JENI ACTERIAN ÎN ÎNCERCAREA DE A SCRIE DESPRE MOARTE
Jenny Acterian in the attempt to write about death

Summary/Abstract: Jenny Acterian (1916–1958) graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in Bucharest in 1940. Nae Ionescu was her favorite teacher. She was a passionate reader and was captivated by authors such as Baudelaire, Proust, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Shestov, Unamuno. Acterian also sensed similarities in thinking with her colleague and friend Emil Cioran. At the same time, she developed a passion for algebra and mathematical logic.In this article I follow her interest in the issue of death, as it appears in her intimate diary, that she kept from adolescence to maturity, when she would break up with philosophy. Reading this diary, published posthumously under the title Jurnalul unei fete greu de mulţumit (Diary of a hard-to-please girl), we find that, prone to meditation and loneliness, she continually sought an explanation for the fear of death. She discovered the role of faith without being able to share it because of excessive lucidity. Terrified by the specter of war, the loss of her brother and the failure of her career, she associated her thoughts of death with paradox and absurdity. She investigated with a lot of logical rigor and emotional involvement the relationship between death and suffering, death and immortality, the hypotheses of post-mortem life and the identity between death and nothingness. Faced with a love drama, she realized that the real tragedy is only around death and various decompositions. Learning that love also dies, she came to the conclusion that death is the only certainty, “perfect and flawless”. In the face of this evidence, her essay on death remained a project. She didn’t write it, but she lived it.

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