Why don’t Romanians read?

Alexandru Ionașcu

Summary

This is a summary of Alexandru Ionașcu’s views on the state of reading in Romania today.

Historical Root

• Romanians’ low reading habits were first documented by Dimitrie Cantemir in the early 18th century, who observed a widespread distrust of formal education in Moldavia’s rural society, where learning was viewed as unnecessary or even a cause of madness.
• Centuries of geopolitical instability delayed the creation of formal educational institutions, keeping literacy tied strictly to basic practical needs and church life.

Modern Structural Deficits

• Romania currently ranks last in the EU for reading, with 11 million Romanians failing to read a single book in the past year.
• Key causes include high book prices, social media addiction, and severe underfunding of public education and libraries—a trend exacerbated by ongoing austerity measures.

Socio-Political Context

• Cantemir’s historical observations are frequently cited by contemporary intellectuals to frame Romanians’ perceived anti-intellectualism.
• The decline in reading is part of a global trend driven by digital media and austerity, which commentators link to increasing political radicalization and the erosion of community literary spaces.

Article

In recent years, the observation that Romanians do not read has become a cliché. All commentators in cultural circles, publishers and even journalists know that Romanians read very little, if at all, and they are right: all surveys point to this reality. Indeed, the press provides concrete figures on just how many people do not open a book: 11 million Romanians have not read a single book in the last year. We rank last in the European Union for reading, and the reasons why so many Romanians do not read are varied – ranging from the well-known lack of time or addiction to social media, to the ever-rising prices of books, which are on the verge of becoming a luxury item. Looming over all these causes is the long-standing underfunding of public libraries. We are already in the midst of a new wave of austerity, so we can expect further library closures, particularly in small towns and rural areas, whilst our public education system is receiving even less funding and suffering from a drain on qualified staff: there are fewer and fewer teachers, especially in mathematics.

The cultural press north of the Danube urges that Romanians should not be blamed for not reading and explains the reasons behind this phenomenon, noting in passing that, when a state supports reading, it supports not only the infrastructure that fosters an interest in books, but also the formation of small communities of people sharing the same passions and interests. That is to say, a community, a community centre – as the writer from Dilema Veche puts it, keywords one would not expect to see in a right-wing publication. But none of these observations are new.

The first person to write about Romanians’ relationship with reading was the scholar Dimitrie Cantemir (1674–1723). Twice Voivode of Moldavia (for a few weeks in 1693 and later in 1710–1711), Dimitrie Cantemir was the first Enlightenment figure in Romanian cultural history – a philosopher, musicologist, historian and geographer whose writings and interests were far more extensive than I can cover in this brief text. He was the first Romanian scholar to become a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, at whose instigation he wrote Descrierea Moldovei, a text in Latin considered to be the first scientific study in Romanian culture. Descriptio Moldaviae, as the study was originally titled, contains information on the geography, politics, history, administration, language and traditions of the pre-modern state of Moldova, which was at that time a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. In a subchapter entitled ‘On the Customs of the Moldavians’, the scholar-voivode – who was then a refugee in the Russian Empire following a failed attempt to break free from Ottoman rule – also reflects on the relationship of Moldavian Romanians with books, having nothing positive to say on the matter.

What does Cantemir write? After a few observations on the psychology of the Moldavians, the humanist suddenly writes, without warning: ‘Moreover, not only are the Moldavians not lovers of learning, but almost all of them actually detest it.’ These are by no means flattering words, and the first Romanian Enlightenment thinker does not stop there: ‘They are not even familiar with the names of the fine arts and the sciences.’ The Moldovans were unaware of the developments taking place in Western European science and philosophy at the beginning of the 18th century, nor could they have been, since there was no university in the Romanian Principalities at that time. Consequently, one might think that scientists and scholars left them cold. After all, we are talking about societies – Moldova and Wallachia – that were overwhelmingly rural.

Well, no: the Moldovans of Dimitrie Cantemir’s time had their own views on the class of learned men. They did not merely believe that reading many books was pointless, or that it was a waste of time to learn other languages or observe chemical reactions in a laboratory – as the usual anti-intellectual discourse, obsessed with economic efficiency, might sound today – but they viewed study as a source of mental illness and alienation: ‘They believe that educated people lose their minds, and when they wish to praise someone’s learning, they say that he has gone mad from too much learning.’ A rural society has no access to the written culture of the cities, and its only link to that world is the Orthodox Church. The Moldovan humanist shows that people of his time believed that learning was the preserve of priests, whilst for the ordinary person it was sufficient to know how to read and write just enough to be able to write down their name and the animals they owned.

The harshness of these statements regarding the Moldovans’ contempt for learning and books at the dawn of the Enlightenment shocked subsequent generations of Romanian writers, who wavered between general pessimism and attempts to bring a country—which was emerging very slowly from its rural mindset—into the cultural fold. A Description of Moldova was published in a volume for the general public in 1973 (from which I have quoted above), and the authorities at the time felt the need to explain such statements. An explanatory note accompanying the quoted passages stated that the instability in which pre-modern Moldova had found itself for centuries did not allow for the development of education; the invasions and the rapid succession of princes imposed by the Ottomans could not possibly have inspired the establishment of schools and the opening of academies, the only ones with access to education being the sons of boyars, the majority of whom studied at Polish universities. As if in response to the harsh candour of the humanist prince, the first Romanian university – the University of Iași – was established in Moldova in 1864, amidst a programme of Western-style reforms carried out by Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza.

Although, following the demise of state socialism, Dimitrie Cantemir’s ethnographic study remained merely a subject of academic research, his passage on the Moldavians’ reluctance towards books went on to have one of the most unexpected lives. From Horia-Roman Patapievici’s exasperated and contemptuous reaction in Politice following the 1990 elections – in which Romanians were seen as incapable of living up to the West’s expectations and electing reformist leaders – to Gabriel Liiceanu’s famous editorial on ‘the toothless Romanians’ (which sparked a series of counter-articles aimed, quite rightly, at exposing the classism behind such an unjust label), Cantemir’s paragraph looms large over all right-wing views on Romanians’ relationship with education.

As a largely rural culture, with elites educated abroad and an education system that developed late and at a frustratingly slow pace, Romanians were not all that different from other rural societies around them, such as the Bulgarians. And, however shocking the scarcity of reading and the meagre funding of public culture in present-day Romania may be, such realities are by no means unique to us. In the English-speaking world, too, funding for public education – and, by extension, for libraries – has been cut, hit by waves of neoliberal austerity. Meanwhile, bookshops are either closing down or being forced to diversify their stock with products that have nothing to do with books, as we can all see when we walk into a Cărturești bookshop in a large university town.

Social media and platforms of all kinds have given the impression that anyone can promote their writing and build their own audience without the involvement of critics or publishers. All commentators note the decline in reading and see this as one of the causes of the rise of the far right and the radicalisation of cis-heterosexual men through the misogyny of the ‘manosphere’.

I suppose that some of those who still read books – particularly classical or modern literature – hope that reading will one day come back into fashion, that young people will rediscover the pleasure of reading a classic novel, or that more poetry clubs and literary circles will spring up, and that the few remaining bookshops and second-hand bookshops will bring together small communities, as in the past. Whether or not this happens, whether reading will act as a bulwark against the far right or whether a nineteenth-century novel can offer answers to what is happening to you today, in the twenty-first century, one thing is clear: we know why Romanians do not read, and they are not alone in this lack of reading – it is a widespread phenomenon. Nevertheless, reading itself remains an effort and a choice. Different views of the world, the reinterpretation of old texts, and always the same question: why do we read?

Bibliography: Dimitrie Cantemir, Description of Moldavia. Afterword and bibliography by Magdalena Popescu. Bucharest: Minerva, 1973.

Photo: (source: Pixabay, CC0)

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