The refusal to grant Mircea Cărtărescu membership of the Romanian Academy of Romanian writers has sparked discussion and surprise in the Romanian cultural milieu, which is usually characterized by its almost complete absence from public dialog. The author of Solenoid received 73 of the 74 votes required to become a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy’s General Assembly, just one vote short of the 74 required to become a corresponding member. Or narrowly missed that status.
Mircea Cărtărescu is the best-known Romanian writer since the fall of communism, having debuted in 1980 with poetry and translated into more than 20 languages, poet, then prose writer, essayist, journalist and translator. Why was he rejected? The ”arguments” that transpired in public are in the area of a nationalism of the 1900s, as Romanians would say. A pre-1989 prose writer believes that Mircea Cărtărescu does not write fiction as it was written in the 19th century. Why can’t Cărtărescu’s prose have more characters than Thomas Mann’s books? Sounds like another of that writer’s grievances from communism. If such reproaches from other eras sound only childish, well, reactionary tendencies are not lacking and another academic is indignant that Mircea Cărtărescu would “insult the Romanian people” when he spoke about Cioran’s fascism or Eminescu’s anti-Semitism, historical realities that are known, documented, but obviously concealed by the nationalist media in the Romanian cultural space. The nationalism of less enlightened historical eras (and this is a euphemism) is well known, as evidenced by the discourse of the Romanian Academy, which is now also mentioned by a liberal writer such as Radu Vancu or Ana Blandiana. But the question arises: have Romanians always been reactionary?
To be able to see why and how (let’s say that some kind of answer might be possible), it wouldn’t hurt to look at examples from the pre-modern stage of culture north of the Danube. More specifically, to that period of the penetration of Western philosophy, culture and mores into the Romanian space – the first half of the 19th century. The two Romanian principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, were opening up to Western influence, and in 1829 the gazette Curierul Românesc appeared, considered by many historians to be the birth of Romanian journalism, and in 1837 the cultural supplement Curierul de ambe sexe appeared. The sons of privileged boyars studying in France were enthusiastic about notions such as liberalism, secularism, civil marriage, the right to divorce and land for peasants, and they believed that all of these would also be appropriate for Romanians from the two provinces. As is usually the case, when something new appears in terms of social behavior, invariably there will also be a reaction, opposition from those areas that are used to things as they know them, as they were before. Those who wanted westernization are called bonjuriists and are quite well known to Romanian historians. Less well known are those who opposed the Western trend in the Romanian Principalities. They were petty boyars with recently received ranks, coming from the military or church background.
The best known such conservative before the unification of the Principates is Colonel Lăcusteanu, but the funniest of them all is a protopope named Naum Râmniceanu. A name that most Romanian literary critics don’t know, Naum Rîmniceanu is a man of the century in which he lived, that is, the 18th century before the French Revolution. Although he lived between 1764 and 1838-39 (the sources are not very reliable), this little-known author never lived beyond 1789, as evidenced by his opposition to anything that sounded remotely secular. Let us note: ”the devil’s vessel, the godless Volter, the forerunner of the last Antichrist, the world-forer, the utterly alien from the divine, the philosopher of the dark and perishing, the devil-seeing, the abomination of desolation’*’. A pattern is noticeable and Naum Râmniceanu is the ancestor of anyone who will have problems with social change in Romania and beyond. He is also the ancestor of those intellectuals who, in the early 2000s, believed that manele was standing in the way of Romania’s westernization.
Whether it was literary currents and cultural ages such as romanticism, modernism, socialism or postmodernism, or current sensibilities derisively called woke/wokism, sexomarxism or trap music, the privileged circles and not only in Romania or north of the Danube, as they say, have, since the beginning of modernity, shown resistance to change, a usually violent rejection of any novelty and have been guided by the notion that what we call knowledge or culture is available only to a few, to a select group. To the question in the title, I think the answer could be: they could not fail to be.
*The quotation comes from G. Călinescu, History of Romanian literature from its origins to the present day (Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent), București: Minerva, 1982.
Photo: Romania seems to have an old and conservative spirit (source: Pixabay, CC0)
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