If, in spite of the heavy thematic cargo they bear, these women come across as vital, persuasive characters, it is because they were nourished by two of the most important women in Mihail Sebastian’s life. Ann was almost certainly inspired by Lena Caler, an actress revered in her day, with whom Sebastian was besmit-ten: his desire to create roles for her was instrumental in his decision to write for the theatre. Sebastian and Caler had an off-again on-again relationship from the time they met in 1935 until the end of his life. Her countless infidelities drove him to despair, but she was one of the few friends who stood by him during the Second World War. Their sexual liaison appears to have continued, at least intermittently, even after her marriage to the theatre director Scarlat Froda. When The Accident was published, Froda made an emotional phone call to Sebastian, telling him he knew who Ann was based on. Nora, on the other hand, is sometimes seen as a portrait of the painter Zoe Ricci, a supposition that can be only partly correct because Sebastian had been writing The Accident for over a year when he met Ricci and, six months later, became romantically involved with her. The physically slight, Italian-descended Ricci was not a maternal figure like Nora; yet Sebastian himself linked her with his character. He noted of Ricci’s telling him during a romantic moment how nice it was not to be alone: “That’s something Nora could have said. She actually says it in a way. So here is life, a year later, repeating a situation in a novel…” On February 21, 1940, a few days after the novel’s publication, Sebastian, finding that he, Lena Caler and Zoe Ricci were all in Braşov on the same day, wrote: “As in the final chapter of The Accident.” Nora, more of a composite than Ann — who, as Paul Cernat points out, is given Zoe’s profession — is a character to whom Ricci contributed; but she was not inspired by her.
The Transylvanian setting acquires layered meanings. Paul and Nora’s skiing holiday may begin as a recuperative expedition to the mountains that harbour the vigorous natural world exalted by partisans of the “Romanian soul,” but the entrance of the Grodeck family complicates this picture. The counterpoint between the Grodecks and the mountains creates dramatic tensions that express the conflict between Sebastian’s nationalist intellectual roots and his awareness of belonging to an ethnic minority. Closely identified with classical music, the manifestation of German culture that Sebastian adored, Gunther Grodeck rescues Teutonic civilization from the grim images of Hitler’s Germany that appear during Paul’s train odyssey. Even if the portrait is ultimately tragic — the artistic Gunther is doomed to die — it establishes the positive attributes of German culture; at the same time, the Grodecks become a trope for the presence of minority groups within the most traditional precincts of Romanian life. Transylvania appears as a zone of multiplicity and mutual enrichment. The love triangle of Gunther’s parents and Hagen mirrors that of Paul, Nora and Ann: in each, the unhealthy original couple is pried apart by an individual identified with the mountains. While Gunther and Hagen inhabit opposite extremes of cossetted sensitivity and feral toughness, Nora balances civilization with nature; she transmits this lesson to Paul. The novel does not abandon the rhetorical glorification of the mountains: they dominate the final chapters and confirm Paul’s cure from his malaise. But the nationalist overtones, including the allusions to the composer Richard Wagner, a favourite of the Nazis, are reconciled with a panorama that seems to make a desperate, almost paradoxical assertion that “national essence” and ethnic diversity are mutually compatible. Hagen may share his nickname with the most destructive character in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, yet the sympathetic light in which he is eventually seen suggests that different cultures can coexist. In the scene in Chapter XV where Nora parades at the edge of the ski run with Gunther on her left and Paul on her right, she is not only reacquainting two neurotic intellectuals with nature, she is also incarnating the Romanian motherland’s capacity to harmonize the country’s disparate ethnic groups.
The novel’s final scenes, set in Braşov, include references to Romania’s largest minority, the Hungarians (who numbered about 2.5 million at this time, compared to about 700,000 Germans). A headline in untranslated Hungarian (a language few Romanians can read) both makes clear and conceals Sebastian’s ultimate pessimism. Seeing the headline, Paul thinks “that extraordinary events might have taken place in the world during the two weeks he had spent in the mountains, and that the headline, printed in large letters, might be announcing a crucial event that would change the fate of mankind.” Once he finds newspapers he can read, Paul decides that he is mistaken: “nothing’s happened. Truly nothing.” In fact, it is here that he makes an error. The agreement announced by the headline, reached on January 7, 1935, was the Treaty of Rome, in which the government of France made its peace with Benito Mussolini’s Italy. This capitulation of the values of civilization to those of fascism undermines the resolutions made by Paul and Nora at the novel’s close. They begin their new life unaware that the process that will lead to Europe’s destruction has already begun. Sebastian’s decision to insert this dark omen into the novel’s conclusion, yet make it invisible to most readers, is typical of the double-edged vision he conveyed with such delicacy and humanity.
STEPHEN HENIGHAN
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945) was one of the major Central European writers of the 1930s. Born in southeastern Romania, he worked in Bucharest as a lawyer, journalist, novelist and playwright until anti-semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935–1944: The Fascist Years, was published in seven countries between 1996 and 2007, launching an international revival of his work. Sebastian’s novels and plays are available in translation throughout Europe, and also have been published in Chinese, Hindi, Bengali and Hebrew.
The Accident is Sebastian’s first work of fiction to appear in English.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Stephen Henighan’s books include Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family, A Grave in the Air, The Streets of Winter and A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. A nominee for the Governor General of Canada’s Literary Award, he teaches at the University of Guelph, Ontario.
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