sescu,” and now quite simply as a “policeman of the mind.”
The Group for Social Dialogue, an intellectual nucleus of the opposition, prefaced its three-part publication of “Happy Guilt” in spring 1992 in its journal, 22, with a foreword by the deputy editor. Just back from the United States, he described the text as “tolerant and full of nuances and subtleties.”
But once the last part had appeared, just three weeks later, he found himself compelled to explain that the Eliade essay had mostly aroused “reactions of disapproval and indignation.” There had been hysterical anonymous phone calls, in which patriotic voices warned that those guilty of publishing such blasphemy would account for it “when the time came for judgment.”
But 22 also made it clear that there had been a reaction from well-known cultural dignitaries, “people with some weight in our public life” who, without being named, were identified as “Romanian intellectuals who think in terms of a Judeao-Masonic world conspiracy.” They did not merely express indignation or disapproval, but, according to 22, claimed that the publication of the essay on Eliade actually “served the dark purpose of demonstrating to certain circles abroad that Romanians are racist, anti-Semitic, and chauvinist.”
It is hardly cause for astonishment that the extremist publications saw in “Happy Guilt” a confirmation of what they expected from international circles hostile to Romania. The true surprise was the general reaction of the Romanian press, including opposition magazines, strictly cultural publications, and so on. “Extremist” echoes in the left/right press (it is hard to distinguish between the two in the current political landscape in Romania) differed only in tone and style from the reaction of supposedly democratic individuals and publications “with some weight in public life.” Those “circles abroad” that are said to decide Romania’s unjust fate would, I believe, have been able to make equally good use of many of the reactions in the country’s “democratic” press in their sinister attempts to promote an unfavorable image of Romanians as intolerant.
Faced with public indignation and assorted threats, the editor of 22 now hastened to explain that the text praised to the skies three weeks earlier “does not by a long shot represent the point of view of the magazine 22” or of its staff. Barely two weeks later, this revelation was followed by a fresh piece in 22 under the same signature, “Mircea Eliade — A Hero of Our Time,” which clarified a few more things. The new article adopted Eliade’s view that the rightist Iron Guard movement had been “essentially ethical and religious,” preoccupied with services, requiems, mourning fasts, and prayers, guided by “blind faith in God’s omnipotence,” and obsessed “only with love.” In this context, of course, it was not surprising that for the Bucharest journalist, the essay he had so recently considered “tolerant and full of nuances and subtleties” now “tended to drive Mircea Eliade away from sympathetic understanding in Romania, instead of bringing him closer to it.”
As we can see, unlike the Russian reaction to Sinyavsky’s book on Pushkin, the Romanian response to my essay on Eliade is better exemplified by the democratic and cultural press than by the much too crude and foul-mouthed nationalist press. The reason for the different reactions may be that Russian culture is traditionally obsessed with ethical and social questions, whereas Romanian culture often seems to be seduced by the delights of ambiguity, of a subtle and coded aesthetic game.
In this connection it is (probably) worth mentioning an original last-minute intervention in the debate, serialized in 1994 under the title “Mircea Eliade and his Detractors,” in the Bucharest cultural review Luceafárul. The Romanian literary critic who wrote this piece located Eliade’s “detractors” among leftists of every stripe, homosexuals, Jews, and exiles. He believed that “Happy Guilt” was part of a huge American conspiracy to obscure the guilt of the United States for its treatment of Native Americans, blacks, and the Vietnamese by focusing attention on Europe and its great cause for guilt, the Holocaust.
This broad and ever-shifting diversion required the constant discovery or invention of celebrated anti-Semites for the new Holocaust archives and museums springing up all over America. “Happy Guilt” was thus seen as part of an active worldwide plot, and the exile, N. M., had simply proved his loyalty to his adopted country.
The name Salman Rushdie was mentioned but once in the long press campaign in Romania against the essay on Eliade. Again, there was a striking difference from the aggressively moral and Slavophile slogans in Russia equating Rushdie’s novel with Sinyavsky’s literary study of Pushkin. The “essentially moralistic themes” in my article were said to have been stimulated by censorship and “fundamentalism, which corrodes the foundation of culture.”15 So, it is not Mircea Eliade’s tiresome pro-fascist propaganda of the 1930s that is inquisitorial, but rather attempts to discuss his case against the background of nationalist revival in the Eastern Europe of the 1990s.
This carnivalization reached its peak in an absolutely original idea: the twinning of Rushdie and Eliade, in a staggering operation of twofold distortion, as jointly sacred. Salman Rushdie, who aroused the dogmatic fury of Islamic fundamentalists against the blasphemy of his anticanonical The Satanic Verses, and Mircea Eliade, whose dogmatic political texts fit perfectly into the fundamentalist canon of an extremist, totalitarian movement claiming to be essentially Orthodox Christian!
For all the wild manipulation, however, the invocation of Rushdie’s name was not altogether inappropriate: neither in the case of the outrage at Sinyavsky’s study of Pushkin, nor in the reaction to my essay on Eliade’s political and autobiographical writings. For in the end, the great Rushdie scandal also began as a “literary affair” associated with an émigré—as did the incomparably smaller and more “local” scandals discussed here. And like these, it facilitated a significant comparison between how “blasphemy” is defined and perceived in societies that have been closed and in those that have long been open.
On its first publication, the novel The Satanic Verses did not shock the West. When its author was sentenced to death by the Iranian dictator Khomeini, he was, of course, fervently defended in the West, in the name of basic human rights and democratic principles. Sinyavsky’s study of Pushkin was appreciated in the Western press as a solid and interesting piece of research, perfectly legitimate and of real use. My essay on Eliade’s political commitment in the 1930s and his ambiguous memoirs about that period was regarded by Western readers, amid the present political confusion in the world, as a revealing critical reflection on the guilt of an intellectual led astray by suspect extremist affiliations.
The authors of these texts — writers exiled in the West, and thus hybrids of belonging and estrangement — had the poignant opportunity to feel in their own skin the moral, historical, psychological, cultural, and religious conflicts that their homelands were experiencing.
“Happy Guilt,” instead of stimulating analysis of the responsibility of intellectuals who aid and abet political extremism, was rejected as an insult to the Romanian nation. Sinyavsky’s book on Pushkin was received as an act of spiritual vandalism designed to separate the masses from their sacred national poet, an outrage to the messianic mission of Russia’s great literature, its very pride and soul. Rushdie’s novel, though a work of fiction, was not accepted as such even by Western clerics, and became the pretext for a fanatical instigation to crime on the part of the fundamentalist militants of Islam. The demonic “disorder” of democracy, the freedom to doubt and debate, pragmatism and diversity, appear to the theocrats as mortal dangers to Islam and the Koran — just as provocations to undermine ethnic cohesion appear intolerable to those who believe in the paternalistic authority of the Nation.