The time may be coming when the fascist period, as well as the communist period, can be analyzed clearly. If today there can be open and lengthy discussion of great writers such as Mihail Sadoveanu, George C
linescu, Tudor Arghezi, and Camil Petrescu, and of their compromises with the communist regime, would it not also be appropriate to analyze the voluntary involvement in the fascist movement, the “happy guilt” with all its consequences, of writers and intellectuals like Mircea Eliade? Instead, during the past year, the sacralization of the thinking of Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, with their lasting guilt, has proceeded apace in Romania’s largecirculation right-wing press (though a critical approach to that generation may be found in the new democratic press, as in the recent and important essays by Alexandru George, especially one called “White Bolshevism”).
All this is more important now that communism is no longer a real danger in Romania. In a sense, indeed, it never was: Ceau
sescu’s Stalinism gradually became a camouflaged nationalist dictatorship. But the forces of totalitarianism in Romania still appear strong. The bankrupt collapse of the totalitarian “left” has much to teach the “right,” even if the nationalistic right seems not yet ready to learn the lesson. The Romanian Parliament’s recent rehabilitation of Ion Antonescu, Romania’s wartime dictator and ally of Hitler, is a scandalous and unprecedented event in postwar Europe and a dark warning about the political future of the country.
And yet Romania means more than just Ceausescu or Codreanu or Antonescu, more than the green-shirted terrorists of the Legion or the miners of the Securitate.* There still lives in Romania, or so we must hope, a legacy of democratic thought. It was stifled for many decades by right-wing and left-wing dictators, but it retains a deep relationship with European culture. The new generation thirsts for freedom and prosperity. There is hope for Romania, but it can be nourished only by a clear commitment to democracy and an unambiguous transition to a civil society.
*In 1990 some ten thousand miners, manipulated by the old apparatchiks as political provocation, invaded Bucharest and terrorized the inhabitants.
Translated by Alexandra Bley-Vroman, 1991
Note
1. Mircea Eliade, Journal I, 1945–1955 trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts (University of Chicago Press). Journal II, 1957–1969 trans. Fred H. Johnson Jr. (University of Chicago Press). Journal III, 1970–1978 trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (University of Chicago Press). Journal IV, 1979–1985 trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts (University of Chicago Press). Autobiography Vol. 1, 1907–1937: Journey East, Journey West trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts (University of Chicago Press). Autobiography Vol. 2, 1937–1960: Exile’s Odyssey trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts (University of Chicago Press).
BLASPHEMY AND CARNIVAL
In 1970, Emil Cioran, the iconoclastic philosopher who had left Romania three decades before and won postwar fame in Paris, wrote in a letter to a friend from his youth about his nostalgia for the illusions of those who stayed behind. “I never cease to wonder that after so many trials you have managed to keep such evident composure. Nor is yours a unique case. I can guess the secret of so much vitality. Without hell, no illusions.”
After so many years in the West, and despite the glory he achieved, Cioran felt old and worn out. “We pay dearly for not having suffered. We believe in nothing,” confessed the nihilist in his Parisian refuge, where he had fled in the wake of the great European and world upheaval. Before, in Bucharest, he had contemptuously savaged the corrupt Romanian interwar democracy and — like his friends, the philosopher Constantin Noica and the writer Mircea Eliade — had ardently supported right-wing extremism.
Writing to his former friend in Romania, Cioran also referred to the sacrilege he had once committed against the French poet Paul Valéry, an unjust text in bitter opposition to his early admiration for Valéry, who had dominated the spiritual aspirations of his youth. Curiously, however, his blasphemy, he says, “was quite well received in Paris, where people like to demolish all reputations, even legitimate, even justified. Especially those.”
He seemed unhappy at the lack of scandal, at the lack of people taking offense. No one had called him a vampire from Dracula’s land, an alien, unworthy Wallachian who had tarnished the splendors of French culture with his barbarous, parvenu frustrations. On the contrary, Parisians adopted his paradoxes with delight and considered him a great stylist of the French language. Had he written an irreverent article in Romania, about, say, the national poet Mihai Eminescu, the outrage would have been instantly felt; he would have been treated as a rootless cosmopolite, an immoral, atheistic renegade. And the scandal would very soon have focused not only on the abject person of the blasphemer but also on the conspiracy of which he was a part, the classic, timeless, pagan, Masonic, foreign conspiracy aimed at undermining the values of a universally misunderstood and abused nation. The fact that he came from a family of Romanian Orthodox priests, or that he had once written that he would commit suicide if he were a Jew, would naturally have been cited as the usual cover for betrayal.
There is, we have to admit, something touching about the canonization of representative cultural figures. And in a world that is constantly losing its ideals, this may even pass for a sign of spirituality. But piety and taboos are structurally alien to culture, which, as we know, is essentially creative and questioning; on the other hand, even from a theological perspective, the quasi-religious canonization of certain nonreligious figures is an act of impiety, a vulgar substitution, itself almost a blasphemy, which expresses people’s need for myth, illusion, and subterfuge.
Without hell, no illusions indeed; all the more so if society is passing through a severe crisis of identity and structure. This is what is happening in countries that belatedly face modernity, with all its tensions, promises, and failures. The Islamic world, large parts of the ex-communist world, but also many other tumultuous regions of our unbalanced planet are in this unenviable position.
The Viruses of Critical Thinking
Amid the explosive uproar of frustrations, even literary debates may become the pretext for violent appeals for a common unity and, of course, for excluding those carrying the viruses of critical thinking and individualism.
Take, for example, the reactions produced by the Russian writer Andrei Sinyavsky’s attempt to clean Pushkin’s hallowed literary monument of the disfiguring dross that had accrued to it from Slavophile orthodoxy and Soviet propaganda.
The mythologizing of Pushkin seems to have begun immediately after his fatal duel with D’Anthès in 1837. At the poet’s funeral, admirers fought to carry off sacred strands of hair from his whiskers and head. But the official canonization took place at the unveiling of the great Pushkin’s statue in Moscow in 1880, and half a century later, in 1937, it was ratified at the Soviet festivities marking the centenary of the poet’s death. In 1880, Dostoyevsky, gratified by an impressive grouping of 100 women surrounding the huge wreath that he had to hang around the statue’s neck, had proclaimed Pushkin a prophetic emblem of Russia, to the accompaniment of the shouts and tears of the crowd. Pushkin, Dostoyevsky said, would show “the way out of European ennui.” He represented “the universally human and unifying Russian soul.” He “uttered the ultimate word of great, universal harmony, of ultimate brotherly accord between all tribes according to the laws of Christ’s gospel!”1