A close friend of Eugene Ionesco and Mircea Eliade as well as - in his later Paris years - Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett, the Romanian philosopher and essayist Emil Cioran is an important figure in central European Modernism. Cioran's existentialism channelled many seminal intellectual influences of the time from Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson. More controversially, it was also a philosophy that that took on distinctly fascist overtones in the inter-war years, especially in his early work "The Transfiguration of Romania."

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