A preoccupation with social and moral problems has always been part of the Russian intellectual tradition. This served in the Russian press as an excuse for the uproar that Sinyavsky caused when his attempted restoration of the real Pushkin seemed to remove the great poet from that tradition.
In Romania, by contrast, the image of the writer as a “pure artist,” belonging to the elite and far from the madding crowd, is accepted and even admired. Social-political commitment, like the whole sphere of moral problems, seems rather tedious, if not suspect — and is not necessarily tied to — is sometimes even harmful to — creativity. Creativity usually focuses on aesthetic achievement, spiritual heights, and a kind of condescending aloofness from immediate reality. Many Romanian intellectuals appear more proud than upset to see themselves propelled into a lofty sphere of unshakable composure.
Irritation occurs, rather, when the troubled life of one of their more esteemed representatives reveals that, instead of shutting himself up in the ivory tower of his own books and projects, he has taken a passionate interest in his nation’s destiny, ready to be politically active on the terrain of his age, not uncommonly in far from honorable company. Even if the debate starts from a premise contrary to the one in the Sinyavsky case, it may trigger an equally violent reaction — as did the previous essay on Mircea Eliade.12
Although my essay deals with the former and current implications of the intellectual’s involvement with totalitarian ideology, and so is strikingly different from Sinyavsky’s study of Pushkin, its public impact inside the country was no less shocking — and an almost burlesque relationship, at once unintentional, spicy, and eloquent, subsequently developed between the two.
I wrote and published the article after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, when it had become evident that nationalism, which was being utilized as a major weapon in the winning of electoral support, was staging a powerful political comeback in that part of the world. Legitimacy was being sought in the writings of some illustrious cultural precursors, to be presented as new propaganda for public worship. It is no accident, for example, that since the overthrow of Nicolae Ceau
sescu a party such as the “Movement for Romania”—which proclaims its continuity with the fascist Iron Guard — has required applicants for membership to take an examination on the work of Eliade and other scholars with similar political views.
I thought it necessary to remind those who did not know, or who wanted to forget, about the tragedy to which the nationalist option once led. The differences, as well as the similarities, needed to be brought out between nationalism and the more recent communist catastrophe, which, not surprisingly, was uppermost in everyone’s mind.
Arousing Passions
The essay, “Happy Guilt,” discusses Eliade’s persistent “amnesia” about his political commitment in the interwar years, and the strange, vaguely nostalgic way in which his last writings before his death evoked the “happy guilt” of his youth. The text, as I have said before, deals only with the autobiographical writings. But these are far from insignificant, given that Eliade himself considered not only his work but also his life to be important, devoting to it successive volumes of memoirs and journals. My own memories of the time in “socialist” Romania when everything was “politicized” probably explain, at least in part, why I limited myself in this way and avoided analysis of Eliade’s scientific or literary work.
The arguments of those who appreciated my essay were not very different in the East and the West. It was the arguments of those who objected to it that differed so much, and it may be of interest to compare them. In America, many readers considered the text too restrained, too subtle, too qualified. Such comments, however, remain a long way from the stupefying interpretation of the Los Angeles Times: “In an ambivalence that reveals Manea’s determination not to overlook political complexities, he is hesitant to embrace popular democracy as the clear alternative to totalitarianism … and even sympathetically presents the philosophy of Romanian writer Mircea Eliade that democracy has been unable to inspire in the people a spirit of fervent nationalism.”13
Publication of “Happy Guilt” in Romania, in 1992, however, aroused militant passions. Although the essay is focused on established facts and testimony, it met an audience that seemed quite unwilling to accept this. The legacy of the nationalist tradition had been obscured and manipulated by the communists for more than forty years, and today nationalism presents itself with an aura of legitimacy, mystery and martyrdom to a public in the throes of an identity crisis and thirsting for a new communitarian mythology.
Some felt it was a “luxury of remembrance” to call into question the values and excesses of nationalism. It seemed to them preferable to idolize great thinkers who had at some time been affiliated with the extreme right, but who could become spotless new parents for the masses orphaned by the collapse of a paternalistically socialist society. To express doubts about their immaculate spiritual biography became a kind of outrage, a hostile and offensive provocation.
Exposure of the horrors of communism was, to be sure, an urgent task but it also evidently fulfilled a complex role of exorcism. In 1945, the Romanian Communist Party had only a thousand or so members. By 1989, it was, in percentage terms, the largest in the entire Eastern bloc, with a membership close to four million, among whom it would have been difficult to find a thousand true believers. A broad, comprehensive debate about left and right totalitarianism — that is, a simultaneous exposure of the horrors of nationalism and native communism — seemed too much for people recently freed from oppression and yet so eager for new protective illusions. (Without hell, no illusions.)
“Blaspheming” the Idols
“Happy Guilt” was immediately seen in 1992 as a blasphemy directed against the great national values. In a chain reaction of indignation, with predictable anti-Semitic spurts, the few voices that dared challenge the general hysteria found themselves overwhelmed. And today, more than three years later, the uproar is revived from time to time by fresh distortions, in an inventive and inexhaustible carnivalizing of blasphemy.
In the ranks of the nationalist-communist press, where the author has been variously described as a “traitor,” “the dwarf from Jerusalem,” or “common trash,” a paper such as România Mare owned by the nationalist parliamentary star C. V. Tudor, ex-bard of the Ceausescu couple, has published an explicit declaration of faith: “Yes, indeed, we are fighting to make Mircea Eliade sacred. We are fighting to rehabilitate Marshal Antonescu, President Ceausescu.”14
It would be wrong to think, however, that cheap nationalist-communist speechifiers were the only ones to take offense. Judging by reactions in the press, “Happy Guilt” also incensed quite a few intellectuals, even those professionally trained in critical reading and interpretation. Nor was there any lack of invective in papers of a more “democratic” character. Certainly more elaborate, perhaps even more subtle, they depicted the author of the scandalous essay now as a “detractor,” now as an “American propping himself up against the White House wall,” now as a “follower of Ceau