Eugène Ionesco: The Theatre of the Absurd

Abstract

Eugène Ionesco was born in Romania in 1909 to a French mother and a Romanian father who moved their family to France before Eugène’s first birthday. In 1916, his father returned to Romania and then lost contact with the family, who believed he had died during the war. In fact, he had remarried and started a new life. When Eugène was 13, his father demanded that both Eugène and his sister be sent to Romania to live with him and his new wife. Eugène lived in Romania for the next 16 years, returning to France in 1938. At the start of World War II, he went back to Romania and was unable to leave for the duration of the war, as he did not have the correct travel documents. Finally able to return to France in 1942, he resided there until his death in 1994. ¹ The circumstances of his youth—his father reappearing in his life as if back from the dead, his difficulties with his stepmother, and the ordeal he went through to escape Romania in the 1940s—haunted him throughout his life and profoundly shaped his view of himself in the world. Always the outsider, Ionesco felt neither fully accepted by the French cultural elite nor fully at home in his surroundings.