Paula Erizanu: I want to tell the story of the Republic of Moldova
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Adela Greceanu, Radio Romania Cultural, 24 February 2024
Paula Erizanu was the Culture Editor of The Calvert Journal between 2019-2022. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, London Review of Books, CNN, Aeon, Dazed, The Architectural Review and other publications. Erizanu did her BA in History with English and History of Art at the New College of the Humanities in London, and her MA in Magazine Journalism at City University London. She published a book on the 2009 protests in Moldova, This is my first revolution. Steal It (Cartier, 2010, trilingual edition), a poetry collection, Take Care (Charmides, 2015, Romanian), and has coordinated the three-part anthology A Century of Romanian Poetry Written by Women (Cartier, 2019, 2020, Romanian), together with Alina Purcaru. In 2019, she was nominated for the Words by Women award as UK’s culture journalist of the year. Her debut novel, The Woods Are Burning, a fictionalised historical account of the lives of early Soviet feminists Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand, was published in Romanian in 2021. The book won Erizanu the Young Writer of the Year 2021 title at Bucharest’s Young Writers Gala. It was also shortlisted for the Sofia Nădejde Prize in Romania and Festival du Premier Roman in Chambery, France. You can follow her on Twitter here.
This transcript/republication was made with the agreement of Mrs Greceanu and the title of the interview was changed by Bridge of Friendship.
Adela Greceanu: Welcome! I’m Adela Greceanu and my guest tonight is writer and journalist Paula Erizanu. Welcome to Radio Romania Cultural.
Paula Erizanu: Hello, Adela!
Paula Erizanu came from Chisinau to participate in the Odessa International Literature Festival, which has been a travelling project for two years now because of the war. Last year it was held in Batumi, Georgia, and this year it is being held in Bucharest. Paula Erizanu has so far published three books, a volume of non-fiction ”This is my first revolution, Steal it”, published by Cartier, a diary of the protests in Moldova in 2009, a volume of poetry ”Take Care”, published by Charmides and the novel ”The Woods are Burning”, published by Cartier. Together with Alina Purcaru, she coordinated the three-volume anthology A Century of Romanian Poetry Written by Women, published by Cartier. She has worked in London as a journalist, was cultural editor for The Calvert Journal and has collaborated with The Guardian, BBC, Financial Times, London Review of Books.
Paula Erizanu, we have already mentioned four cities in our region: Chisinau, Odessa, Batumi, Bucharest. In the last two years, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, we have become much more aware of what is happening here in the East, in areas that are actually much closer to us geographically, but also culturally and geopolitically than those in the West that we have been referring to for decades. What do you think will be the long-term effects of this interest in what is happening now in the East?
I didn’t come here as a fortune teller, but I’m happy about this change, this emergence of interest in our area, including from our area. In fact, Romania’s interest, for example, in Ukraine, started with the interest of the United States of America in Ukraine. So, although Romania and Ukraine have been neighbours for so long, they had to start getting to know each other in this crisis, where there was no way around this approximation.
The horrors that are happening today in Ukraine, in Russia’s great invasion, have a side effect. They also gave rise to opportunities, namely the opportunity to get to know Ukrainian culture, a culture that was not really understood and known even inside Ukraine because of the Russian domination of Ukraine until 2014. There was partially Ukrainian identity – in the west of Ukraine, but in the east of the country, in the centre, in the south, it had a less visible presence. I remember now, for example, about the poet I was reading with last night, who wrote before the war in Russian and once the war happened, she switched to Ukrainian. The fact that Ukrainians have developed a cultural identity and have recovered, reconstructed, reunderstood their history, putting aside Russian imperialism, which had contaminated it for centuries, has also meant that the rest of the world has been able to get to know this culture and understand that there is not only Russian culture in Eastern Europe, but there are many other cultures that deserve to be known and understood.
So, this is how the reconstruction of a national identity, which is done very much through culture and literature, opens up the interest of other countries in the region, in the neighbourhood, for that nation that is rebuilding its identity.
Yes, exactly, journalists, for example, who have been following Ukraine since the Orange Revolution or the Maidan protests, say that the country that Ukraine is today is different from the country they first knew in 2014 or before the 2000s. Similarly, when people talk, for example, about Ukrainians helping Russia in the Transnistrian war against Chisinau in 1992, when I was born, Ukrainians respond we were a different country then, today we are something else.
And how did this change come about? What triggered this change? The fact that it looked more towards the Western world, towards the free and democratic world?
No. The invasion of the Russians, the annexation of Crimea, the invasion of eastern Ukraine and then the whole of Ukraine. Once you are physically annihilated, you cannot accept other forms of annihilation, including cultural annihilation.
Paula Erizanu, I watched your reading last night at the Odessa International Literature Festival and I was very impressed by your emotion when you read the poem Fear of War, which you said you wrote in London, where you were living in the early days of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. A poem that begins like this: “Stay where you don’t depend on Odessa, which in turn depends on Nikolaev.” And you said, after reading this poem, that after writing it, you returned from London to Chisinau. What was it like to make that decision?
I wrote this poem at the invitation of Maria Sleahtitsky, the director of the Museum of Literature in Chisinau, who revitalised this institution and who organised a reading of poems about war against war in the first weeks after the invasion. Respectively, it was a kind of poetry on demand, but I enjoyed the invitation because I was able to exorcise, to get rid of certain emotions, to pour them out of me, because in that period, in the first weeks after 24th February 2022, I couldn’t really do anything except read the news, cry a lot and talk to dear people. Plus writing articles, because that’s my job after all.
But the emotions were high and I also felt a certain alienation from London at that time, because I was living, for example, with two flatmates who are British and who said to me maybe I shouldn’t listen to the news so much, because I don’t smile, and it’s not good for me. And they had the best of intentions. But of course this crisis doesn’t allow you to stand by while it affects your family, your country and your region.
That’s why I felt I had to do something as a journalist. I wanted to contribute to telling the stories, telling what is happening in Moldova, the story of Moldova. And I couldn’t do it from London, because, after all, a journalist has to be where his subject is, and somehow professional reasons were combined with emotional reasons, the desire to be with loved ones at such a tense time as those first months of the war, when we thought we were the next casualty – the Republic of Moldova, and when the front was very close to us. Fortunately, in the summer that followed, the Russian army withdrew in the wake of Ukrainian resistance in the east and the front moved away from Moldova, which gave us a greater degree of security.
As a journalist, you wrote about Eastern Europe daily for a while in The Calvert Journal, trying to attract the interest of the English-speaking public to Eastern European themes and issues. How do you see this interest changing after the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Have English-speaking readers become more receptive?
Yes, definitely. I’m a pretty big Twitter user myself. And I remember that before the war, when I used to write, for example, about Soviet-era deportations in Moldova or about the famine, I got some reactions – for example 6. After the war, if I wrote about deportations, I got 600 reactions. Why? Because, suddenly, those stories that we grew up with, that were told to us by our grandparents, parents, teachers, and that seemed to us to belong to the past and to history textbooks, became reality again.
I remember, before the great invasion began, I had a colleague at work, a Russian, married to a Ukrainian and living in eastern Ukraine. And she said that her in-laws were preparing for the Holodomor, they were stocking up on food. It seemed like an exaggeration to us at the time, but it turned out that that understanding of history and the stories that are part of our DNA, of recent experience and the experience of Russian imperialism on our own skin and on the skin of our great-grandparents and grandparents, it turned out that, look, there are still stories that can be repeated.
The Holodomor being the great forced famine caused during the Soviet period in Ukraine…
Yes, in the 1930s, which was also copied in Kazakhstan by the Soviets and in Soviet Moldova in 1946-47.
Paula Erizanu, how do you manage the two forms of writing – journalistic writing and literary writing?
I don’t know if I do it very well, but it seems to me that they often feed off each other. What I’m doing now, for example, in a prose project I’m working on, is to use the interview for research and inspiration, following the model of Svetlana Alexievich or Larisa Turea’s Book of Hunger. So here, journalistic style and literary style or journalistic and literary methods intersect. In other places, I don’t know, they may even contradict each other.
Why do you think it’s important that in wartime writers continue to speak, continue to participate in literary events, continue to call the public to literature, continue to go about their business?
Because that’s our job. And if a writer feels the need to speak out, to testify to what is happening, he or she must do so. The public’s need for poetry, for literature in times of hardship is greater than in times of comfort. In Ukraine, for example, there are writers who have become rock stars like Serhiy Zhadan, for example, whose launches are attended by hundreds of people who are about to launch their next book in one of the biggest halls in Kiev with thousands of people. So it’s clear that in times of crisis we need to feel connected to each other. And literature is precisely that form of intimacy that unites us and helps us feel less alone and less vulnerable. But it’s also a form of getting back to normal life before the crisis.
But what do you think literature can do? What can writers do in times of war? What do they bring to the public that journalists don’t, that the news doesn’t?
Probably often the news is more formalistic, somehow it’s more rigid, it’s a more top-down look at things, whereas poems are an inside look from the side, a backward look, a forward look. But on the other hand, there are different forms of journalism and different forms of literature. When you listen, for example, to the experience of a man going through war on the radio, that’s also a form of literature. Maybe it’s a first-person essay, a diary. So often these forms intersect more than we’re ready to admit.
Forms of storytelling, different forms of storytelling…
We know that you can write as the events unfold about overwhelming historical events, about tragedies, like this war. You can also write years after historical events. You yourself have written both as the events unfold and after they have settled. You wrote in the heat of the moment. I’m thinking of the diary that became your first book, a non-fiction book, it’s true, but in which you documented those days in April 2009 in Chisinau. And I’m also thinking of this poem I mentioned earlier, Fear of War, written in the early days of the Russian invasion. It’s also written like that from a distance. I’m thinking, of course, also of your novel, in which two of the women who were part of Lenin’s government come to the fore. What’s it like to write in the heat of the moment, and what’s it like to write decades away from historical events you’ve researched and you didn’t experience them yourself.
Clearly, your level of knowledge is different. I had the advantage of 100 years of experience with Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai, and I know how the Soviet Union, which they tried to establish with Lenin and others, continued its story. But, on the other hand, I have to imagine how they would have felt in the heat of those events and that era. Or when I wrote the diary in the heat of the moment, I didn’t have all the information about where those April 2009 protests would lead. I didn’t know exactly what was going on behind the scenes, whether someone was orchestrating those events or not. It’s true that even now we don’t know much about the events of April 2009. There have been some journalistic investigations that have tried to connect the dots and make some assumptions, but we don’t have a final official version that shows exactly which forces tried to influence those protests and which provoked the violence.
But the fact that we didn’t have that information of what was going to happen didn’t mean that we didn’t have other information, which was the testimony on the ground. All these details that you notice when you’re a participant, that here come some people who don’t look like the rest of the protesters, because they’re all shaved on their heads and dressed in sports suits. And it’s like they’re not from here. So, when I was writing, I was thinking that I had to write about these protests, because I would forget and because over time all sorts of political figures would try to manipulate the meanings of that event and represent it as it would suit their interests. That’s why I thought it was essential to talk about things as I saw them at the time, from the perspective of a teenager. And, indeed, today, when I sometimes leaf through the book, I still find details I had forgotten.
You were really very young, you were 17 as young as the other protesters. It was the Twitter revolution, as it was called in the Republic of Moldova, but you already had a very strong civic consciousness at that age.
I think that’s when it was born. There were some prerequisites for that civic consciousness, but it was born at that time, when we came together, we saw each other. I felt then that I was part of a political community for the first time, and in fact this can be compared to what happened in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or the Maidan protests. They are moments that create the nation. The nation is not just a past, a myth of the glorious past or an experience of the past, but it is also the present and a vision of the future. And these public demonstrations actually coalesce a part of society around a vision of what we want our country to be going forward, where do we want it to go.
Paula Erizanu, how do you see the links between writers from Moldova and Romania? Do we know each other well enough?
Yes, it seems to me that at the cultural level there is already a kind of union, in the sense that Romanian authors publish with publishers in the Republic of Moldova, authors from the Republic of Moldova publish with publishers in Romania and books that appear in Romania or in the Republic of Moldova circulate in one country and in another. There is a sense of community. The online space facilitates the maintenance of these relationships and these communities. It is true that it sometimes separates them, when there is a scandal and the community is divided into two or more little churches.
But yes, it seems to me that we are living in a good moment that was not possible until the 1990s, because Romanian books did not even exist in Soviet Moldova. My parents’ generation used to go to Odessa to buy books in Romanian or to Chernivtsi. They couldn’t find them in Chisinau. Romanian literature, which was known in the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, was also very limited. ”Mihai Eminescu, the greatest Moldovan poet,” I read in a Soviet textbook. Sadoveanu was also taught, there were a few Ion Creanga, especially writers from the Moldavian area, but many classics and especially contemporaries were not known there at all.
Does this war bring us closer to the Black Sea region, I wonder. Does it make us close ranks?
Yes. Look, for example, yesterday’s event or today’s events where Ukrainian writers come to Bucharest and there is a real interest in their literature (the hall was full here), shows that this cultural exchange has intensified and there has been a greater openness on both sides to cultural products from Ukraine or Romania or the Republic of Moldova. At the same time, the Black Sea is big, we have Turkey, we have Georgia, we have a lot of countries around the Black Sea and I can’t say that this war has necessarily brought us closer to Turkey, for example. Although Turkey is playing an important role in the negotiations between the Russians and the Ukrainians, which could not have been foreseen before the war.
How do you see Moldova’s near future?
I’m worried, I’m a bit anxious, because we have parliamentary elections next year…
…and presidential elections this year?
I think that in the presidential elections there are more chances for Maia Sandu to get another mandate, but in the parliamentary elections next year it is not clear if the pro-European parties can get a majority and this makes me a bit nervous and I am trying to see what steps I can take, as a journalist, as a writer, to help fight against Russian propaganda, which is very strong, it has intensified.
The Institute of War Studies also said a few weeks ago that Russia is preparing a so-called new and bigger psychological or propaganda operation in the Republic of Moldova to destabilise the political situation. They also said that the statements about Transnistria that have been made in recent days would be part of this strategy to destabilise Moldova politically through propaganda, and that we might see a turning point in the coming days, on 28-29 February, which would trigger a political crisis following the so-called congress of Transnistrian deputies and Putin’s speech the following day.
But for now we don’t know exactly what will happen. I very much hope that Moldova will become European, that Moldova’s European course will become ossified or that it will no longer be possible to turn back. And I will do my best, as far as I can with my spoon, to quote Amos Oz, and I hope that as many of my fellow citizens as possible will do the same, and so will Romania or other European partners, because, in fact, Romania is helping us in many ways, but in other ways it is taking strange steps. For example, at the moment, the PSD is supporting Ceban (the mayor of Chișinău), who on 24 February 2022 was in Moscow and who was pro-Russian and now pretends to be pro-European. Which seems to me an enormous risk. I wouldn’t trust him as a politician.
Paula Erizanu Thank you very much for coming to Radio Romania Cultural. The Odessa International Literature Festival is being held this year in Bucharest, at the Goethe Institute. It started yesterday and lasts until Sunday. You can also listen to Timpul Prezent (Present Time) on the Radio Romania Cultural website, as well as on podcast platforms. I am Adela Greceanu. See you soon!
Photo: Paula Erizanu (source: YouTube)
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