this first part,
entitled “The underground”, a profession of faith of the narrator written
in the first person. Any rational criterion fades away with the monologue
of this sick man; this disease is not accidental, but it is the essence of the
active conscience (“ [...] to have excess of conscience is a disease; a real and
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a complete disease [...])30. This concept of disease represents in

Dostoyevsky's works a philosophical category (“la souffrance est
inséparable d'un certain plaisir, la faiblesse et la laideur sont compensées
par une vision de la réalité différente de celle des hommes sains”31). The
underground reflects this hell that the conscience humanizes and tries to
eclipse; the classical symbol of philosophical ascension, as we find it in
Plato’s myth of the cavern, disappears and takes the reverse way. The sick,
tortured and spiteful individual annihilates the static and preconceived
ideas, descends into the cavern of the thought and throws his prisoners
into the deepest underground; and thus any metaphysical regulation
remains imperiously annihilated. And Dostoyevsky continues: “[...] any
degree of conscience is a disease [...] can a man who has conscience respect
himself?”32. This man with conscience rationalizes everything that
surrounds him, supports logics against a widespread irrationality of
feelings and passions, something that ultimately consumes life. Thus, for
Dostoyevsky, conscience would become the authentic disease by incrusting
the logical categories into the nonsense of the existence. The human being
imposes laws to life, organizes and classifies it for his rational contentment.
Through his skeptical man of the underground Dostoyevsky explores -and
exploits- the categories of human knowledge, revitalizing the tragedy and
the hell that suppose the impulses, the feelings, an ontology of a sick and
desperate body (“I am a sick man... I am a furious man. I am not attractive
at all. I believe that my liver is sick. Nevertheless, I don’t know anything
about my disease and I certainly cannot tell what hurts me [...] And if I do
not want to recover it is out of anger [...] and if my liver is bad, I hope it
becomes worse! [...])33; and thus he scandalously approaches the cioranian
conception of conscience as a disease of the contemporary man and the
desperate shout as the only possible way towards freedom. This suffering
that accompanies the disease is potentially a purifier, but it imposes on man
psychologically abnormal conditions34.
Cioran too has a great admiration for this life ruled by uffering, tragedy
and a conscience touched by disease, but at the same time lucid.
Corroborating Ciudin’s words, “Dostoïevski est un anthropologue, un
expérimentateur de la nature humaine, un romancier qui sonde l'esprit
humain dans ses profondeurs; il soumet l'homme à une expérience
spirituelle et le met dans des situations [...]”35.These lines might equally
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apply to Cioran. The depth of both authors, more than as psychologists or

philosophers, lies in an extremely fine scaple that they use in matters of
high anthropological anxiety. When reading Dostoyevsky, as well as when
reading Cioran, we feel closer to understanding our fellows, and even, on
too many occasions, we can identify in his pages words that are relevant for
our own experiences. Both authors were chronic patients and were using
their own autobiographies, ocassionally in the form of fiction, to reflect, in
the case of Dostoyevsky, on the tragedy and the misery of all his
prominent figures and, in Cioran's case, to unfold his identity and to watch
himself in fragmentary and changing forms36, and thus to shout to a heart-
breaking nature, to a totally naked man who is placed on thse desperate
hights from where his bitter shout corrodes the fatal and sick conscience.
And it is probably here that one can find a difference between the two
authors. While Dostoyevsky superposes the moral and the spiritual
suffering on the carnal one, Cioran, in his first work, obeys more to a
damned physiology than to a sick thought. But, likewise, the problematic
of this conscience as fatality and disease remains in both works and helps,
as we have tried to prove, to see a clear influence of Dostoyevsky on the
work of Cioran.

Conclusion
We have attempted to focus our attention on these two extremely
relevant works for the literary life of both authors, but there are influences
in other big works and this fact helps to understand the literary itinerary
that Cioran will follow to the end of his days. We have strived to highlight
the important and great influence that Dostoyevsky's words had on the
literary evolution of Cioran; the books of the Russian writer never close
wounds, but quite on the contrary, they opened them more with every
word and, as we know, Cioran took pleasure in dropping shouts from his
wounds.
The compared reading of On the Heights of Despair and Notes from the
Underground opens the intense and complicated dialogue of the two
authors; it is not devoid of importance to mention, as we already have
stated, that Cioran considered Dostoyevsky, in the interviews of maturity,
as “the writer”, one of the few that had managed to teach him something,
the master in the art of penser contre soi. We consider that this influence is
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totally justified and that the fact of focusing our attention on the analysis
on Cioran the young reader of Dostoyevsky helps to clarify some of the
questions on the cioranian work and, moreover, to demonstrate how
Dostoyevsky's spirit is more present than ever.
The link between the one who reads and the one who writes is
established due to a naked description of the individual, “en lisant les
oeuvres de Dostoïevski et de Cioran, le lecteur découvre la vulnérabilité de
la nature humaine [...] Le 'Je pense, donc je suis' de Descartes est renié par
Dostoïevski et Cioran et sera transformé dans leur conception en 'Je
souffre, donc je suis'“37. The individual, endowed with this fatal and sick
conscience, must suffer in order to know the real life, the one that escapes
the logics and the same that condemns the man of the underground
condemns to a self-chosen isolation; both explore the soul and its limits,
the man and his mystery, the tragedy and its devilish nature. Both writers
become, according to the words of René Char, poets who express the
infinite faces of everything alive. Poets who suffer and poets of the
suffering. And this is why, in the end, “we are burdened by the fact of
being men, authentic men of meat and bone [...]”38. Their tragic and sick
humanity had always burdened Cioran and Dostoyevsky...

How I would like to lose all conscience of myself and of this world! 39.

1
All the translations of the citations, of the works of both authors as well as of
the critical works that we use, are our translations from Spanish, French and
Romanian into English. The pagination comes from the Spanish translations too.
2
“It seems to me that all the heroes of Dostoyevsky are like this: They need to
find wine that daze and captivate their thirst for an intense life, they need to
overstep the limits of mankind, to reach the borders, to burn their wings with any
poison, as long as it is stronger than man: angel or demon, it doesn't matter! They
feel stifled in the carcass that nature has provided them, they need to find
something else...” (Marie-Dominique Molinié. Lettres du Père Molinié à ses amis,
Paris: Pierre Téqui éditeur, 2005. 2).
3
Mikhail Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl
Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
4
“I know Dostoyevsky very, very well. I have liked him so much, it is one the
passions of my life. He may be the deepest, the strangest, the most complicated
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writer of all times. I put him at the top of anyone, with his huge imperfections but
with all his glare of saintliness” (E. Cioran. Entretiens. Paris : Gallimard, 1995.
268).
5
Cristina Ciudin. La passion de la souffrance chez Dostoïevski et Cioran, Bucarest, 1990.
10.
6
“The Knight of the Sorrowful Figure”. This expression makes reference to the
classic figure of Spanish literature written by Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
from La Mancha.
7
Emil Cioran. Des Larmes et des Saints. Paris : Gallimard. 323.
8
Eugène Van Itterbeck. “Cioran et les Russes: Rozanov, Chestov et Tolstoï”.
Approches critiques V, (2004). 59 (in memoriam).
9
“Quelqu'un disait que les Roumains n'aimaient les romans de Dostoïevski que
pour la débauche que s'y trouve. En vérité, les caprices tout extérieurs et la
complexité de surface, si spécifiques à l'âme roumaine, ne sont séduits que par la
théâtralité du drame russe, par les seules apparences de la tragédie intérieure”
(Emil Cioran, Transfiguration de la Roumanie, Paris, Gallimard, p. 41). [Someone said
that Romanians only like Dostoyevsky's novels for the debauchery in it.
Truthfully, the whim all outside and the complexity above, so specific to
Rumanian soul, are only seduced by the stageworthiness of the Russian drama, by
the simple look of the inner tragedy].
10
Cioran places within this category authors of the height of Baudelaire, Stendhal
or Shakespeare.
11
“Aici Cioran se simte într-o solidaritate existențială şi metafizică cu personajele
care populează universul lui Dostoievski. Dostoievski este prezent în Cioran peste
tot unde gânditorul român dezertează de la “cămaşa de forța” a stilisticii franceze,
de la spiritul excesiv estetic al Franței. Acolo unde Cioran îşi permite să fie liric,
întro limbă în care şi lirismul trebuie să-şi asigure fațada stilistică, răzbate, de fapt,
ascendența dostoievskiană, forța spiritului slav.” (Vasile Chira. “Cioran şi
Dostoievski”. Dominantele Gândirii Cioraniene. Sibiu: Editura Universităţii “Lucian
Blaga”, 2006. 14)
12
Susan Sontag. « Penser contre soi. Reflexiones sobre Cioran », Estilos radicales,
traducción del inglés a cargo de Eduardo Goligonski. Barcelona: Muchnik
Editoriales, 1984. 85.
13
“[...] I'm a frustrated epileptic” (Conversaciones, p. 87).
14
“On the Heights of Despair...this explosive and baroque book [...] This work is like
a farewell, flood of anger and of spite, of the philosophy, is the witness of the
failure of a form of thought that turned out to be an idle entertainment, unable to
confront an essential uneasiness. Dam of insomnias that devastated my health, I
wrote a requisition against the philosophy without the minor efficiency in the
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 Sergio Garcia Guillem, The «clairvoyants des abîmes»
HSS, vol. II, no. 3 (2013): 124-139

serious moments, threw a spiteful ultimatum [...]” (Conversations, p. 165).

15
Cristina Ciudin. op. cit. 17.
16
Emil Cioran. En las cimas de la desesperación. traducción de Rafael Panizo.
Barcelona: Tusquets, 2009. 9-10 [On the Heights of Despair].
17
“[...] Besides, everything that I have experimented or thought has become
nothing more than a fight against any form of system, in any domain. There
would have you could put as subtitle to your thesis: Of the anti-system”
(Fernando Savater. “Carta-prefacio por E. Cioran” in Ensayo sobre Cioran. Madrid :
Taurus, 1974. 12).
18
Conversations. 21.
19
“Au cœur du désarroi, il ne nous apprend pas à désespérer, au paroxysme de la
lucidité, il perçoit encore une joie extravagante qui tombe comme une grâce”
(Sylvie Jaudeau. Cioran ou le dernier homme. Paris : José Corti. Les Essais, 1990. 24).
20
Fernando Savater, en op. cit. 11 (cursive is mine).
21
On the Heights of Despair. 21-22.
22
Idem. 50.
23
Idem. 121.
24
Idem.
25
“Tragic sense of life”. We can also see the article of Eugène Van Itterbeck,
“Cioran, lector de Unamuno”. Diálogo Filosófico. nº 81 (2011). 439-446.
26
Conversations. 49.
27
F. Dostoievski. Memorias del subsuelo. traducción del ruso a cargo de Bela
Martinova, Cátedra, Madrid. 2009. 9 [Notes from the Underground].
28
We do not have any relevancy (it does not even index either in his works, or in
his interviews or in his notes) of if Cioran managed to read - nor in what language
it would be done - by this Dostoyevsky's small novel that possesses a very
complex background of translation and edition. For a major information about
the question, since we do not possess the space to enter details, remand to two of
the articles of the teacher Juan Bautista Llinares Chover (University of Valencia),
”Una lectura antropológica de Memorias del subsuelo de Dostoievski” (Thémata.
Revista de Filosofía, nº 39, 2007. 443-450) and “Antropologia filosòfica i literatura: la
lectura nietzscheana d'Apunts del subsòl de F. Dostoievski” (Quaderns de filosofia i
ciencia, nº 38, 2008. 41-57).
29
On the Heights of Despair. 77.
30
Notes from the Underground. 72.
31
Michel Eltchaninoff. Dostoïevski. Roman et philosophie. Paris : Presses
Universitaires de France, 1998. 40.
32
Notes from the Underground. 68, 71.
33
Idem. 69.
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 Sergio Garcia Guillem, The «clairvoyants des abîmes»
HSS, vol. II, no. 3 (2013): 124-139
34
“Dostoïevski et Cioran ont une préférence non pas seulement pour l'homme
tourmenté, mais même pour l'homme qui sort des critères du normal, par
exemple les malades, les fous, les criminels. Car c'est dans la folie et non pas dans
la santé [...] dans les parties de l'âme éclairées par le grand jour de la conscience
qu'on peut sonder les profondeurs de la nature humaine et toucher leurs limites
[...]” (Cristina Ciudin, in op. cit. 42-43).
35
Idem. 31.
36
About this question I send readers to Professor Simona Modreanu’s article (Al.
I. Cuza University, Romania), “La autoficción: conciliaciones improbables. Cioran
y Maxime Roussy” en La Torre del Virrey. Revista de Estudios Culturales, nº 13,
2013/1.
37
Cristina Ciudin. op. cit. 102-103.
38
Notes from the Underground. 194.
39
On the Heights of Despair. 35.

References
Boissau, Pierre-Yves. « E.M. Cioran: les racines slaves d’un auteur francophone ».
Slavica occitania, n°5 (Europe centrale), Toulouse (1997): 51-79.
Catteau, Jacques. La création littéraire chez Dostoïevski. Paris : Institut d’Études Slaves,
1978.
Cavaillès, Nicolas. Cioran malgré lui. Paris : CNRS Éditions, 2011.
Chira, Vasile. « Cioran şi Dostoievski ». Dominantele gândirii cioraniene, editura
universităţii “Lucian Blaga”, Sibiu (2006).
Cioran, Emil. En las cimas de la desesperación. traducción de Rafael Panizo.
Barcelona: Tusquets, 2009.
Cioran, Emil. Cahiers. Paris : Gallimard, 1997.
Cioran, Emil. Œuvres. Paris : Gallimard, 2011.
Cioran, Emil. Entretiens. Paris: Gallimard, 2009.
Cioran, Emil. Conversaciones. traducción de Carlos Manzano. Barcelona: Tusquets,
2010.
Ciudin, Cristina. La passion de la souffrance chez Cioran et Dostoïevski. Bucarest :
Verus, 1990.
Dostoievski, F. M., Memorias del subsuelo. Madrid : Cátedra, 2009.
Dostoievski. Notes d’un souterrain. Paris : Gallimard, 1992.
Eltchaninoff, Michel. Dostoïevski. Roman et philosophie. Paris : Presses Universitaires
de France, 1998.
Jaudeau, Silvie. Cioran ou le dernier homme. Paris : José Corti. Les Essais, 1990.
Molinie, Marie-Dominique. Lettres du Père Molinié à ses amis. Paris : Pierre Téqui
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 Sergio Garcia Guillem, The «clairvoyants des abîmes»
HSS, vol. II, no. 3 (2013): 124-139

éditeur, 2005.
Modreanu, Simona. Le Dieu paradoxal de Cioran. Paris : Éditions du Rocher, 2003.
Savater, Fernando. Ensayo sobre Cioran. Madrid: Taurus, 1974.
Sontag, Susan. Estilos radicales. traducción del inglés a cargo de Eduardo
Goligonski. Barcelona: Muchnik Editoriales, 1984.
Van Itterbeck, Eugène. “Cioran et les Russes: Rozanov, Chestov et Tolstoï”.
Approches critiques V, (2004): 167-182.

Biographical note
Sergio Garcia Guillem was born in Valencia in 1991. He is a student in
Philosophy at the University of Valencia (Spain) and at the Paris VIII University,
Vincennes Saint-Denis (France). In addition, he is the Secretary and the translator
of the Journal of Cultural Studies La Torre del Virrey (Valencia). He is interested
especially in the relationships between philosophy and literature, he centers a part
of his search on the French-Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran, on whom he
has published several studies, and he accomplished the first translation into
Spanish of Marie-Dominique Molinié's letters to Emil Cioran. He is also
interested in F.M Dostoyevsky's works, he translated into Spanish a part of
Stanley Cavell's work and he has dedicated another part of his research to the
cinematographic universe (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lars Von Trier, Michael Haneke).

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