Rezumat: Ion D Sîrbu (1919-1989) was one of the members of The Literary Circle of Sibiu (appointed in 1943), together with Şt. Augustin Doinaş, Radu Stanca, Ion Negoiţescu etc., and Lucian Blaga's favourite disciple. Son of a coal miner, who induced him the belief in the Marxist utopia, he joined the Communist Party in his youth, and he fought as a soldier in the Second World War. The war finished, he returns to the University of Sibiu-Cluj, and attempted to the exams he was left with. After graduation, he becomes Liviu Rusu's assistant in The Aesthetics Department, and a couple of years later, he is already promoted as Associate Professor at The Dramatic Art Institute, Cluj. In 1949, he gets fired, ranked with his former teachers among the "people's enemies", because he stubbornly refuses to act as a "mole" of the Securitate, to write forged notes and to give away his colleagues. Then, Ion D. Sirbu lives on the outskirts of society, assuming anonymity, incessantly spied on by the Securitate and, finally, being sentenced to seven years of prison (1957-1964). As a writer he made himself known mostly throughout his posthumous books, which are the best arguments to count him among the best antitotalitarian writers, for the outspoken ethic value of his works.
In the specific case of our country, the wholesale publication of diaries, correspondence, memoirs and different documents, shown up after 1989, met with the natural need of the public who wanted to find out the secret and unforged history the totalitarian censorship refused to bring forth for such a long time. Rarely the irrefragable value of these documents is doubled by a similar aesthetic value. There are few "professional" writers who had the inner strength to reject compromise, and correspondingly, to accept isolation and anonymity as facts. That is why, the so-called "pigeon-hole literature" proved to be, with few notable exceptions, pretty thick and unsubstantial. When the precious underground manuscripts of Ion D. Sirbu's works were set into free circulation, the editing and printing event was synonymous with the abolishment of censorship ban. The most important writing pieces are, in fact, the posthumous works, namely the diary, the correspondence and the novel Adio, Europa! (Farewell, Europe!). They might be taken both as an intellectual's testimony, granted with his flawless, untainted behaviour, and as a prose writer's fine expression, perhaps one of the most valuable in Romanian post-war literature.