The Traditions of Invention

Balkan Studies Library

Editor-in-Chief

Zoran Milutinović, University College London

Editorial Board

Gordon N. Bardos, Columbia UniversityAlex Drace-Francis, University of Amsterdam

Jasna Dragović-Soso, Goldsmiths, University of LondonChristian Voss, Humboldt University, Berlin

Advisory Board

Marie-Janine Calic, University of MunichLenard J. Cohen, Simon Fraser University

Radmila Gorup, Columbia UniversityRobert M. Hayden, University of Pittsburgh

Robert Hodel, Hamburg UniversityAnna Krasteva, New Bulgarian University

Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary, University of LondonMaria Todorova, University of Illinois

Andrew Wachtel, Northwestern University

VOLUME 10

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsl

The Traditions of Invention

Romanian Ethnic and Social Stereotypes in Historical Context

By

Alex Drace-Francis

LEIDEN • BOSTON2013

Cover Illustration: A Romanian (‘Wallachian’) in traditional costume. Trachten-Kabinett von Sie-benbürgen (1729), from a 1692 watercolour. Romanian Academy Library / www.europeana.eu. Author unknown.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Drace-Francis, Alex. The traditions of invention : Romanian ethnic and social stereotypes in historical context / by Alex Drace-Francis.  pages cm. — (Balkan studies library, ISSN 1877-6272 ; volume 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-21617-4 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25263-9 (e-book) 1. Romania—Social conditions. 2. National characteristics, Romanian. 3. Romania—In literature. 4. Romania—Civilization. I. Title.

 DR212.D724 2013 949.8—dc23

2013012194

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ISSN 1877-6272ISBN 978-90-04-21617-4 (hardback)ISBN 978-90-04-25263-9 (e-book)

Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS

List of Tables and Illustrations  ................................................................... viiAcknowledgments  .......................................................................................... ix

Introduction  ..................................................................................................... 1

PART I

SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS

1.  The Traditions of Invention. Representations of the Romanian Peasant from Ancient Stereotype to Modern Symbol  .................... 11

PART II

TRAVEL AND ALTERITy

2.  A Provincial Imperialist and a Curious Account of Wallachia: Ignaz von Born  ........................................................................................... 63

3.  ‘At ten minutes past two, I gazed ecstatically on both lighthouses’: Time, Self and Object in Early Romanian Travel Texts  .............................................................................................................. 91

4.  ‘Like a member of a free nation, he spoke without shame’: Foreign Travellers as a Trope in Romanian Cultural Tradition  115

5.  Dinicu Golescu’s Account of My Travels (1826): Eurotopia as Manifesto  ..................................................................................................... 135

PART III

MyTHS AND DISCOURSES OF THE NATION

6.  National Ideology between Lyrics and Metaphysics: The Political Writings of Mihai Eminescu  .................................................................. 161

7. Ion Luca Caragiale: The Tall Tale of the Romanian Nation  ........ 187

vi contents

PART IV

AT THE VERBAL FRONTIERS OF IDENTITy

 8. Eugen Ionescu’s Selves, 1934–60  ......................................................... 201

 9.  Beyond the Land of Green Plums: Romanian Language and Culture in Herta Müller’s Work  .......................................................... 213

PART V

EAST-WESTISM IN THE COLD WAR AGE

10.  Sex, Lies and Stereotypes: Images of Romania in British Literature, 1945–2000  ............................................................................. 233

11.  Paradoxes of Occidentalism: On Travel and Travel Writing in Ceauşescu’s Romania  .............................................................................. 251

Works Cited  ...................................................................................................... 265Index  ................................................................................................................... 293

LIST OF TABLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Tables

1. Leipzig Valachica, 1774  ............................................................................ 842. Intercontinental ethnography in the London press, 1777  ............. 853. London popular pamphlets, 1779  ......................................................... 854. Frameworks for comparison: Ignaz von Born’s other works  ....... 865. Articles in The Times about Romania, 1996–1998  ............................ 247

Illustrations

1. View of Schemnitz (Banská Štiavnica), site of Maria-Theresa’s Mining Academy (from R. Bright, Travels from Vienna through Lower Hungary, 1818)  ................................................................................ 68

2. Emmanuel-Adolphe Midy ‘Le rencontre’, c. 1840. Encounter between a boyar of the older generation in Oriental dress, and a younger boyar in European dress. Detail from lithograph, Romanian Academy Library  .................................................................. 103

3. A Wallachian boyar, c. 1830. Watercolour by Russian artist “R.G.A.I.”, Romanian Academy Library  ............................................... 140

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A work compiled over as long a period as this one was brings with it many scholarly debts, and I have done my best to recall the assistance I have received along the years. Primary support, encouragement and critical engagement has come from Dennis Deletant, now Emeritus Professor of Romanian Studies at University College London, and Wendy Bracewell, now Professor of Southeast European History at the same institution. With their contrasting but complementary approaches, Dennis and Wendy have suggested topics, readings and contacts in the world of compara-tive Romanian and southeast European history and culture. In Bucharest, I have always found a warm welcome at the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History, as well as at the New Europe College, and have enjoyed many fruitful exchanges with the members and fellows of these establishments, as well as with those of the “A.D. Xenopol” Institute in Iaşi. I have also been fortunate to receive invitations to lecture at the Doctoral School of the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest and try out my ideas on students there in 2010 and 2012: thanks to Mircea Anghelescu and Adrian Stoicescu for facilitating this. An earlier such invitation to the University of Cluj in 2003 was no less fruitful. Colleagues at the Universities of Liv-erpool and Amsterdam, notably Harald Braun, Alexandrina Buchanan, Charles Forsdick, Kirsty Hooper, Michael Hughes, Kate Marsh, Lyn Mar-ven and Brigitte Resl at the first institution, and Joep Leerssen, Michael Wintle, Krisztina Lajosi, Guido Snel and Christian Noack at the second, have engaged in discussion of issues of travel writing and cultural differ-ence, in a most fruitful way.

Xavier Bougarel, after inviting me to present some of my ideas from Chapter 1 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, suggested the title ‘traditions of invention’ for that section. It seemed to me such an inspired coinage that I adopted it for the work as a whole.

Angela Jianu read the manuscript through and offered valuable sugges-tions, references and improvements, especially in respect of structure and continuity. Zoran Milutinović has acted efficiently as efficient editor, and administered the peer review process in a constructive fashion. Ivo Romein has been exemplary in his courteous and prompt assistance. I thank also Brill’s anonymous readers for their helpful comments and observations; and Thalien Colenbrander for her careful production editing.

x acknowledgments

Many other people sent or gave me books, articles and theses, includ-ing Cristina Bejan, Ioana Both, Xavier Bougarel, Cristina Codarcea, Euge-nia Gavriliu, Mihaela Grancea, Florea Ioncioaia, Vintilă Mihăilescu, Andi Mihalache, Cătălina Mihalache, Raluca Muşat, Şerban Papacostea, Jeanine Teodorescu, Maria Todorova, Marius Turda, Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, and Alexandru Zub. For help sourcing illustrations, I am especially grate-ful to Angela Jianu and Cristian Cercel.

IntroductIon

this book gathers a number of studies researched and written over the past fifteen years, on representations of romanian culture from the begin-nings of the modern age to the late twentieth century.

In an earlier book, The making of modern Romanian culture (2006), I attempted an institutional, social-historical survey of the development and production of cultural output in the romanian language over the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries. Here on the other hand, methods and approaches from literary and cultural history are used to elucidate a num-ber of themes and topics in greater detail than could be achieved within a survey work. case studies put the focus on individual actors and docu-ments; or on specific social types or social practices, such as peasants, or travel. At the core of all of them is a focus on the topic of representations of self and other; on the subjective nature of these representations; and on the interplay between formal and informal discourses on identity.

the book also offers a long-term approach. For, while the majority of the studies focus on the period from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth—romanian history’s first ‘era of transition’—an important theme is the persistence of older ideas, for reasons that are elaborated especially in the first chapter. At the same time, I have made significant inroads into the twentieth century, with four chapters dedi-cated to texts and cultural practices after 1900.

Research Context

the study of modern romanian culture in terms of its relations—whether active or passive, oppositional or integrational—to ‘Europe’, has a rela-tively long history. Pompiliu Eliade, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, saw this as an entirely one-way process. He described West-ern influence not in terms of a synthetic element or ‘graft’ of European ideas on existing roots, but as the force which actually brought a culture into existence where none had flourished before.1 others perceived the matter differently, speaking of ‘an old and original civilization’ which

1 Eliade, De l’influence, i–ii.

2 introduction

nevertheless sought ‘respect’, being ‘not yet integrated into the general life of humankind’.2 Inter-war literary and cultural historian Eugen Lovinescu understood romanian relations with western Europe as a two-stage pro-cess, first of ‘imitation’, then of ‘synchronization’.3 A more neutral and popular term to describe romanian cultural relations with western Europe was ‘discovery’.4 Irrespective of their positions, however, pretty much all scholars agreed that issues of culture and identity—especially collec-tive dignity in relation to the outside world—were important aspects of the modernization process that accompanied political independence and the creation of the national state.5

Since the 1960s, despite the constraints placed on research by the com-munist regime, a tradition of ‘image studies’ developed in romania.6 Sig-nificant documentary projects were undertaken, including a ten-volume collection of travellers’ accounts of the romanian lands in the period to 1800.7 Scholars drew partly on the ‘mentalities’ paradigm, following the illustrious tradition of the Annales school, and partly on the traditions of literary image studies or ‘imagology’ developed in comparative literature circles.8 this was supplemented by some important contributions by for-eign scholars, usually interested in the cultural dimension of their own countries’ relations with romania.9

2 Iorga, Roumania, 259; idem, La place des Roumains, I:1.3 Lovinescu, Istoria civilizaţiei. For excellent overviews on the interwar debates, see

Heitmann, ‘das “rumänische Phänomen” ’, Verdery, ‘Moments (II)’; Hitchins, Ruma-nia, 292–334; idem, Identity, 269–96; deletant, ‘the debate’; and trencsényi, Politics. on Lovinescu in particular, see nemoianu, ‘Variable socio-political functions’, and Petrescu, ‘debates’.

4 E.g. călinescu, History, 73–130; Bucur, ‘La découverte de l’Europe’; Marino, ‘Les lumières roumaines découvrent l’Europe’.

5 Zub, ‘Political attitudes’, surveys some important statements around the concept of ‘dignity’; drace-Francis, Making, 5–7 surveys the English-language secondary literature..

6 on the history of research into the study of ethnic stereotypes, or ‘imagology’, see Pageaux, ‘recherche sur l’imagologie’ and especially Leerssen, ‘Imagology’. Some signifi-cant early works of the school were actually published in romania, e.g. Pageaux, ‘une perspective’, or going back still further, drouhet, ‘Le roumain’.

7 Călători străini. A bibliography of 19th-century travellers to romanian lands appeared in Bibliografia istorică, 1:62–70, while cartographical sources were catalogued by Popescu-Spineni, Rumänien.

8 on romanian contacts with French social-cultural history see e.g. Some of the histo-riographical context is covered in Lung, ‘La storia culturale in romania’.

9 outstanding is the monograph of Heitmann, Das Rumänenbild; on English attitudes see the more miscellaneous but still valuable contributions of tappe, ‘rumanian echoes’; idem, ‘Victorian glimpses’; idem, ‘Anglo-rumanian contacts’.

introduction 3

After the collapse of communism, this type of study flourished in romania. Important and in some cases outstanding works were dedicated to such topics as the self-image of the romanians in nineteenth-century schoolbooks; Hungarian attitudes to romanians; romanian images of russians, Greeks or Jews, to name but a few.10

In the English-language scholarship of the same period, issues of geocultural identity and representation also came to the fore, although the scope and methodologies used were different. Works tended to focus less on reciprocal ethnic images than on broader culture areas such as Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Moreover, the inspiration was less from literary image studies than from postcolonial studies, especially Edward Said’s Orientalism. Perhaps especially in the circumstance of the Yugo-slav conflict and the ensuing struggles over representation, questions of the political significance of images and the inequality of control over the means of disseminating them were special objects of scrutiny and debate. the trend generated some impressive scholarly studies which far tran-scend the immediate context and made constructive but not uncritical application of the Saidian paradigm to a geographically contiguous case.11 However, while all these authors touched on romania, many texts still await systematic treatment in English. Moreover, the reception of the postcolonial paradigm by scholars in romania has been somewhat half-hearted, perhaps because the implicit casting of romania as a country subject to passive representations is something a number of scholars are somewhat uncomfortable with.12

10 Gavriliu, Sindromul Gulliver; Murgescu, Între bunul creştin şi bravul român; M. Mitu, Problema românească; S. Mitu, Imagini; Mazilu, Noi şi ceilalţi; Ivanov, Imaginea rusului; Muntean, Imaginea românilor; Pecican, ed. Europa; Lascu, Imaginea Franţei; oişteanu, Inventing the Jew. Vlad, Imagini, studies romanian attempts to represent the national identity abroad through world exhibitions and fairs. For related work in the field of social psychology, see Iacob, Etnopsihologie şi imagologie.

11  the most widely-cited are Bakić-Hayden & Hayden, ‘orientalist variations’; Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, and todorova, Imagining the Balkans. Most important for liter-ary studies is Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania; see also Kostova, Tales of the periphery.

12 the first scholar to adduce orientalism as a relevant concept in respect of romania may have been Verdery. See Verdery, ‘Moments (II)’, 100, 105; eadem, ‘Moments (I)’, 49. the paradigm was then flagged by Antohi, Imaginaire culturel, 250 n5, and Brînzeu, Corridors of mirrors, 14, 39. Iordachi, Citizenship, nation and state-building, applied it to the romanian state’s policies in the dobrogea after 1878. on romanian scholars’ relative lack of inter-est in orientalism, see cioflâncă, ‘cunoaşterea alterităţii’, 121. Leanca, ‘Geografii culturale’ considers some more recent trends.

4 introduction

In the present work I use aspects of ideas from the tradition of ori-entalism and postcolonialism, following the insightful and pioneering work of the above-cited scholars. Indeed, unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t believe it is always necessary to establish a paradigm of ‘Balkan-ism’ fundamentally distinct from orientalism.13 But at the same time my approach is not subordinate to any one tradition and tries to adapt the theory to the relevant case study material. Verbal representations of roma-nia, whether self-images or ones produced by outsiders, cannot be easily understood in a monolithic way. In fact they may belong simultaneously to a set discourses about Europe and its boundaries, and to ones about the orient; while it is equally important to bear in mind that neither of these main paradigms can offer definitive answers, and statements about roma-nian identity may easily have quite other meanings. Simple inventories of images drawn from heterogeneous sources do not always take account of the different functions they play within specific narrative contexts.14

Content and Structure

I start my inquiry in chapter 1—the longest in the book, constituting the whole of Part I—with a consideration of the image of the romanian peas-ant, an archetypal one for discourses about the nation as a whole. While an explicit ideology of ‘peasantism’ did not emerge until the late nineteenth century—a process which I also analyse15—I argue that the general cul-tural context in which it did so owes a lot to older relations and repre-sentations, understanding of which is essential to a proper reading of the terms of the twentieth-century debate. I attempt a comparison between domestic legal and historical discourses, where a strong categorization of the peasant was not in evidence, with foreign discourses, which depicted the inhabitants of this area variously as fierce savages and pacific farmers. this background is then drawn on in an analysis of the nineteenth cen-tury when the image of the peasant developed its modern contours.

13 compare e.g. Hammond, British literature, 43–66; todorova, ‘Balkanism and postco-lonialism’. While todorova is quite right to argue for the ‘historical specificity’ of the Bal-kan experience, such ‘specificity’ can of course involve similitude to as well as difference from regions which were after all part of the same ottoman polity. I develop this point most explicitly in chapter 2 below.

14 Pârâianu, ‘Sintaxa antisemitismului’, 229,15 See ch. 6; and drace-Francis, Making, 178–97.

introduction 5

Part II, ‘travel and alterity’, consists of four studies on discourses of identity and otherness to be found in travel texts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—a key period for the formation and crys-tallization of such discourses. there are two case studies on travellers Ignaz von Born and dinicu Golescu; and two more general studies. the first of the latter looks at romanian responses—both acquiescent and polemical—to being the object of Western travellers’ descriptions and evaluations. the second looks at romanian travellers’ own travel experi-ences and particularly at the techniques they used to represent it in a romantic paradigm. In all these studies I try to bring nuance to the analy-sis of the ‘othering’ process by focusing on a series of common factors. these include: the biography and motivations of individual authors; com-parision of ‘Eastern’ discourses with Western ones, and vice versa, as well as continued interrogation of whether these might be relevant or mean-ingful labels for given texts; analysis of publication contexts and paths of dissemination and reception (or lack of it); and consideration of rhetorical structures and strategies which might serve to advance certain messages or even relativize or ironize them.

Part III, ‘Myths and discourses of the nation’, examines two writers and texts from the ‘classic’ period of romanian literature, around the time of independence. A reconsideration is offered of the political journalism of national poet Mihai Eminescu. this, considered a ‘controversial’ topic in romania, is often discussed but less frequently analysed. dramatist Ion Luca caragiale, often juxtaposed to Eminescu as evincing a satirical or even sarcastic attitude to nationhood, was also a great writer of short sto-ries. these are considered here as producing a more complex, dialogic representation of national language and character. In both cases, complex representations of foreigners are also produced, as Jews but also Greeks and others are juxtaposed to romanians and find their place as characters in the national imaginary.

Part IV, ‘At the verbal frontiers of identity’, examines a further two writers, both born and raised in romania, who went on to find fame and reputation abroad. Eugen Ionescu wrote several books and a large body of journalism in romanian before leaving the country aged 32 (in 1942). His later work rarely treated the topic of romania explicitly, but his roma-nian background, still relatively little known by scholars, throws much light both on his own oeuvre and on the broader issues of identity and alterity. Herta Müller’s native language was German, not romanian. She spent a litle longer than Ionescu in romania, being 34 at the time of her departure (in 1987), but her work focuses more explicitly on romanian

6 introduction

experiences and landscapes. I explore attitudes to romanian identity both in these writers’ explicit affirmations, and in certain themes and motifs from their literary works. I then try to put these in the context of the cul-tural and geographical politics with which their life and work was bound up. considering these two cases side by side gives us a glimpse into the potential complexity and variety of attitudes to romanian culture and identity, which could easily be explored further through any number of exiled or ‘hyphenated’ writers.

the final part, V, also consists of two studies, this time surveys focus-sing on the period after 1945. the first treats the representation of roma-nia in British literature, especially fiction and travel literature. the second looks at the record of romanian travel literature about Europe during the same interval. As short surveys, both are necessarily selective, and focus on a limited number of themes which seemed salient in both traditions. But they both establish a record and offer, I hope, points for future com-parison. Placing the articles together demonstrates that both British and romanian travel writers had recourse to strategies of ‘othering’ their des-tinations, in both positive and negative ways. there are also, of course, asymmetries—for instance British writers portray romanians in an erotic key, whereas the reverse is not true at all. And the two types of discourse were largely elaborated in conditions of mutual ignorance.

taken together, the studies must stand for a small sample of the com-plexities that questions of romanian identity and alterity could provoke. other categories, particularly those of gender, age, regional identity and countless others, must await future analysis. Moreover, I should stress that the purpose of this work is not to ‘answer’ the question of who the roma-nians are (or, in studies dedicated to views of other cultures, to reduce them to a single, identifiable ‘romanian’ perspective). the question of who exactly is gazing upon whom (in the singular or plural) is in con-stant flux, and the purpose of these diverse studies is to give a sense of the variety of possible actors that participate in this process of reciprocal, if asymmetrical, scrutiny and spectation. the very names of the partici-pants change over time, as do the size and form of the given groups. In particular cases—striking are the ‘hyphenated’ writers like Ionescu and Müller—it is simply impossible to define the actors unilaterally as insiders or outsiders. Studying them does, however, give a unique insight into the ways boundaries are being constantly drawn, broken down and redrawn, often according to quite time-specific factors. Moreover, I have also given attention not just to the content of cultural representations but also to the processes of their dissemination, adaptation and interpretation, which

introduction 7

have a decisive effect on the influence and significance of representations. As such, this is a work as much of social history as of literary and cultural history, although in any case I believe the two enterprises to be funda-mentally intertwined.

For that reason, many of the studies here do not focus solely on naming and defining different groups such as ‘romanians’ and ‘Westerners’ and implicitly constructing lines of difference in the process. I have argued that some researchers, by the very process of declaring an intention to study, say, ‘Western’/‘British’ images of ‘the Balkans’ have installed a presupposi-tion of difference between the two categories which the texts themselves may not always bear out.16 the focus here is therefore not solely on a ‘cumulative’ technique. Each study adopts a methodology such as I hope is appropriate and sensitive to the material. As such it is introduced at the start of each chapter. Moreover, by adopting a multidirectional approach, using different perspectives—not just bilateral, a sense of the multiple possibilities of identity can hopefully emerge. It is the kind of historical research where, precisely by privileging the surface impressions and over-arching conceptions and forms over the mineralogically overvalued detail of the archive document, a sense of the complexity of the representational process emerges. As romanian historian nicolae Iorga once observed, ‘the past ages of the social and political life of the peoples of the world can not be understood without recourse to forgotten literature’.17 or, as Fernand Braudel concluded, when confronted with the impossibility of defining history except by conceiving of it as ‘the sum of all possible historians’,18 it is necessary, when considering ethnic, social or geocultural representa-tions, to think of such souces as but part of a greater spectrum of possible categories and images.

16 drace-Francis, review of Jezernik; idem, review of Hammond.17 Iorga, Les écrivains, preface.18 Braudel, ‘Histoire et sciences sociales’, 734.

part one

SoCIaL repreSentatIonS

Chapter one

the tradItIonS of InventIon. repreSentatIonS of the romanIan peaSant from anCIent Stereotype to

modern SymboL*

Introduction: Past and Peasant

historians and sociologists have not yet reached full agreement as to whether ‘the peasant’ really exists, or whether he (for it is generally a ‘he’ that is being discussed) was invented by people who, not counting them-selves as peasants, sought for their own purposes to ascribe certain values to certain ways of life.

Some scholars would reject outright the attempt to produce a rigorous definition, asserting that ‘the concept ‘peasant’ has no precision what-soever’ and that ‘it is essentially a folk term adopted into social science usage without the necessary scientific refinement’; that it represents a dubious search for essences; that it fails to account for the role of the other in delimiting such roles; that it is inevitably used to back a political agenda, and so on.1 others would like to reject definitions that do not take into account the precise economic patterns and activities of the people in question.2

Still others are more optimistic about the chances of categorizing the peasant, but would insist upon a proper historical and regional delimita-tion. reinhard Wenskus offered a formulation that was accepted by later historians: this time the emphasis was on defining the peasant against non-european modes of production, and against later (‘industrial’) or earlier (‘primitive’) society.3 Western europe, it is said, ‘achieved a peas-antry in the high middle ages as a result of various social and techno-logical changes: the development of the mouldboard plough and harness;

* Unpublished. a much earlier version was presented at the ecole des hautes etudes en Sciences Sociales, paris, 16 march 2001. I am pleased to thank Xavier bougarel for that invitation, and nataša Štefanec (Zagreb), Şerban papacostea (bucharest) and paul Stephenson (nijmegen) for specialist advice on medieval and early modern scholarship.

1  Leeds, ‘mythos and pathos’, 228–31.2 orlove, ‘against a definition of peasantries’.3 Wenskus, Wort und Begriff ‘Bauer’ [1973], cited in rösener, The peasantry of Europe,

18–20.

12 chapter one

the three-field system; the evolution of the professional knightly class.’4 In other quarters, a hot debate ensued over the dating of the disappear-ance of the peasant class from western europe. In his book Peasants into Frenchmen, historian eugen Weber argued that it was only in the third quarter of the nineteenth century that peasant forms of life finally dis-appeared from rural france as a result of the encroaching influence of the state. his thesis, however, was not unanimously approved—Charles tilly for one, countered that the ‘proletarianization’ of the peasant had in fact begun much earlier, around 1800.5 yet another authority, eric Wolf, saw the process of ‘capitalization’ of the peasantry as having gained irre-versible momentum in the West in the mid-eighteenth century and, in eastern europe, as having reached its apogee around the 1860s, with the emancipations in russian, polish, romanian and other lands: ‘put in gen-eral terms, peasants became farmers.’6

romanian intellectuals have expressed a similar diversity of opinions about the reality or otherwise of the peasant. In an issue of the cultural journal Transilvania dedicated to the peasant in the mid 1990s, a num-ber of them were asked whether they thought the romanian peasant still existed. the responses ranged from a belief that ‘popular culture is a living flame’, to the affirmation that ‘today, the romanian peasant no longer exists’, to ‘I can’t give you an informed answer. I haven’t just come fresh from a tour of romanian villages and I couldn’t draw any conclu-sions without falsifying the state of things.’7 elsewhere in post-communist romania, the peasant was described variously as a mystification, and as an all-too-real obstacle to european integration. one commentator remarked that ‘for too long the peasant has been the obverse image of our everyday illusions and helplessness; out of this has come an authoritarian ideal-ization, which has falsified not only what we know about our past, but also what we ought to do in the present’, thus placing the concept of the peasant in the sphere of the imaginary.8 another pro-european writer, on the other hand, argued that peasant societies do have real general char-acteristics, and that such characteristics have a negative effect on roma-nian modernization: ‘rural society, traditional, enclosed, isolated, having

4 rösener, The peasantry of Europe, 20–9.5 Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen; tilly, ‘did the cake of custom break?’, 29–33.6 Wolf, Europe and the people without history, 317–8.7 Transilvania: interviews with, respectively, Stăniloae (29–32); paleologu (68–77); pleşu

(81–3). the editor, mircea, avowed his intention of ‘resuscitating a theme of ongoing living interest, but deliberately avoiding its excesses’ (8).

8 patapievici, ‘despre ţăran’, 102.

the traditions of invention 13

an instinctive reaction of mistrust and self-defence in the face of the ‘stranger’, cannot think and act in the european spirit. It is animated by other values and other reflexes. Its traditions are diametrically opposed, conservative, religious. only the town, in contrast, opens new horizons to its inhabitants’.9

If I choose to use the term ‘invention’, that is neither because I think peasants didn’t exist, nor because I think the elaboration of the concept was only a literary or juridical fabrication. Just as imagined communities are not always imaginary, so invention can refer to the discovery of a real phenomenon, as well as to the elaboration of a mythological one. perhaps a more apt way to define invention is to go back to the Latin inventio, a term in classical rhetoric for the selection of a theme for a discourse. this meaning avoids the distinction between discovery and fabrication which is common to modern discourse history—but also describes well what cer-tainly did happen with the peasant in nineteenth-century romania. the peasant was selected as a central theme for both writing and oratory.

any examination of the literary development of the peasant must grap-ple with the meaning of the word itself. In romania the very word for peasant—ţăran—became a kind of magnet which attracted a particular set of values to it; and these figures often substituted for, and made more difficult, a proper understanding of what peasants are. If we are to be able to define peasants at all, we need to recognize that peasant is as much a word as a real person. nevertheless, the concept ‘peasant’, theodor Shanin has asserted,

is not an empty word reflecting the prejudices of the populus, the linguis-tic frivolities of the intellectuals, or else the plots of ideological henchmen, even though each of these may be true at times . . . the conceptualization of peasant specificity rests on the admission of the complexity and degrees of the ambivalence of social reality and expresses an attempt to grapple with it on a theoretical level. It is not an answer but a working hypothesis and a tool which help to elicit answers.10

those, then, who would argue that there really is such a thing as ‘peasant specificity’ need precisely to concede the fact that the reality behind the image is no more simple than anybody else’s: that, like most words denot-ing social classes or categories, ‘peasant’ is rather an intellectual tool than

 9 marino, Pentru Europa, 44.10 Shanin, Defining peasants, 73.

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an all-embracing description of a uniform reality: a concept, rather than a fixed group of people.

often this has been a distillation of literary and historical idées reçues. a certain set of writers provide the contours which defined ‘the peasant’, giving the figure not only its social definition, but a positive or negative moral value. ernest Gellner observed this when writing about the differ-ent cultural strategies employed by nationalists in eastern and western europe during the nineteenth century: ‘In the Westernmost time zone, national unity is forged with, but against the peasantry. “peasant” is a term of abuse, not of endearment, in such societies.’ In east-Central europe, on the other hand,

a national and state culture is created not in opposition to peasant idiosyn-cracy, but on the basis of it. a folk Culture is used to forge an operational high Culture. of course, this culture has to be sifted and distilled and stan-dardized; but none the less, it must first of all be investigated in its raw state, if it is ever to be streamlined and codified, so as to provide the base for a new high Culture around which a nation and state are to be created.11

a critical examination of that process of sifting, distillation and standard-ization to which Gellner refers, and of which the end result was the cre-ation of the figure of the peasant as one of the cornerstones of modern romanian identity, is the subject of the present article.

one could limit the period in which romanians’ ideas of the peasant underwent their most dramatic and fundamental development by look-ing at two dictionary definitions, one fifty years later than the other. the transylvanian compilers of the first published romanian dictionary, the quadrilingual Lexicon published at buda in 1825 are significantly hesitant about the meaning of the word. their entry for Ţeranu is as follows:

1. the son or inhabitant of a certain country: indigena, patriae filius: hazafi: Der Burger, das Landeskind.

2. one who is in a country with me: popularis, gentilis: foldi: der Landesmann.3. (–)4. Some have glossed this word to mean ploughman, or villager (qv.)

(from Lat. terrenus. Ital. tereno.)12

In other words, the word ţăran does not even necessarily have a rural identity attached to it, or at least only in its secondary meaning; it is a

11  Gellner, Encounters with nationalism, 191; hofer, ‘Creation’, offers more detail.12 maior et al., Lexicon Valacho-Latino-Hungarico-Germanum, sub voce. translating the

romanian, I have left the other three languages (Latin, magyar, German) in the original.

the traditions of invention 15

civic conception based on political membership rather than a term denot-ing ethnie, mode of production, place of residence or any other socially differentiating criterion. other dictionaries of this period likewise omit the word.13

by 1876, the second volume of a.t. Laurian and I. massim’s Dictiona-riu, commissioned by the recently-founded romanian academy, was published in bucharest. the word ţăran (spelt terranu, for these lexicog-raphers were committed to a Latinist orthography in order to emphasize the roman origins of their language) was defined as follows:

terranU [rusticus, colonus, ruricola]. he who works the land [pamintulu], who is settled on the land [campania]. the peasants plough, sow, harvest and thresh; the peasants are the basis of the land [terra]; the peasants lead a simple life, but a laborious one; our peasants are of a rare frugality, they eat only cereals, vegetables and fruit, milk, cheese and eggs; very rarely do they eat meat; and despite all this they are healthier than the urban dwellers.14

obviously this moralizing normative definition did not arise from nowhere. one might therefore reasonably assume that romanians’ atti-tudes towards peasants dramatically altered in the years between these two definitions: and this was indeed the case.

however, despite this apparently clear-cut state of affairs, in which the peasant is evidently the subject of an invented tradition, there are many nuances which need to be taken into account, even in the most general survey of writings on the peasant.

prior to the systematic attempt by romanian writers to construct and diffuse images of their people as a ‘peasant nation’,15 the Wallachian and moldavian principalities, occupying as they did a marginal and contested space on the european map, had been the subject of a certain number of cultural characterizations from outside, especially from the West. they were sometimes seen as a barbaric people, but also as simple peaceful folk; as incapable of civilization but also as bearing certain ancient and

13 Clemens, Walachische Sprachlehrer für Deutsche. Ţăran is not listed, while the nor-mal German word for peasant, ‘bauer’, is defined as ‘land worker, villager’ [lucrătoriu de pămănt, săténu] i.e. without use of the word ţăran.

14 Laurianu & massimu, Dictionariulŭ Limbeĭ Romane, s.v.15 Several works deal with this debate from the point of view of intellectual history:

ornea, Ţărănismul; Jowitt, ed. Social change; durandin, ‘Une étape’; eadem, ‘Le bon sujet’; eadem, ‘Les intellectuels’; verdery, ‘moments, II’; mihăilescu, ‘Comment peut-on être pay-san?’; muşat, Sociologists. from the perspective of ideas on language and folklore: Kar-noouh, L’invention, 75–122; from that of literary history: Craia, Orizontul rustic; Câncea, ‘Situaţia ţărănimii’.

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praiseworthy characteristics which might constitute a critique of the civi-lized world; as a negative example or as an ironic counterpoint to Western vanity and egocentrism. moreover, since romanian literary discourse was frequently concerned with presenting the national character to a Western audience, romanians were compelled both to react to and to assimilate existing Western preconceptions about a) romanians; and b) peasants. for the nineteenth-century romanian writers’ discovery of the peasant went hand in hand with their discovery of ‘europe’; and their encounter with the latter, I shall argue, decisively influenced their conceptualization of the former.16 If the creation of a peasant identity within romania is a modern affair, then the identity of the romanians as peasants has a rather older history in certain writings in wide circulation in the rest of europe.

this symbolic transmission of messages ‘outwards’ was combined with a need to use ideas ‘inwards’, to create durable images and symbols that can form part of the new, nationalized identity. Internally, the struggle for nationhood involved a degree of social transformation. for romanians, the principal forms this social transformation took were the establish-ment of a modern democratic constitution and the move from a disrupted semi-pastoral tributary economy to a producer of agricultural goods on the world market. this alteration carried with it the need to redefine the social centre of gravity; the basis of political legitimacy—coming now from the people, rather than from divine right or military triumph. In this context, literature functions as a tool for representing new social realities; for providing a concrete image of the people conceived as a whole; and for forging a sense of unity among hitherto disparate parts: ‘only eloquence, the love of letters and the fine arts can make of a territory a fatherland, and give to the nation living there the same tastes, the same habits and the same sentiments.’17 this very frequently takes the form of anthropomor-phic characterizations: the idea that nations represent different individual types, and the qualities of a nation can be resumed in a single figure: a process that by its very nature involves aesthetic representation.

the attitudes of pre-modern romanian writers are also relevant because the nineteenth-century writers themselves attempted to identify—on their own terms, of course—with an older body of literature and tradition in the romanian principalities, in order to provide a historical basis for their rhetorical model. those who ‘invented’ the romanian peasant were

16 marino, ‘Les Lumières roumaines’.17 de Staël, De la littérature, 56.

the traditions of invention 17

also obsessed with history: they associated the peasant with the past, with tradition and with their literary forebears. thus a romanian writ-ing in 1880 might call upon the testimony of a chronicle written in 1650 to substantiate claims that there was such a thing as a ‘peasant state’ in romania in 1400. for eminescu, romania’s greatest poet and one of the key elaborators of the peasant ideal, ‘love of the fatherland is not love of the furrow, of the soil, but of the past’.18 It will be my contention that ‘the peasant’ was not a coherent concept in these earlier writings, and that when the older tradition of romanian literature and historiography dealt with the peasant at all, this tended to be in a negative, dismissive mode which subsequently had to be jettisoned or revised.

the rest of this chapter, then, will be divided into three parts. first, I shall attempt to highlight certain images of the danubian peasant that figure in classical and modern european literature. this ‘european’ part will be concerned with generalised images of peasants and of their super-imposition onto, or overlap with, images of romanians. Secondly, in an analysis of usages of the word in older romanian writings, I intend to show that the word ţăran had various different meanings and values already attached to it before 1830; but that, in general, the word lacked its main modern connotations. finally, I shall discuss a selection of writers who, during the course of the nineteenth century, were responsible for transforming both the meaning of the word and the symbolic value of the image.

The Romanian Peasant: A European Invention?

i) The Classical Legacy

the romans had their own cult of agrarian life; and this too involved the manipulation of images about the countryside in order to establish and maintain a stable social and political order. after octavius Caesar estab-lished himself as sole emperor after the battle of actium in 31 bce, he used the harmonious songs of his friend virgil in order to reconcile his soldiers to their new estates. over fifty different books of Georgics, poems prais-ing the agrarian life and evoking the belief of the elder Cato that ‘tillers of the soil make the best soldiers and the strongest men’, were published

18 eminescu, ‘vremea strămoşilor noştri’, 60.

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in the first few years of augustus’s rule.19 horace complained that the regal villas of the new rich leave few acres for ploughing, and that ‘this is not the norm our ancestors divined, that romulus and rough-bearded Cato prescribed.’20 a particular historicity was thus evoked, an associa-tion of agrarian practices and rustic simplicity with ancestors and with a golden past.21 Indeed, according to virgil, the very introduction of agricul-ture dated to the arrival of Jove, king of the gods:

before Jove’s time no settlers brought the land under subjection;not lawful even to divide the plain with landmarks and boundaries:all produce went to a common pool, and earth unpromptedWas free with all her fruits.22

on the other hand, the Latin poets delimited their tradition not only according to time—the beginnings of their gods—but also by space.

as some of the oldest sources for the history of the space now occupied by romanians come from roman writers, it is interesting to see how these sources reflect the agrarian virtues when writing about the people whom the romanians consider their ancestors: known as dacians or Getae and inhabiting the little-known outposts of empire.

horace counterpoised the pacificity of the roman rustic with the dacians’ aggression: in his ode to the Goddess fortuna, he writes that she is entreated not only by the ‘rustic peasant’, but even ‘by dacian savages and Scythian refugees’ (odes I:38). elsewhere he maintains the contrast between the ‘fleet’ dacian menacing the city, and the values of the metropolis (odes III:6; III:8). thus for horace the dacians stand in contrast both to the city and to the ploughman: they are a barbarian peo-ple, whose possible virtue is bravery but whose chances of rustic peace are slim.

ovid, who was exiled on the black Sea coast for the ten years to his death in ad 18, also generally portrayed the Getae as barbarians. he noted a tendency towards agriculture, but saw it imperilled by the generally war-like conditions prevailing on the edge of empire:

the harsh enemy, in great number, comes in flight like a bird, and scarcely have you sighted him when he has seized his prey . . . So it is, that rarely do

19  Gibbon, Essai sur la littérature, 35–40.20 horace, Odes II:15: ‘Iam pauca aratro’, trans. W. Shepherd.21  Williams, The country and the city, 13–20.22 virgil, Georgics, trans. C. day Lewis, 125–8.

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you see somebody daring to cultivate the land, and even he, wretched fel-low, ploughs with one hand and holds his weapon in another.23

these Latin poets’ stress on the contrast between ‘pacific’ agriculture and ‘warlike’ tribes has roots as far back as herodotus and other Greek writ-ers, who had described thracians and others occupying the same space to the north of the Lower danube, to the effect that ‘they could be one of the most powerful nations of the earth’ but that ‘to them, idleness is extremely widespread, while working the fields is a most humiliating practice.’24 but elsewhere horace toyed ironically with the possibility that one day the dacians might study his work (odes II, 20). finally, and most curiously, in one of his habitual critiques of the decadence of urban mores at rome, he evokes the ‘stiff-necked Getae (et rigidi Getae)’,

Immetata quibus jugeras liberas for whom unnumbered acres make communal

fruges et cererem ferunt harvests under Ceres.nec cultura placet longior annua each brave works a year on the land: defunctumque laboribus his service remitted,aequali recreat sorte vicarius. a successor continues by equal rota. Illic matre carentibus there stepmothers behave privignis mulier temperat innocens rationally to orphaned daughters, nec dotata regit virum no women rule by dowryConiux nec nitido fidit adultero. and wives do not trust in some sleek

adulterer.25

In other words, the Getae are portrayed as the idyllic counterpoint to the corrupt and greedy city-dwellers, whose communal life of innocence, despite its reputation for harshness and wildness, may serve to point to a better way. at the same time their practices are reminiscent of those of the romans before the intervention of the god Jove. the evocation of a barbarian people as a rhetorical device to criticise corruption at home was a common theme in antiquity. Certain similarities with other peoples

23 ovid, Tristia, v:10, 17–24. Syme, Ovid in history, 164–5, argues that ovid’s description of the peoples of the pontic region was conditioned by considerations of prosody: he may attach the name of a tribe to a particular practice because the ethnonym fits his metrical scheme. habinek, Politics, 151–69, claims that ovid is not merely bemoaning the barbarity of the Getae but ‘demonstrating and enacting the transferability of roman institutions to an alien context.’

24 herodotus, Histories, v:3, v:6. many romanian historians quote the first part of hero-dotus’s remarks but not the second; e.g. pascu, ed. Foreign sources, doc. I.

25 horace, odes III, 24, ll. 12–20, in The complete odes, trans. W. Shepherd, 155–6.

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living across the danube can be seen, for instance, in tacitus’s Germania. tacitus’s description of the Germans, strikes a familiar note:

the fields are taken in succession according to the number of cultivators, and are subsequently divided among themselves according to rank. the lands are changed over every year and there is an abundance of fields.26

Likewise Caesar on the Suevi, a Germanic tribe:

however, there are no private and separate fields amongst them; nor does anybody stay in one place for more than a year, to cultivate them. nor do they consume much cereals, but live for the most part off milk and cattle, and a great deal from hunting.27

as martin thom has recently reminded us, the work of tacitus and other classical historians (posidonius, pliny, Livy) often treated the topos of the barbarian or distant peoples according to set rules of the genre, so that what is said conforms more often to a convention rather than to solid geographical or ethnographic fact.28 this is clearly the case here too: three different writers are attributing the same or similar prac-tices to geographically distant peoples. however, this did not in the least stop later historians and statesmen from waging major political and ideo-logical campaigns on the basis of these works. and just as tacitus’s work was rediscovered in the early sixteenth century and used as evidence in polemical debates between pope pius II (aeneas Sylvius piccolomini) and recalcitrant protestant bishops, so horace’s remarks about the Getae were to find echoes in a large number of subsequent writings. not only did clas-sical writings become fuel for a long-running historical debate about the origins of the romanian communal village,29 they also evidently affected

26 tacitus, De origine et situ Germanorum, in On Britain and Germany, trans. h. mattingly, ch. 26.

27 Caesar, De bello gallico, Iv, 1.28 thom, Republics, nations, tribes, 212–21. See also hartog, The mirror of Herodotus.29 one of the first romanian scholars to invoke horace as a historical source for the

agricultural practices of the proto-romanians was Grigore tocilescu, in his doctoral thesis of 1876. In fact tocilescu was cheerfully sceptical about the possibility of drawing conclu-sions from horace’s writings. ‘In short, it would be safer to consider horace’s description as a vague, unclarified recollection from Caesar on the Suevi, as an idealization of the little known peoples of the north; more a poetical, and particularly satirical, description, than a historical one.’ tocilescu, Dacia înainte de Români, 374. G. popa-Lisseanu published a romanian translation in idem, ed. Dacia în autorii clasici, 16. however, later historians (e.g. Stahl, Contribuţii, 1:293–6; panaitescu, Obştea ţărănească, 17) have tried to take the poem as valid evidence for the agrarian life of the Getae. both these authors have curi-ously mistranslated the Latin to make horace say that it was the fields worked, rather than the people working them, that were changed over by rota. this gives the unwarranted

the traditions of invention 21

the imaginations of 19th-century lexicographers, as is clear from a com-parison of the remarks of Caesar about the eating habits of the Suevi, and Laurian and massim on those of the peasant.

ii) Renaissance Refashionings: The Princely Mirror

early modern sources are no less contradictory when it comes to describ-ing the mores of the romanians. for instance, writers who sought to explain the surprising fact that they were a Latin people, the only one in europe to live across the danube-rhine limes, might refer equally to their warlike disposition or to their propensity for agriculture as proof of this.30 the tension between the violent and the agrarian, remarked as early as herodotus, continues. We have heard ovid remarking on the natives’ reluctance to plough the land for fear of a military ambush. fifteen cen-turies later, the polish chronicler bielski reversed the same terms, when he was writing about the moldavians:

they are brave men, masters in wielding javelin and shield, though they are simple peasants taken from the plough. apart from the courtiers, the rest are mostly peasants with bare saddles and oaken stirrups, but strong in attack with the javelin.31

bielski himself had met the moldavians in battle at obertyn in 1531, and needn’t necessarily be seen to be relying on classical stereotypes: the con-cordance of his materials with those of ovid might be merely acciden-tal. but the classical image of the barbarian/peasant (for the categories were henceforth to be increasingly confused) was, in the same decade, to undergo a remarkable revival elsewhere in europe.

‘el vilano del danubio’ is the title of an episode in the book of princely instruction written by the Spaniard don antonio de Guevara, bishop of

interpretation that a) the entire community was engaged in agriculture; b) land was dis-tributed on egalitarian principles; c) the rudiments of crop rotation were in place.

30 thus the Italian historian marcantonio Coccio, in his Rapsodie historiarum Enne-adum. Ab orbe condito Ad annum Salutis Humanae, 1504: ‘valachorum nobilissimi qui agri-culturam et qui pecuariam excercent, quae res ipsius gentis arguit originem’; on the other hand, the pole Stanisław orzechowski wrote that ‘hi natura, moribus ac lingua non mul-tum a cultu Italiae absunt, suntque homines feri, magnaeque virtutis; neque alia gens est, quae pro gloria belli et fortitudine angustiores fines cum habeat, plures ex propinquitate hostes sustineat, quibus continentur aut bellum infert, aut illatum defendit’ (Annales polonici ab excessu Sigismundi, 1554). both these examples from armbruster, Romanitatea românilor, 82, 115. Similar contradictory opinions in the valuable recent study of almási, ‘Constructing’, focused especially on transylvania.

31  Cited by Gonţa, Satul în Moldova medievală, 212.

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Guadix, and first published in Seville in 1528: Libro aureo de Marco Aure-lio, emperador. this was republished as El relox de principes [the dial of princes] in valladolid the following year. this book was one of many books of princely education published in the renaissance, expounding on matters of public and private comportment and rules for action in the life of a prince. as is usual for the genre, it purported to derive from clas-sical literature, as a book of orations made by the roman philosopher-emperor marcus aurelius; its author claimed to have translated it from a much older Greek text. In fact Guevara did nothing of the kind, and the speeches and moral lessons of which the book is constituted, were origi-nal rhetorical compositions, embossed with fables, epigrams and quota-tions from humanist literature. however, this fiction did not stop the book becoming an international bestseller. It went through over seventy editions in five european languages before 1600,32 and translation were made into many european languages, including by the eighteenth century a romanian version (by nicolae Costin, c. 1712)33 and even an armenian one (venice, 1738). a Greek version made its way into the library of the mavrokordatos family, whose members would play a major role in ruling the principalities of moldavia and Wallachia in the eighteenth century, as we shall see.34

the episode of ‘the villain of danuby’ is a tale narrated by marcus aure-lius himself to ‘Senators, philosophers, physicians and other sage men’, and it serves the purpose of a kind of moral mirror to illustrate the corrup-tion of manners and arts in ancient rome. a ‘poor villain from the river of danuby’ comes to aurelius to complain of the injustices and cruel acts perpetrated on him and his race by the roman prefects and judges sent to administer his province. his physiognomy is the type of the barbarian according to the classical imagination:

this villain had a small face, great lips, hollow eyes, his colour burnt, curled hair, bare headed, his shoes of porpyge skin, his coat of goatskin, his girdle of bulrushes, a long beard and thick, his eyebrows covered his eyes, the stom-ach and the neck covered with skins, haired as a bear, and a club in his

32 I have consulted a modern edition of north’s english translation: The Diall of Princes; the bibliographical information I cite comes from here. See also Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno, 20–5.

33 ‘Ceasornicul domnilor’; most recently published in Costin, Scrieri vol. 2.34 popovici, ‘difuzarea ideilor luminilor’, 84. pippidi, Tradiţia politică bizantină, 62–4,

interprets the translation of Guevara’s work into romanian at the instigation of nikolaos mavrokordatos, as part of the development of a cult of the sovereign.

the traditions of invention 23

hand. Without doubt when I saw him enter into the Senate I imagined it had been a beast in the form of a man.35

despite this bestial appearance, the peasant’s harangue against the romans impresses aurelius greatly. he denies that the danubians have no awareness of good and evil, asserting that ‘we want not reason to know who is just and righteous in holding his own’; he accuses the romans of being ‘but the destroyers of the people that be peaceable, and robbers of the sweat and labours of strangers’; arraigns their greed in conquering distant provinces, their corruption in administering them, and the folly of their luxury both at rome and abroad: ‘ye that are here do rob us of our good name, saying that since we are a people without a king (as unknown barbarous) ye may take us for slaves.’36

against the colonialist corruption of the romans, the villain posits the simple virtues of his own people’s manners:

since we had no enemies, we needed no armies, and since every man is contented with his lot and fortune, we had no necessity of a proud senate to govern us, and we being as we are all equal, it need not we should consent to have any princes . . . in apparel we were honest, and in meat very temper-ate, we needed no better behaviour. for although in our country there are no merchants . . . yet for all this we are not brutish, neither cease to have a commonwealth.37

furthermore, the peasant offers as supporting evidence to the roman Senate the moral influence of his primitive lifestyle, which has a powerful rhetorical appeal in the circumstances:

I live by gathering acorns in the winter, and reaping corn in the summer. Sometimes I fish, as well of necessity as of pleasure, so that I pass almost all my life alone in the fields, or in the mountains . . . for I had rather wan-der solitary in the fields, than to see my neighbours hourly lament in the streets.38

at the end of the peasant’s oration, the Senate and the emperor agree to provide new judges for the river of danuby, and command the villain to write down his speech. furthermore, he was made a Senator and a free

35 Guevara, Diall of Princes, 98–9.36 Ibid., 102, 106, 110, 112.37 Ibid., 113–4.38 Ibid., 119–20.

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man of rome, and that ‘forever he should be sustained with the common treasure’.39

even though this is a clear instance of classical texts being ‘updated’ and reinterpreted, it would be unreasonable to accuse Guevara of intend-ing to portray real ‘romanians’, even if he had heard of such a people.40 the tale’s ‘set’ or target is at the civilized audience rather than the barbar-ians themselves, in conformity with renaissance norms for rustic perora-tions: ‘not of purpose to counterfeit or represent the rusticall manner of loves or communications: but under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches, to insinuate and glance at great manners’, as the contem-porary english author thomas puttenham put it.41 the villain identifies himself as German, which, although a generic term in tacitus, indicating all dwellers across the rhine and danube, excluded the dacians.42

two observations can be made, on details in Guevara’s work which will return countless times in the reworking of this classic image, both in western european writers and in romanian texts. the first is that the peasant’s reward comes not because his case is actually investigated and proved true by the judges of the Senate, but on account of his eloquence. his story might have been a pack of lies: what has impressed marcus aurelius is the peasant’s ability to argue his case according to the rules of rhetoric; to adduce examples at suitable moments; to perform to a given theme; to observe not only the classical topography but also the figures of speech. Indeed, the original author’s purpose was probably to provide as much a stylistic and rhetorical example as a social one. one of Guevara’s principal concerns (as well as forging a classical origin for his work) had been to prove the capability of the vernacular Castilian as a medium for the sumptuosity of high rhetoric.43 the successes of the villain of danuby reflect this concern, and indeed the initial suspicion of his possible coarse-ness of speech—‘if it was a fearful thing to behold his person, it was no

39 Ibid., 124.40 the few specific studies on the ‘paysan du danube’ tend to agree on this point:

Ciorănescu, ‘Ţăranul dela dunăre’ (in the context of comparative literature); and Stoyano-vitch, Le paysan du Danube (treating it as a motif of global colonisation).

41  puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie [1589] cited by Williams, City, 21.42 ‘Germany’ borders on dacia to the east, tacitus tells us in Chapter 1.43 Guevara, preface to Diall of Princes, xvii. Likewise the last paragraph of the first eng-

lish translation (by thomas berners): ‘Certainly as great prayse as oughte to be gyven to the author is to be gyven to the translators that have laboriously reduced this treatise oute of Greke into Latin, and out of Castilian into french and out of french into english. Written in high and swete styles.’ Ibid., xvi. on the rhetoric of ‘ordinary speech’ in the renaissance see also Greenblatt, Marvelous possessions, 146–7.

the traditions of invention 25

less monstrous to hear his words’—is one of the first things the emperor seeks to allay at the end of the oration: ‘what words so well couched, what truth so true, what sentences so well pronounced.’44 Guevara’s vil-lain, then, is prized for his speech—as will many a romanian peasant be in the centuries to come—his progress can be said to almost a symbol for the rise of the vernacular, its ability to find a place in the civic order. It is not, of course, the true language of the peasantry, but the speech of a higher classical order that is prized.

Secondly, the villain’s reward causes him to undergo a complete change in status. although the emperor decides to reappoint judges on the dan-ube, the villain will not be there, for he has become a citizen of rome. this is his reward: not to return to the simple, honest life he has only just finished depicting; but to become part of the metropolis, a roman instead of a barbarian. this clearly discloses the attitude of the author, hitherto not revealed, towards the rural life he has portrayed. It has served well as a subject for oratory, but the just place for the eloquent is in the city. there is no suggestion that the villain would have preferred to return to the country from which he has come, and to which he has declared his allegiance. a patrician life is—against the ostensible moral of the discourse—simply assumed to be desirable and creditable. Later, as post-romantic writers in the West but even more acutely in romania, would try to invest the peasant with value qua peasant, they would come up against a new paradox, which scarcely presented itself in the renaissance: that to praise the peasant way of life and at the same time attempt to encourage the peasant to actually adhere to it, was actually to force him to remain a barbarian and an outsider to the empire.

the popularity of Guevara’s work gave rise not only to hundreds of edi-tions and translations, but many imitations and adaptations of the theme. In french, the episode was reworked in pierre boaistuau’s Histoires prod-igieuses, extraits de pluisieurs fameux auteurs grecs et latins (1561); Jean de marcouville’s Recueil mémorable d’aucuns cas merveilleux (1564); pierre Sorel Chartrain, ‘L’avertissement du monstre du danube au sénat romain’ (1566), and Gabriel fourmennois, Harangue descriptive au livre doré de Marc Aurèle, empereur, d’un paysan des rivages du Danube (1601). by the end of the seventeenth century, Guevara’s own fame was fading, and

44 Guevara, Diall of princes, 99; 123. Compare Shakepeare’s othello, another kind of renaissance barbarian: ‘rude am I in my speech,/ and little blest with the soft phrase of peace’ (Othello, act I, Scene 3, ll. 81–2) but it would be unthinkable for othello, however ‘rude in speech’ not to speak in pentameters in front of the council-chamber of venice.

26 chapter one

he is now almost completely forgotten. but the tale of the danubian peas-ant was to be given a new lease of life by another world-famous author of the day, Jean de la fontaine.

La fontaine’s ‘Le paysan du danube’, was included in the eleventh book of his Fables, published in 1679. most of the detail in it is similar to that given in Guevara. Its political intent was, however, probably more closely directed against the depredations of the french intendants who were just then indulging in unscrupulous requisitioning and taxation across the rhine, as a consequence of the french wars in the United provinces.45 again, we see a modern author making free use of tropes considered part of the common literary inheritance, to illustrate a moral closer to the concerns of his own time. but one or two of the details undergo a subtle sea-change. the peasant—by now named as such, the word paysan having replaced the mediaeval villain—had hitherto been represented as disdainful of the arts of agriculture, both amongst the roman authors and in Guevara’s work.

La fontaine’s description of the peasant of danuby breaks the mould in this respect. for his peasant is not content like Guevara’s to fish and gather acorns, but is proud of his agricultural skills:

nous cultivions en paix d’heureux champs, et nos mainsÉtaient propres aux arts ainsi qu’au labourage: Qu’avez-vous appris aux Germains?

moreover, the fruit of their skilful and arduous toil is seen as passing explicitly into the hands of the romans, at which point they refuse to practise it any longer, and flee to the mountains:

rien ne suffit aux gens qui nous viennent de rome; La terre, et le travail de l’hommefont pour les assouvoir des efforts superflus. retirez-les; on ne veut plus Cultiver pour eux les campagnes;nous quittons les cités, nous fuyons aux montagnes . . .46

La fontaine has been praised for these and other passages in his work which, it is alleged, are far from being toy-like representations of rural-urban tensions, but are actually addressing real issues: ‘were one to attach

45 Couton, La politique de La Fontaine, 94–6.46 La fontaine, ‘Le paysan du danube’ (fables XI, 7); lines 43–5 and 60–5. I am indebted

to the textual apparatus of this edition for bibliographical details of the earlier french versions of the episode.

the traditions of invention 27

to his concrete evocations the abstract words of which we have contracted the regrettable need, his discourse would appear right up-to-date. here are questions of imperialism, colonialism, malthusianism.’47 this may well be true in terms of a critique of seventeenth-century western europe. but what persists is the sense of the ‘danubian peasant’ being depicted not as a character in his own right, but as an ironical index of the shortcomings of others: in short, it is a critique of empire more than a manifesto—or even a description—of the colonised. the peasant, however virtuous, is still ‘other’; his discourse is by now a familiar, even banal morality tale; and while La fontaine should be given credit for modernizing both the style of the lesson and the social details of the situation described, he can hardly be said to have produced a new ‘realist’ work. as he himself says: ‘Le conseil en est bon; mais il n’est pas nouveau’.

iii) The Enlightenment and After

It is very difficult to measure precisely the cultural effect this image had on european expectations as far on as the nineteenth century. as already stressed, there are no grounds at all for assuming that the villain of danuby in Guevara’s day has any specific association with the romanian people. the Wallachians and moldavians remained a fairly unknown quantity to the broader public well into the nineteenth century, up to 1848 and even afterwards. however, it is certain that the image circulated very widely indeed throughout europe, from the 1520s onwards and for as long as La fontaine’s fables were standard material for learning by rote in every francophone school, in other words well into the twentieth century.

the Comte d’hauterive travelled to moldavia in 1785, in the capacity of french representative and counsellor to the reigning prince, alexan-dros mavrokordatos-firaris. Later he wrote an account of his experience which is a major source of information about the customs and practices of the period. his work is notable for its positive curiosity about the peas-ant: he is one of the first writers to refer to the Latinity of the romanian language as being best preserved among the masses, and to affirm that the moldavians’ linguistic and ethnic purity may even exceed that of the french or Italians.48 he also defends the peasant against the customary accusations of idleness, arguing that his reputed sloth is in fact a strategic response to the indiscriminate exploitation that he suffered.

47 Couton, La politique de La Fontaine, 94.48 See nevertheless peyssonnel, Observations historiques, 195.

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Still more interesting is the account of the manner in which the peas-ant maintained an intimate judicial link with the ruler of the land.

they do not fear to cross the entire province to come to the court to pres-ent their cases on their own and full of tenacity. they harangue with an eloquence all the more persuasive for the fact that it bears all the simplic-ity of nature’s inspirations, without lacking the resources of art. one could not present oneself with a more modest countenance. . . . but this studied embarrassment is soon followed by a tide of words, now pronounced with a prodigious volubility, now sustained by a pathetic tone, and ever accompa-nied by an expressive gesturing and an exceedingly interesting physiognomy. I avow that this tradition of ancient roman liberty is one of the things I was least expecting, and which was all the sweeter for me to find four hundred leagues from rome and eighteen centuries from Cicero.49

It is not completely impossible that this passage was based on accu-rate observation of the moldavian court. We know, for instance that the phanariot prince Konstantinos mavrokordatos, who reigned as prince in moldavia or Wallachia on ten separate occasions between 1730 and 1769 frequently received peasants and judged their cases in a manner which often—and possibly deliberately—infuriated the native aristocracy, who claimed it was against customary law.50 however, in all likelihood d’hauterive’s owes more to the rhetorical mirroring and stereotyping of the type discussed above. We can be fairly sure that this was not an ancient tradition: another frenchman’s description of the same process about two centuries earlier represents the peasants calling out their doleances on their knees, at a distance of a hundred paces from the prince, surrounded by guards dressed in hungarian military uniform—hardly the same egali-tarian scene as in d’hauterive’s account.51

moreover, the then prince of moldavia, alexandru Ipsilanti, had been responsible for doing away with this very practice in Wallachia in 1775, an abolition that was codified in 1780 in the famous Pravilniceasca Condică [register of Law]. In this code, Ipsilanti made provision for the appointment of a number of provincial judges [ judecători], who were to

49 d’hauterive, Mémoire, 80–3.50 Georgescu & Strihan, Judecata domnească, I-ii: 8.51  pavie, Relation. Iorga makes light of the knee-bending, the hundred paces and the

military retinue, commenting that ‘we could be watching a scene from the middle ages: Louis the Saint judging the frenchmen of the 13th century under the oak of vergennes’—Istoria românilor prin calatori, 1:193. It forms an important piece of evidence in his positing of a medieval romanian ‘peasant state’: see for instance Iorga, A history of Roumania, 131. he references the ‘paysan du danube’ motif on numerous occasions in his work: see e.g. România în chipuri şi vederi, 11.

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be independent both of the prince and of the centrally-appointed local administrators [ispravnici]. While this initiative has been praised as rep-resenting the first introduction of the separation of the judiciary and exec-utive powers in romanian lands, it also had the effect of breaking the personal judicial bond between peasant and prince. Ipsilanti makes this clear: he motivates the appointment of judecători as necessary in order ‘to judge the cases of the inhabitants and to determine them accord-ing to what is right, that they be not forced to come to me.’52 even if d’hauterive’s description was accurate, one still has to recognize that he was firstly, recording a practice which was effectively moribund; and, sec-ondly, evidently embroidering it as timeless and classically-rooted when earlier witnesses do not support such an image. We are dealing with two phenomena, both highly characteristic of the elaboration of the myth of the peasant. one is the tendency of writers to be assigning value to cus-toms and practices only as a result of their own rupture with the com-munitarian world which produced them, and their consciousness of the imminent disappearance of the customs. another is determined by the motivation and mind-set of the traveller abroad, who is prone to have recourse to the standard literary images even when seeing with his own eyes. andrei pippidi expressed this well: ‘to explore the unknown is to go to the limit of one’s own mental horizon; [travellers] testify effectively in this counter-society, to precisely those phenomena which their own community has been forced to banish.’53

It would not, of course, be fair to tar all Western writers about the romanian lands with the same brush. not all of them showed a substan-tial interest in characterizing the inhabitants as a nation of peasants. for instance, Jean-Louis Carra, who published a sufficiently lurid account of moldavia in 1777 and was hardly one to shy away from coarse jokes at the natives’ expense, almost entirely ignores the existence of the peasantry and mentions them only once.54 for him it was the nobles who were sav-age, not the peasants who were noble. other writers actively deplored the condition of the peasantry, but without attributing their state to any kind of ‘essential’ character traits: William Wilkinson, a former british consul in bucharest who wrote up his experiences and published them

52 Pravilniceasca condică (1780), 76. See also hitchins, The Romanians 1774–1866, 31; Stahl, Traditional Romanian village communities, 109–11.

53 pippidi, Hommes et idées, 3. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 291–5, points interest-ingly to a number of rousseauist interferences in hauterive’s general outlook.

54 Carra, Histoire. the only allusion to the peasantry is to their thick hessian clothes, 176.

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in London in 1820, went positively out of his way to insist that govern-ment, and not climate or race, lay at the root of the peasant’s experiences. Whereas d’hauterive had been fascinated by the physiognomy of the natives, Wilkinson affirmed categorically that ‘they have no peculiar turn of features which may be called characteristic; from long intercourse with foreign nations, their blood seems to have become a mixture of many.’55 If later romanian historians have privileged the account of peasants given by the former writer,56 and ticked off Wilkinson for a ‘crude and unfair judgement’ of the peasantry,57 this is scarcely the fault of the authors themselves; however, the very existence of their accounts served as often as not to promote and to prolong a particular peasant discourse into the nineteenth century and beyond, as can be seen from two final examples.

In 1854, during the Crimean War, in other words when the peoples of eastern europe had once more been put in the forefront of public atten-tion in the West as the dissolution of european turkey became a seri-ous political possibility, Jules michelet began writing a series of légendes, examples of heroic figures from different european countries with an almost fairy-tale quality. he conceived his project as a kind of modern, popular book of Instruction, legends in several senses: ‘because they were on the lips of the people across europe, and because the people were making the stories through their actions and through their representa-tives, the heroic leaders. michelet also gave such peoples their own legend in written, literary form and he also encouraged them to treasure other forms of their folklore.’58 he was in contact with numerous romanians, exiled from the 1848 revolution and living in paris or england; the recent tribulations of the danubian principalities were therefore to form the set-ting and subject of one of his legends, which were eventually published in 1857 as Légendes démocratiques du Nord. three themes struck him par-ticularly when he was engaged in reading up his subject. one was the fig-ure of maria rosetti, wife of the bucharest liberal journalist and politician C.a. rosetti: her allegedly heroic role in the events of 1848 was painted in suitably saccharine colours, thus fulfilling one of michelet’s purposes in illustrating the moral and patriotic vocations of the modern woman.

55 Wilkinson, Accounts, 158.56 thus a respected legal historian Georges fotino, takes d’hauterive’s remarks as solid

evidence of the ethnic homogeneity of the romanians of different provinces. fotino, ‘Ce este vechiul drept românesc?’, 118–36.

57 Iorga, Istoria românilor prin călători, 3: ch. 6.58 rearick, ‘Symbol, legend and history’, 90.

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the two other themes were the peasant and the danube. he asked his correspondent rosetti whether he know of any folk-songs, tales or chants associated with the illustrious river: ‘Seeking the unity of the danube, its genius and its soul, I wanted to catch in these divers melodies the plaint and the sigh of the great captive river.’59 rosetti was obviously nonplussed by this request, and replied in the negative—for the danube’s value as a cultural motif in romanian writing was virtually nil. this did not stop michelet depicting it in the rich romantic colours of picturesque, deserted melancholy:

the harsh softness of the songs of the Serbian shepherd, the ferryman’s monotone rhythm, the refrain of the romanian and the raia of bulgaria, all is confounded in a vast plain, this is your sigh, o river of captivity! . . . the tide varies ceaselessly, the deep never varies. romania, from trajan to the present day, stays true to herself, fixed in her primitive genius.60

moreover, michelet explicitly uses the sufferings of the inhabitants of the danubian region as a reproach to the indifferent West, who has appar-ently cynically failed to come to their aid: ‘they call you barbarian. It is they who made you so. there is nothing inhuman in your genius.’ the peasants are familiar creatures:

they are an elegant people, of an easy eloquence, who talk marvellously. there is no difference between the peasant and the man of letters; truly, it is like Italy, there is no ‘people’; however, if one wishes to seek it out, elegance and distinction are above all to be found in the countryside.

I would venture to say that in no other land can one found to such a degree, among the inhabitants of the countryside, this noble primitive strength, this vigour of ancient common sense, and at the same time a true, penetrating and irreproachable logic, which the modern age believes belongs to them alone.61

the atmospherics and the ethnological specificity of michelet’s evocation are relatively new elements. however, the evocation of the danube as a paradoxical haunt of peasants, simple in their manners and a reproach to the civilized West, could easily have been derived from the earlier topoi of the fabular tradition. the effect, therefore, of Guevara’s apparently time-less tale, was felt in political writings of singular importance for the fate

59 this information from Cadot, ‘Introduction’, 100–17. See also Jianu, A circle of friends, 204–5.

60 michelet, Légendes démocratiques, 250.61  Ibid., 250, 252, 269.

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and identity of the romanians, over three hundred years after its original elaboration.

finally, it was left to michelet’s fellow historian, edgar Quinet, to pro-vide an account of the romanian people which definitively wedded the figure of the peasant with the latest developments in language theory. Quinet had been more or less the first french writer to take an interest in herder, translating the latter’s Ideas towards a philosophy of history of mankind in 1834: this was to be one of the routes whereby herderian ideas on language and culture reached the romanian principalities.62 he took as his second wife the daughter of the moldavian poet and civil servant Gheorghe asachi, and was therefore equally interested in taking up what had become a fashionable theme in western europe in the 1850s. his work Les Roumains, which first appeared in the Revue des deux mondes in 1855 and subsequently in book form, shows an ongoing herderian concern with language and with the rural. the work was in fact composed under somewhat difficult conditions. not only was Quinet living in political exile in less than comfortable circumstances in brussels, but he found it hard to think his way into romanian history. his wife taught him elements of the language and supplied him with materials, but, as he wrote to michelet, ‘I’ll do what I can to write something on their account, but I have never seen the places in question. all the materials I have managed to collect consist merely of endless repetitions: I feel decidedly awkward’.63

although he begins by telling the romanians that ‘you are no longer an isolated province, you form part of the city, I would say the occiden-tal Christian fatherland’, his account of the romanians’ national revival focusses on the hidden resources of the rural population: ‘In the midst of this deep night of their history, they found, as an orientation towards humanity, nothing but echo of the antique word in the mouth of the peasants, the mountain peoples, the plainsmen.’64 much of his interest lay in using romanian as evidence to posit an early date for the crystal-lisation of the neo-Latin languages, in order to contribute to a domestic french polemic about the relative contribution of the Germanic and Latin peoples to the ethnogenesis of the modern french nation. In the guise of the ‘paysan du danube’, he was thus able to harangue the metropolitan

62 Zub, Cunoaştere de sine, 147–51.63 Cited in valès, Edgar Quinet, 230.64 Quinet, Les Roumains, v, 33.

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philologists, notably raynouard, to some effect. however, Quinet’s writing is also noteworthy in that it contains many ideas about the peasant and his language which will appear in later romanian writings:

It is under the peasant’s reedy roof, in listening to his plaint, his doinas, that [the romanians] seek to rediscover the true imprint of their ancestral lan-guage, not altered or disfigured by the neologisms of the large towns. . . .

only then [in the dark ages] was a Slavic layer superimposed, like a blight, on the Latin stratum.65

as we shall soon see, these types of concept had not yet fully made their mark in the writings of the romanians, even by the 1850s; perhaps it was inevitably more natural for a Western author to focus on the figure of the peasant as a symbol of purity and simplicity. however, the ‘superimposed layer’ as a ‘blight on the bedrock’, and the peasant as the bearer of the ‘ancestral imprint’, would at a later time become firmly entrenched in the local literary imagination.66

to summarise, michelet’s and Quinet’s writings, although they played demonstrably on an extremely old theme in european literature, were important for two main reasons. first, they modernized the image of the peasant by explicitly developing a theoretical discourse which stressed the national value of the peasant’s linguistic resources. Secondly, as they communicated directly with romanian writers and intellectuals, they con-stituted a kind of interface where the native and the external traditions of thinking and writing about the peasant could merge: they were one of the most important channels whereby the by-now general european exalta-tion of the peasant’s virtues spread to romania.67

65 Ibidem, 52, 56.66 the theorist par excellence of the superimposed layer in romania was mihai emi-

nescu, in his political writings of the 1870s and 1880s. other writers, however, took up the idea before then: for instance, alexandru odobescu wrote in 1861 of Slavonic influence on the romanian language as ‘a superimposed veil which a master’s hand could lift discreetly and carefully, without in the least altering the true character of the national language’ (odobescu, ‘psaltirea’, in Opere, 2:181–2).

67 more on french travellers and their depiction of the peasant as emblematic for romanian identity: muntean, Imaginea, 208–17; on the attitude of German travellers see heitmann, Das Rumänenbild, 23–28; and my ch. 2 below. one could even extend the argument to non-european attitudes: the ottoman Sultan murad, when offered a tran-sylvanian military leader in hostage after the battle of Kosovo in 1448, is said to have remarked indignantly: ‘What should I want with such an uncouth infidel peasant?’ See Iorga, ‘Cronicele turceşti’, 12.

34 chapter one

The Domestic Tradition: The Word and Concept ţăran before 1830

Whatever was thought or written in Classical or western europe about the peasant, there are few instances in pre-modern romanian writings of a disposition to praise him; to use him as a figure of ironical counterpoint to correct courtly manners; or to develop any kind of myth of ‘the honest ploughman.’ Indeed, as we have seen, the lexicographers of 1825 did not even assign to the word ţăran a particular signification of rurality or agrar-ian activity. one might go further, and assert that whereas in the West the peasant was fairly clearly conceptualized as a social category at least by the mid-12th century;68 in the romanian principalities it is far from clear even what the term meant before about 1650.

the word is very old in romanian, and its etymology apparently indis-putable. Ţăran derives from ţară (= terra, land or country), in much the same way as paysan derives from pays.69 We have no known usage of the word before 1591: but most scholars and lexicographers assert that, in Slavonic documents from mediaeval Wallachia and moldavia, the word horan (derived from Greek choriatis, villager or inhabitant of a χωρα or χωρίον) substituted for, and had an equivalent meaning to, ţăran.70 but what horan itself meant as a social class or grouping is often impossible to tell from documents.

the earliest mention of the term comes in 1470 in a document relat-ing to the confirmation of the use of some mountains for grazing by the monastery of tismana. We are first told that ‘neither boyar nor cneaz, nor siromah [poor man]’ should be permitted from grazing there without the prince’s permission; then this is repeated, with the added injunction that ‘any horani’ taking their cattle to the mountain will be punished ‘accord-ing to Wallachian law’. one scholar interprets this as meaning peasants; another thinks it refers merely to local people; a dictionary seems to imply

68 bloch, Feudal society, I: 320–1.69 as far as I know the only writer to have disputed this claim is the banat chronicler

nicolae Stoica de haţeg, Cronica Banatului [c. 1825], 54–5 who said it derived from tsar, the Slavonic form for ‘Ceasar’, a presumed emperor ancestor-figure. ‘naţiile sloveăne au zis stabunilor romaneşti ţaru roman, apoi ţara rumun . . . Sloveănii aceia numea pre stabunu rumânesc ţar roman, apoi ţar rumuneşti’.

70 Iorga, ‘ “Ţărani” ’; Ştefănescu, ‘despre terminologia’, 1161–2. the χωρα is the land sur-rounding or outlying a town, and dependent upon it; a χωρίον in 11th-century byzantium was a village in which the dwellings are concentrated together; as opposed to a κτησις, a more scattered settlement. ostrogorsky, ‘La commune’, 161.

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that horani might mean cattle-grazers.71 Likewise with the use of the word on the tombstone of a Wallachian prince, radu de la afumaţi, who died in 1529 and was remembered to have fought a battle at poenari, ‘at the citadel, with horani [u gradu, sa s horani]’: some incline towards a peas-ants’ revolt, others towards a fight with the locals.72

on the other hand, in moldavia the word ţăran occasionally took over the meaning of the Slavonic zemlean, a word which in polish had denoted provincial noblemen, and for which the Latin equivalent was terrigenus. the precise social role and status of such-named people is still not entirely clear: a polish chronicler described them confusingly as nobles who worked the land.73 however, it is likely that zemleane had an important administrative role in the principalities in electing the prince, in collect-ing taxes, and so on; they owed personal service to the prince in return for property right. roughly similar privileges appertaining to people called zemleane or cognate names certainly applied across Slavophone eastern europe in the middle ages, from Lithuania to Serbia. historian valeria Costăchel has argued for an equivalent status for zemlean (in moldavia) and horan (in Wallachia), and offers a general definition of zemlean:

owners of land, obliged to perform military service, and to execute various tasks related to the need to defend the country. the category of zemleane was not homogeneous: some of them, accumulating a lot of land, became boyars, others passed from being free peasants, masters of their plots, to the position of enserfed peasants.74

as if the meanings of these words were not already sufficiently unclear, there is the additional problem of what happened to such terms when romanian started to predominate as the official written language of state and society from the sixteenth century onwards. did zemlean and horan become translated as ţăran, or were the particular categories to

71  the document is given in romanian, with translations of some Slavonic key words, in Documente privind istoria României, 145. Interpretations in panaitescu, Obştea ţărănească, 49; Ştefănescu, ‘despre terminologia’, 1161; DLR, s.v. Some light is shed by a charter of 1579 in which radu is said to have done battle with the treacherous ‘sons of bilţu [sinii Biltsov]’ who wanted to instal ‘a bandit, namely dragoslav the pig-herder’ [edin lotru, na ime Dra-goslav purkar]’ as prince [gospodar]. mihnea, ‘Charter’.

72 panaitescu & Ştefănescu respectively; the original was recorded by nicolae Iorga, Inscripţiile, 148–9.

73 Kromer, Polonia [16th century] cited by frost, ‘nobility’, 185: ‘this name comes from the lands and fields which they till and where they have lived so long, which they inherit, buy or are granted by the prince.’

74 Costăchel, ‘Contribuţii’, 163.

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which they referred in such decline as not to warrant being translated? the question is scarcely answerable in this case, and has not always been helped by the desire of historians to interpret the documents according to the particular vision of romanian society that they were interested in promoting.75 I shall confine myself to a few observations.

the Slavonic term zemlea, scholars have never doubted, is equivalent to ţară. put at its simplest, this means ‘land’. however, by metaphorical extension this meant (and not only in the romanian principalities, but also in neighbouring Serbia and Lithuania)76 the political nation, the forces in the land. thus ţară-zemlea carries with it a sense not only of land, region, country; but also to an extent of those who participate in the state’s business. When, as is quite frequent, the term is used to refer to people and not a place, it is often extremely unclear whether the entire population of the country, or merely a select group empowered or impli-cated in decision-making, is to be understood. nicolae Iorga once asserted that ‘ţară means, without any further addition, free romanian earth, in its full extent and with all the sacred right which is comprised in it.’77 modern historians have arrived at a more nuanced interpretation: that by the mid-eighteenth-century ţară gradually came to be used to designate the mass of people outside any of the privileged estates (noblility, clergy or urban corporation). and even then, ‘this opposition is not always expressed in the same rigid terms: Ţară could mean both state and people.’78

If ţară and zemlea were near synonyms, this does not permit us to assert that the ţăran was a zemlean. Was he a member of the political Land; or simply an unprivileged inhabitant? In the usage of the term found in a census taken by the moldavian prince petru Şchiopul (‘peter the Lame’) in 1591, we might conclude that this refers to dependent labourers. they are by far the most numerous category in this fiscal document of the

75 Indeed, such were the historiographical divergences at the beginning of this century that one historian wished to claim that the free peasant class in romania was descended from an expropriated nobility, while another tried to show the exact reverse, that the roots of the romanian nobility were to be found among the communities of free peasants. respectively, rosetti, Pamântul, and Iorga, Développement.

76 on the zemiane in Lithuania, see backus, ‘the problem of feudalism’; von Loewe, The Lithuanian statute, 198–9.

77 Iorga, ‘Înţelesul cuvîntului “ţară” ’, 79. elsewhere, a similar formulation: ‘the name “Ţara românească” [i.e. ‘the romanian Land’, the standard internal name for Wallachia] once had a meaning which many people have forgotten and some have never understood: it meant all the land ethnographically inhabited by romanians.’ Iorga, Români şi slavi. Români şi unguri, 9–10, cited by papacostea, ‘postfaţă’, 413.

78 Georgescu & Strihan, Judecata domnească, I-ii, 93.

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moldavian counties, and are divided into ţărani de istov [‘full’ ţărani] and ţărani săraci [poor ţărani]. these have been interpreted as, respectively, labourers with and without work-animals and tools.79 however, the other categories of people listed in the census (curtiani, military courtiers; vătaşi, bailiffs or headmen; neamişi, lesser noblemen; popi, priests) are all known to have been fiscally privileged at one stage or another: there is, then, no reason not to assume that this is a list of those with privileges, rather than of those who have fiscal dues to pay.

there are several examples in Grigore Ureche’s Chronicle of Moldavia (Letopiseţul Ţării Moldovei, composed in about 1640) of ţărani engaging in military activity.80 Ureche describes the hungarian army fleeing after defeat at the hands of Stephen the Great at the battle of baia in 1467:

Seeing as they were drunk and unprepared for war, prince Stephen struck against them with a fully made-up force at dawn, causing much death and destruction among them. on account of this unpreparedness, they took sooner to their heels than to their weapons, but had no means of escape, it being night time, having no idea which way to go, they strayed in all direc-tions, and the ţărani hunted them in the mountain coppices, where about 12,000 lay dead.81

the lascivious behaviour of another prince, Iancu, causes the boyars to chase him of the country: ‘he determined to pass into hungary through poland, for across the mountains, it was not possible to cross, as he feared the ţărani.’82 this is as likely to refer to warriors as to villagers, since there would have been villagers on whichever route he took out of moldavia. Indeed, a retreating polish army in 1564,

could not find a clear route out of the country, since they feared a ruse on the road they had come by, that [moldavian prince] tomşa’s men might come out in front of them . . . they were afraid to pass by the Cosmin forest,

79 Livadă, ‘feţele sărăciei’, 51; Ştefănescu, ‘despre terminologia’, 1157–9. the document is published in hurmuzaki, Documente 11: 219–20; and by turcu, ‘Cele mai vechi statistici’. See also the debate between Cihodaru and panaitescu, 160–9.

80 panaitescu, Obştea ţărănească, loc. cit.81  Ureche, Letopiseţul, 93. In a later version of the same episode, nicolae Costin (writ-

ing c. 1710) described these ‘ţărani’ as being, ‘on the order of voevod Stephen, ready on the paths with arms, scythes, axes and flintlocks’. Cf. Chiţimia, Probleme de bază, 249–53, who argues that since there is more, and not less detail in the later chronicle, both writ-ers must have been using a common (Slavonic) chronicle, now lost. the earlier extant bistriţa chronicle which describes the battle (see bodgan, Cronice, 38) does not mention the ţărani. Gonţa, ‘Strategia lui Ştefan cel mare’, 1140, believes this story is part of local oral tradition, and that ‘it is extremely likely’ that these were peasants pillaging for booty.

82 Ureche, Letopiseţul, 213.

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lest the ţărani might cut the forest down on their heads, and suffer worse than John albrecht . . . although they returned home, in many places the ţărani bore down on them with flails and scythes.83

at one point in Ureche’s chronicle, the ţara is equated with the military force.84 at another, ţărani are distinguished from oşteni [soldiers]: when the polish king John albrecht is chased out of moldavia by Stephen the Great’s army, ‘much of the polish army was killed: some by the oşteni [ soldiers], some by ţărani.’85

from these examples, we can conclude that the people in question are obviously cultivators (judging by their use of agricultural implements as weapons), who did not form part of the regular army. they may or may not have been zemleani, i.e. men holding privileges in return for military obligations: this is not clear. however, in terms of the mental images and ethical models evoked, Ureche insisted mainly on their military function as defenders of the country, and hardly at all on a picture of peaceful ploughmen working the land.

Later on, in the 1670s, the moldavian historian miron Costin (1633–1691) describes the difference in status between a curtean—a servant of the prince with military obligations and fiscal privileges—and a ţăran. ‘and so, when a curtean goes to law with a ţăran, the curtean should have the greater honour in both the prince’s word and in his consideration.’86 one of the clearest documents indicating the status of the ţăran refers to the four sons of petru Ţinter, living in moldavia: on 12 June 1664, they declared to the princely court that ‘they had not the privilege of curtenie or of any other group’ and ‘fell into ţărănie.’87 finally, in the early eighteenth cen-tury there is an instance of ţăran being used to refer generally to people who enjoy no exemption from fiscal dues. In a printed booklet of 1714 setting out the obligations and duties of the priesthood in Wallachia, the metropolitan bishop anthimos reinforces a recent princely edict declar-ing the clergy to be exempt from paying dues to the state; but should priests fail to observe the observations contained in the book, or lose the book, ‘they shall be numbered amongst the ţărani.’88

83 Ibid., 188.84 Ibid., 111: ‘aşa ţara strîngindu-să, iară din cetate cît putiia să apăra’ [the ţara, thus

assembled, then defended what it could of the fortress].85 ‘multă oaste leşască au peritu, unii de oştenii, alţii de ţărani’, ibid., 113.86 ‘Şi aşea, cîndú să pîrăşte un curteanú c-un ţăran, mai de cinste să fie curteanul şi la

cuvîntú şi la căutătura domnului’ Costin, Opere, 89.87 Grigoraş, Instituţii feudale, 186.88 antim, Capete de poruncă [1714] preface repr. in BRV, I:493.

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the above instances thus seem to indicate that the ţăran’s definition in the pre-modern romanian lands depended as much on fiscal consider-ations as on questions of lifestyle, occupation, place of residence or other cultural characteristic.

nevertheless, the use of the word ţăran to mean a low-born, base per-son was becoming more frequent from the middle of the 17th century onwards. a law book of 1652 lays down the precept that ‘God has created only man, and nobody has subsequently laid down that one should be a simple ţăran, and another of good family.’89 but this precept was clearly not observed: as seen in the paragraph above, miron Costin dismissed claims of the ţăran to be judged on an equal footing with the curtean. else-where he equated the ţăran with prostime, simple base folk: recounting a turbulent revolt of the 1630s against the machinations of the moldavian court, he depicts a peasant smashing the vornic vasile Lupu (later prince) over the head with a bone. Subsequently an unpopular Greek courtier is ‘seized and given over to the ţărani. Unspeakable hatefulness of the base folk!’ bemoans the chronicler.90

a more unequivocal use of the word ţăran to mean a base creature is to be found in a fragment of a version in romanian of the life of aesop, from 1705. this tells of Xanthus wishing to show to aesop a model of an ‘incurious man’: he goes out to the market place and finds a ‘ţăran prost’, who is bad-mannered, unwashed, coarse of speech and dressed in ‘haine ţărăneşti [the clothes of a ţăran]’ Xanthus tests the ţăran’s lack of curios-ity by announcing his intention to make a big fire in his courtyard in order to burn his pastry-maker for making bad cakes (‘too thin’, according to the ţăran, ‘he should have made them thicker’). the ţăran goes off to get his wife, ‘and put her on too, ‘cause that’s only fit.’ on the popular level, then, the term certainly had a clear enough, and impolite enough, meaning.91

the term was thus being widely used, both in the legal sense of those without fiscal privileges, and in a more ideological direction as a term of abuse for the violent or ignorant lower classes. however, the word ţăran did not denote particularly a worker of the land. We have the moldavian law-book of 1646, Cartea românească de învăţătură, as evidence for this.

89 ‘dumnezeu au făcut numai pe om, iară altul al doile n-au făcut să fie unul prost ţăran, iară altul de buna rudă’; Indreptarea legii [1652], cited by barbu, ‘Concepţia asupra “blagorodiei” ’, 148.

90 ‘Şi aşea l-au apucat şi l-au dat pre mîna ţăranilor. nespusă vrăjmăşiia a prostimii! Şi aşea, fără de nice o milă, de viu, cu topoară l-au făcut fărîme.’ Costin, Letopiseţul, ch. 12, zac. 21.

91  anon, ‘omul necurios’ [1705], 352. (DLR: ‘ţărănesc’).

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In it are named ‘all the workers of the land, namely: ploughmen, workers of the vine, servants and shepherds.’92

however, the writers of the élite who compiled law codes, chronicles and translations of belles-lettres in the eighteenth-century showed a cer-tain unease with the word. there are numerous instances of this. nicolae Costin (miron Costin’s son, c. 1660–1712), who translated The Dial of Princes into romanian in about 1712, translated ‘villanus’ alternately as ţăran and as lăcuitoriu oarecare [a certain inhabitant]. a quotation from Cicero’s oration which in the original reads ‘vitamque hanc rusticam . . . et hones-tissimam et suavissimam esse arbitrantur’ is rendered as ‘viaţa ţărăniască învăţătoare sau dascal iaste moştiniei nevoinţei şi direptăţii [the rustic life is the guide or tutor of the estate of simplicity and righteousness]’. this could well constitute the first instance of such a sentiment being expressed in romanian: it is symptomatic, however, that it represented a translation of a Western work.93

Such a notion was hardly a widespread article of faith. nicolae Costin’s contemporary, dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723, prince of moldavia 1709–10, 1711), believes that ‘Rusticus pure Moldavus nullus est.’ he imagined a land of aristocrats of purely roman blood, ruling over an ethnically impure people. all the power was in the prince’s hand: however, ‘if he wishes to bestow the title of Grand Logothete, which is the supreme rank that moldavia has in its gift, to some rustic [quem rusticanum], nobody will dare to contradict him in public.’94 elsewhere, he perpetuated the idea that the local population was lazy and ill-disposed to engage in trade or agriculture. however, his conception of moldavian society was also inno-vative in that he was one of the first writers to divide the population into cives and rustici.95

texts dealing with agrarian reform in the eighteenth century reveal a subtle and complex mixture of terms in use for denoting the rural and agrarian population. Konstantinos mavrokordatos, many times ruler of

92 ‘toţi lucrătorii pămîntului, anume: pentru plugari, pentru lucrătorii viiilor, pentru nămiţi [i.e. servitori, slugi] şi pentru păstori’; Carte romînească de învăţătură [1646], 54.

93 Guevara, Ceasornicul domnilor; most recently published in Costin, Scrieri, vol. 2. ‘Ţăran’ is used twice, 137 & 155; ‘lăcuitoriu’ twice, 136, 137; ‘ţărăniască’, 137; cf. Cicero, Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, ch. 17. Costin’s translation was of the Latin version by Johann Wanckel (torgau, 1601): see Cartojan, ‘ “Ceasornicul domnilor” ’.

94 Cantemir, Descriptio Moldaviae [c. 1717], 298; 126.95 Ibid., 298–304. his proclamation of 4 June 1711 calling the moldavians to join arms

with peter the Great against the turks is likewise exceptional in addressing itself to the entire population: pippidi, Hommes et idées, 207; cf. Subtelny, ‘the contractual principle’.

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moldavia and Wallachia between 1730 and 1769, is remembered for hav-ing abolished serfdom in both principalities. Serfs went under the name of rumâni in Wallachia, and vecini in moldavia.96 In order to ensure the maintenance of a steady taxable population in Wallachia, mavrokordatos in 1746 declared that ‘all sons of the fatherland’ who had fled their home villages would be allowed to return and to be free of rumânie; moreover, that the tribute ‘that weighs upon the ţărani’ shall not apply to any return-ees for a period of six months.97 mavrokordatos executed a similar reform in moldavia, and this time was quite explicit in wanting to abolish not only the condition of serfdom, but also the word. he stated clearly that the former vecini should now be known as ‘free neighbouring villagers [săteni megieşi] without landholdings’; and that wherever land is sold, the men are not sold with it, but ‘they should remain in the village as villagers of the village’.98 the most common juridical terms henceforth for people engaged in agriculture, but without their own land and usually owing dues to the masters of the land, were clăcaşi [somebody owing clacă or labour dues], lăcuitori [residents], sătenii [villagers], plugari [ploughmen].

thus in the legal canons elaborated in Wallachia by alexandru Ipsilanti and his legal adviser michael photeinos in the 1770s and 1780s, the stan-dard term was plugar. the basis of the agrarian section of these laws was a byzantine text known as the Nomos georgikos (written in the late 7th–early 8th century), which was translated as Pravile pentru plugari, and had already been used in the moldavian law-book of 1646, Cartea românească de învăţătură [the romanian book of teaching].99 nevertheless, the term ţăran slips in occasionally, nearly always when it is a question of exclu-sion, sanction or limitation. for instance, it was a punishable offence to house ţărani who fled from the estates where they were settled.100 Like-wise, ţăranii cei proşti who engage in selling or borrowing were only supposed to do so under the witness of the parish priest, constable or

 96 for these terms see Ştefănescu, ‘Consideraţiuni’; Gonţa, Satul, 295–9. 97 this was unfortunately mistranslated as six years by e.d. tappe (mavrokordatos,

‘decrees’, 130–2). It is given correctly in Documente privind relaţiile agrare, 2:453–4. 98 Documente privind relaţiile agrare, 2:287–9. 99 Georgescu & popescu, Legislaţia agrară, 67–9. for a critical edition of the Nomos

georgikos, see ashburner, ‘the farmer’s Law’.100 Pravila pentru plugari, zac. 18: ‘Cînd va fugi ţăranul de la locul şi de la stăpînu-său,

nime necăiuri să nu-l primească, iară de-l va şi priimi, deodată, de sîrg să-l întoarcă înapoi la satul lui de unde iaste.’. this paragraph seems to have been inserted into the Nomos georgikos sometime in the 14th century: the text reproduces an edict of the prefect Zoticus (512 ad), in turn inspired by previous constitutions. Georgescu & popescu eds. Legislaţia agrară, 79 n.91.

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village elders.101 and in Ipsilanti’s edict of 1775 for the development of education in Wallachia, the occasion of the mention is again a negative one, his exclusion from access to any form of schooling. but, as we might expect from a rationalist legislator, a reason is given: ‘it is given to them to work the land and to raise livestock’.102 the ţăran, however, is specifi-cally named: and even in the Greek in which this law was redacted, he is not only γεωργιος but also τζαρανος.103 a pattern is apparent which will become important later. the ţăran is i) classified directly as a worker on the land; ii) his importance to the common good is stressed, and indeed considered praiseworthy; iii) he is excluded from reaping the benefits. the exclusion of ţărani from schooling was almost certainly motivated by the earlier decree of mavrokordatos in 1746 which made attendance at the academies of bucharest or Iaşi an obligatory condition of access to public office. the boyars thus increasingly felt the need to protect themselves as a class from incursions from below.104 a marginally more generous atti-tude towards the peasants can be detected in a Schools Instruction from habsburg-administered bucovina in 1797: there, peasants were permitted to attend, but the purpose of schooling is not ‘so that educated peasant children can rise up to the great higher schools by themselves’ but merely to teach them the elementary reading, writing, and arithmetical skills.105

an alternative tradition, however, was gradually making itself felt. In an introduction to a series of Lives of the Saints written in 1807, venia-min Costachi, the orthodox metropolitan of moldavia, showed an interest in propagating faith and knowledge to all classes of society: ‘books’, he opined, ‘ought to benefit not only the great, but also the small; not only the citizens, but also the ţărani; not only the wise, but also the simple and foolish.’ he is remembered for the establishment of a seminary at Socola, outside Iaşi, where, in contrast to the educational policy of Ipsi-lanti and other, ‘natives and foreigners, the poor and the rich alike’ were

101  Pravilniceasca Condică, ch. 24, zac. 3, 112: ‘iară datul şi luatul ce să întîmplă între ţăranii cei proşti [Τών δε ποταπων τζαρανων], să se facă supt mărturie preotului enorii i a pîrcălabului sau celor mai bătrîni ai satului.’

102 Ipsilanti, ‘hrisovul pentru şcoli’ [1775], in hurmuzaki, Documente 14–ii, 1273. the term seems even to have entered the russian language in the autonomous Soviet Social-ist republic of moldavia: cf. the title of a scholarly article on labour rents in eighteenth-century moldavia: dragnev, ‘evoliutsiia otrabotochnoi renty v tsaranskoi [sic!] derevne’.

103 other instance of the use of the term τζαρανος in Greek texts of the period are cited by papacostea & Constantiniu, ‘Les premières reformes’, 101, 102.

104 See pippidi, ‘L’accueil de la philosophie française’, 225–6.105 ‘Instruction pentru privighetorie ce-i de loc a şcoalelor de prin târgurile cele mari şi

cele mici şi de prin sate’, 17 June 1797, cited by Ceauşu, ‘Şcoală şi educaţie’, 232–6.

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encouraged to enrol.106 a further index of the changing ideology of the times, was the opinion of the Greek-romanian historian daniil philippide, who expressed in 1816, possibly for the first time in romania, the senti-ment that the peasantry are ‘the most precious part of the population, the foundation of the entire people, the fathers and feeders of the towns.’107 that it was not a universally-shared belief, however, can be seen from a statement of 1821 by one of the members of the Philike Etairia, which voiced the contrary opinion that it was the boyars that were ‘the mainstay of the country.’108

meanwhile, in transylvania as we have seen, the word ţăran had no particular connotation of rurality, nor of any attempt to valorize such a rurality. ‘peasants’ were indicated by two main terms borrowed from the hungarian, iobag [dependent] and jeler [hun. zséler, cottager].109 the dictionary definition cited earlier, where ţăran was associated with the German Bürger or Landsmann, reflected local usage. thus the historian and philologist Gheorghe Şincai could write in his Hronicul Românilor (1805–1812) that the invasion of romania by the Cumans in 900 ad ‘was terrifying not only to the foreigners but also to the ţărani’.110 a pro-posed romanian journal of 1789 is called Ziarul românesc pentru ţărani, which the German censors translated as ‘Wallachische Zeitung für den Landesmann’.111 the sense of a compatriot is again to the fore; the sense of an honest, humble agrarian, illiterate but virtuous, that we will meet at the end of the nineteenth century, is not part of the intrinsic mean-ing of the word. on the one hand, an agrarian identity was extremely natural for the transylvanian school of writers, most of them coming as they did from rural backgrounds.112 on the other hand, the authors of the

106 Cited by Isar, ‘trăsături iluministe’, 449–50.107 Geografikon tís Rumanias (Leipzig 1816), cited by Georgescu, Political ideas, 100. this

in itself may owe something to an earlier work in Greek, the Elliniki Nomarkhia, which stated that: ‘the peasants toil non-stop and suffer tribulations beyond description, they never have anything to spare of the fruits of their sweat, so that they may rest for as much as one day . . . the peasants, the most respected class of a state, the most stable support of civil happiness, live worse than their own animals.’ anon, ‘elliniki nomarkhia’; cf. Clogg, ‘aspects’, 24.

108 brad-Chisacof, ‘Language’.109 for these terms and their evolving meaning see Constantiniu, ‘termeni sociali’,

176–7.110  DLR: ‘ţăran’.111  See tomescu, Istoria cărţii, 108.112  See for instance the list of vocabulary entitled ‘de necessariis in domo’ in Şincai and

micu’s grammar: the list includes besides an inkpot and pen, a hoe and a sickle. Şincai & micu, Elementa linguae [1780, 1805], 202–3.

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petition to Leopold II in 1791 (Supplex Libellus Valachorum) explicitly laid claim to an aristocratic heritage, and denied that they were merely a race of peasants.113 Şincai, besides his grammatical and historical works, was also the author of a brochure entitled ‘natural teaching for the eradica-tion of popular superstition’ [Învăţătură firească spre surparea superstiţiei norodului, 1803]: to him it was clear that the peasants’ folk beliefs were a serious obstacle to national development.114

Romanians into Peasants. The Crystallization of the Image, 1821–1883115

It is roughly with the uprising of tudor vladimirescu in Wallachia in 1821 that one can see a discourse developing that tries to define the nation according to different criteria from the traditional élite’s point of view, and to put forward a definition of the nation (norod) that at least included the peasantry, although it did not base itself upon it. In a letter of tudor’s to nicolae văcărescu, he writes that

evidently you consider the people, which whose blood the whole noble class has fed itself and refined itself, to be merely nothing, and you only include the thieving nobles in the fatherland . . . but why do you not realise that the people is the fatherland and not the clique of thieves? and I ask you to tell me what I have done to oppose the people. for I am no other than a man taken from amongst the people of the country who have been embittered and down trodden on account of the thieves.116

a lot of the ascriptive speech figures that would later be used to describe and locate the romanian peasant, begin to appear. the phantasmago-rical unreality of the upper orders on the one had, and the sweat and blood of the lower on the other: according to tudor, the boyars are ‘piling up ill-intentioned fabrications on top of us’ while they ‘feed and refine

113 prodan, Supplex libellus Valachorum, 493–510.114 bodea, ‘preocupări economice şi culturale’, 93–5. Similar publicity aimed at stamp-

ing out allegedly unhealthy popular traditions appeared rather later in moldavia: e.g. the article ‘despre obiceiul’ [1840], 17–20.

115 for this period there exist already the insightful (if at times impressionistic) studies of durandin, ‘Une étape’, eadem, ‘Le bon sujet’; cf. Karnoouh, L’invention. more detailed analyses, focusing on the concept of ‘the people’, by roman, Le populisme; and Cornea, ‘Cuvîntul “popor” ’.

116 vladimirescu, letter to nicolae văcărescu [11 feb 1821], in bodea, ed. 1848 la români, I:64.

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themselves on the blood of the people’.117 a pamphlet of the time, Cuvân-tul unui ţăran cătră boieri—one of the earliest instances of the rhetorical appropriation of the voice of the peasant in romanian writing—likewise describes the boyars as ‘sleeping on in the bosom of idleness and langu-our’ while they ‘ride on our backs and feed on our sweat’.118 and in 1826, dinicu Golescu would allude to ‘a lot of these speculators, masters of all around them, wringing all the sweat out of the people.’119

We could say that a social critique that derives its power from a claim to represent (both in the political and aesthetic sense) the lower classes has come into being. there is also, in Cuvântul unui ţăran cătră boieri, a particular sense of a golden age, when boyars lived simply and peasants were happy:

our ancestors used to tell us—and clearly it was like that in the golden times—that, whenever a want came upon them, it weighed on them only until they showed their case to the boyars, and at once they found relief and comfort; so the peasant wished for nothing else but for the boyars to hold power, and the boyars did not reckon much of wisdom or power or honour except to serve the good of the country . . . 

how simply they lived, with what judgement, with what care; with only a few servants, they walked in the streets amongst the people and were pointed out and known, not from the ornaments on their clothes, but by the brilliance of their worthy deeds!120

however, this kind of talk was not part of the mainstream public dis-course, nor could it be said that such social critiques were blessed by the authorities.

the actual word ţăran appears rarely in these diatribes; both Golescu and vladimirescu prefer the terms norod or patrie or obşte. Indeed, one critic has plausibly argued that the Cuvînt was a later fabrication, dating from the 1840s, for the very reason that the word ţăran was not in com-mon use in the 1820s; rather, it was an attempt by liberal writers to invent

117  Ibid. the imagery may or may not appeal to local vampiric traditions, but is in any case not tudor’s invention. nearly twenty years earlier, the russian consul in Constanti-nople, vasilii tamara, wrote to the prince of Wallachia alexandros Soutzos, criticizing the ‘gang of bloodsuckers that the princes bring in their wake to moldavia and Wallachia’; Letter of 16/28 august 1802 quoted by vianu, ‘Iluministul rus v. f. malinowski’, 176. See also Chapter 4 below.

118  ‘Cuvîntul unui ţăran către boieri’, in Acte şi legiuiri, 761–5.119  Golescu, Însemnare [1826], in idem, Scrieri, 20–1.120 ‘Cuvîntul’, loc. cit.

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a tradition for themselves.121 even when agricultural activities are being alluded to, there is no need to evoke the ţăran: ploughing was quite capa-ble of being undertaken by noroade, as for instance in the enlightened boyar vasile pogor’s poem ‘dialogue between nature and moldavia’:

moldova, de ce ai lipsă, în ce simţaşti greutate?au pe cîmpii tăi n-ai roadă, sau păşuni îmbîlşugate?n-ai isvoară să ti-adăpi? n-ai năroade să te are?În sînul tău nu să naşti argintul, aur şi sare?

(Moldavia, what do you lack, what hardships do you feel? In your plains have you no crops, or luxuriant pastures?/ Have you no springs to water you?/No peoples to plough you?/ Does not your breast bear forth silver, gold and salt?)122

Similarly, literary and economic publications of the 1820s and 1830s were as likely to refer to the plugar or the sătean as to the ţăran. most of these writers recommended the benefits of civilization and commercial devel-opment, as solutions to the plight of their people. If they promoted agri-culture, it was ‘as the foundation of wealth and happiness in a nation, for we see all the civilized people practising it, wise and great men write about it and dedicate their whole lives to writing and teaching it in prac-tise and in theory’.123 ploughing was a modern, industrial activity, a sign of modernity rather than traditionalism. one writer equated the plough quite directly with civilization, breaking with the past and cutting off the roots of tradition.124 those who praised the continuous, submissive aspect of agriculture, on the other hand, were likely to be reactionaries like mihai Sturdza, who spoke in 1823 of ‘une soumission paternelle, la soumission que le peuple entier conserve aussi, en conduisant leur charrue et labou-rant la terre’.125

moving into the 1830’s one can see the image of the peasant subjected to a kind of conscious literary rusticity. the moldavian poet and civil

121  mănucă, Argumente, 52; idem, ‘Cuvîntul’. the pamphlet was traditionally attributed to the moldavian ‘Jacobin’ writer Ionică tăutu (1795–1830) and dated to the 1820s. Iorga, perhaps wishing to give it an even older pedigree, attributed it to the monk vartolomeu măzăreanu (c. 1720–c. 1790). Ist. lit. rom. în sec. 18 [1901 edn.], I:543–6.

122 pogor, ‘dialog între fire şi moldova’ [1821] in vîrtosu, ‘o satiră în versuri din moldova anului 1821’, 523.

123 ‘plan pentru un aşăzămînt de agricultură spre îmbunătăţirea ţărinilor’ [1830], apud C. bodea, 1848 la români, 1:82.

124 ‘plugul, adeca civilizaţia, stîrpeşte zi pe zi rădăcinile şi preface codrul în curătură.’ russo, ‘Studie moldovană’ [1851], in Scrieri, 13.

125 m. Sturdza, “arz mahar” addressé à la Sublime Porte par les boyards refugiés en Bucovine [1823], repr. by Xenopol, ‘Un proiect de constituţie’, 168.

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servant asachi’s idyllic representations, influenced by both classical and modern european pastoral, often show the păstor or the plăieş living a happy, simple life:

pe la munte-i avuţie,Că umbrosul verde plaie lăcaş de bucurie,de plăcut şi dulce trai.acolo răsună stîncade un cîntec armonios,Gioacă-n horă cu româncapăstorelul cel voios.

(There is plenty in the mountains,/ For the green and shady uplands/ are a haven of joy/ Of a sweet and pleasant life./ There the rock resounds/ To a har-monious song,/ And the lively shepherd/ with a Romanian girl dances in the round.)126

nonetheless, asachi was certainly aware of the unofficial, eschatological imagery. thus, in his adaptation of Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, one particular strophe stands out from the rest:

o voi care n-aveţi stimă pentru omul umelit,nobili plini de fantezie, mîndri-n titlu ruginit,de ce-n ură-aveţi săteanul, cînd a fruntei lui sudoarea produs mărirea voastră ş-avuţilor odoare?

(O, you who cannot respect the humble man,/ You fantasizing nobles, proud of your rusting titles,/ Why hold you the villager in hatred, when the sweat of his brow/ Has given rise to your greatness and the ornaments of your wealth?)127

When this poem was recited by a pupil at the summer examination of the academy in Iaşi in 1838, these lines caused both the prince Sturdza and the metropolitan Costachi to walk out of the room. the poet asachi and the schools inspector Gheorghe Seulescu were subsequently severely upbraided for having attacked the honour of church and state. these lines have been remarked upon frequently by critics, and much comparative analysis and conjecturing has tried to establish which source asachi used for his translation of this poem.128 but these lines, which repeat the exist-ing tropes of sweating villager and dreaming nobleman, surely have their

126 asachi, ‘Cîntecul unei păstoriţe române de la munte’ [1854], in Opere 1:124.127 Idem, ‘elegie scrisă pe ţinterîmul unui sat’ [1836], in Opere 1:52.128 Grimm, ‘traduceri şi imitaţiuni’, 292–3; Cornea, Originile romantismului românesc,

333–6; Sorescu, Gh. Asachi.

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roots in the existing romanian tradition. they are certainly not explicitly in Gray’s original, nor in any of the french or russian versions of Gray’s poem that have been proposed as a source.

In Wallachia, too, the burgeoning of literature enabled a more elabo-rate representation of a world of rustic harmony, and the enactment of the idea that a rural community can stand in as a metaphor for the politi-cal community. this moral message comes across with clarity in a festive sketch written by Ion heliade rădulescu on the occasion of the birthday of alexandru d. Ghica, prince of Wallachia in 1837. the scene is set in a village where Ghica had once served as ispravnic or district prefect: on the return of two of the villagers from a visit to bucharest, all learn that their former local prefect is the present prince: ‘didn’t we know him—eh? what do you say, is it twenty years ago now? he’s changed his dress, his gait, but his nature’s just the same.’ the returning villagers also bring history books telling of the roman origins of the romanians; everybody rejoices: ‘the dance begins.’ this sketch shows how literary works served the need to project on an imaginary level the personal, communitarian link between the head of state and the world of the village. It is also an early example of a writer successfully representing ‘popular’ speech in a literary work. the dramatis personae, however, is revealing: the speaking parts are taken by people described as juraţi [men capable of swearing oaths], and săteni [villagers], whereas ţărani are denoted as an anony-mous supporting crowd, without a speaking role.129

a final key development of the 1830s, which was to have a long career in romania, was the elaboration of the idea that one or other of the prin-cipalities was ‘a predominantly agrarian country.’ as we have seen, this had been a typical assumption of foreign writers and observers, for hun-dreds of years. however, it was only when an intellectual discourse began to be considered as a possible aid and solution to the romanians’ prob-lems, that objectivized statements of this nature became commonplace in local writings. one of the key works stating this proposition was the eco-nomic treatise Aperçu sur l’état industriel de la Moldavie, published in 1838 by prince neculai Suţu (1798–1871), at the time Grand postelnic (a senior court function, equivalent to the later minister of the Interior). ‘molda-via is an essentially agrarian country: its only wealth is drawn from the production of agriculture’ he began unequivocally. In fact his work was

129 heliade rădulescu, ‘Sărbătoare cîmpenească pentru 30 august 1837’, in idem, Opere, 1:269–78.

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designed to show that this state of affairs was not inevitable for moldavia; that economic wealth depended on producing exchangeable goods, and not only primary materials in which there was no intrinsic advantage. ‘agriculture exercises no superiority in the creation of riches.’130 but he was not always taken at his word. Whether or not the romanian lands should remain ‘predominantly agrarian’ would become the principal bone of contention amongst romanian economists for the next hundred years and even beyond. henceforth, however, almost no writers denied that romania was somehow profoundly agrarian in its nature.131 and this despite the fact that only since the opening of Wallachia and moldavia to the international grain market in 1829, following the treaty of adrianople, had cereal production been the predominant economic concern of the romanians.132

however, even in the 1840s the peasant could hardly be said to be a major object of representation in literary works. the moldavian writers associated with the review Dacia litterară [1840] and with developing the theatre in Iaşi were concerned with social class, and saw literature as an ideal way to distinguish and evaluate different groupings.133 many of them sought to promote a model of the past and of traditional, archaic manners and ways of life: but the figure of the peasant did not attract any special attention. In works such as negruzzi’s Fiziologia Provinţialului [the pro-vincial type, 1840] or Kogălniceanu’s Fiziologia provincialului [the provin-cial type in Iaşi, 1844], the bearer of traditional values was frequently a rural boyar, dressed in the old-fashioned bearskin coat in opposition to the frivolous youth in their top-hats and tails; smoking a turkish pipe rather than french cigarettes; still going about town in a carriage guarded by an albanian retainer.134 this figure continues to appear as a moral counter-weight to the corrupt urban bureaucracy in later fiction: nicolae filimon’s novel Ciocoii vechi şi noi [Upstarts old and new, 1864] contains a typical

130 Soutzo, Aperçu, 1, 12.131  paiusan, ‘Strat vs. Xenopol’. other instances of the privileging of agriculture include

Ionescu de la brad, Povăţuitorul sănătăţii [1844], 29: ‘our only source of sufficiency and wealth’; bălcescu, Question économique, in idem, Opere, 2:42 (‘les pays comme les nôtres, où le seule industrie existante est l’agriculture’); Catargiu [1857], 156 (‘l’agriculture, notre seul richesse naturelle’); moruzi, L’amélioration des monopoles [1860], 110 (‘la moldavie, pays essentiellement agricole’).

132 See platon, Geneza revoluţiei, 142–212.133 for instance, russo, ‘Critica criticii’ [1840], in idem, Scrieri, 3–10.134 negruzzi, ‘fiziologia provinţialului’ [1840], in Opere, 1:243–5; Kogălniceanu, ‘fizio-

logia provincialului din Iaşi [1844], in Opere, 1:67–74; cf. also russo, ‘Studie moldovană’ [1851] in idem, Scrieri, 10–24.

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example in the person of ‘banul C. . . .’, a romanian by nationality, whom the daughter of a phanariot official falls in love with but is forbidden from marrying by her ambitious father.135 Kogălniceanu’s sketch, Fiziologia pro-vincialului in Iaşi [the physiology of the provincial in Iaşi, 1844] describes a lesser class of provincial than that portrayed in negruzzi’s earlier work of the same name, but, perhaps characteristically, the author writes:

the peasants, in other words, the workers on the land, likewise cannot serve me for my type: their life is so terrible in comparison to our own, their char-acter is so natural, my sympathy for them is so great and right, that even the slightest joke that I could make against such a class of people, upon whom all burdens lie, apart from the beneficial ones, and who provide us, the lazy and idle townsfolk, with food, would be imputed to me as an injustice.136

although the extended expression of sympathy was a new sign of a more humanitarian outlook, the exclusion from representation harked back to the older discourse of the eighteenth century.

nevertheless, in the period immediately before and during 1848, the image of the peasant is developed in two extremely significant directions. one we owe to the collectors of folklore and compilers of peasant songs, poems, and customs; another derived from the more concrete political developments of the revolution itself, and the arrival on the political agenda of the idea of the peasants’ emancipation as a real possibility. one could say that we are dealing with the peasants’ political representation and territorialization on the one hand, and with their literary representa-tion and territorialization on the other.

nicolae bălcescu (1819–1852), famous like many of the 1848 genera-tion both as a writer and as a politician, speaks of the need for sources for a new, authenticating history. ‘the first historians were poets’, ‘a col-lection is needed, then, of poems and stories which are to be found in the mouth of the people’.137 Just as in literature, appeal is made to the ‘mouth’ of the people, so on the field of Liberty, according to the liberal journalist and politician C.a. rosetti, ‘every word that came out of the mouth of the orators entered down directly into the heart of the roma-nian villager’.138 meanwhile, the village deputies who come to the com-mission for property set up by the provisional government in bucharest

135 filimon, Ciocoii vechi şi noi [1864], ch. 2: ‘postelnicul andronache tuzluc’.136 Kogălniceanu, ‘fiziologia provincialului din Iaşi’ [1844], in Opere 1:70.137 bălcescu, ‘Cuvînt preliminariu despre izvoarele istoriei românilor’ [1845], in Opere,

1:95, 96.138 rosetti, ‘despre sătenii’, [1848], in idem, C.A. Rosetti—gînditorul, 102.

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to debate the emancipation of serfdom in august 1848 ‘call out together in a united voice’, or so we are told. authenticity, direct vocal link between the peasants and the master, and unity of opinion are the hallmarks of the discourse.

It is at this stage that the previously threatening image of the agricultural labourer, sweating, bleeding, and put upon by his masters, enters both the official archives of the state as well as the annals of literature. thus again bălcescu in 1848: ‘those who possess land,’ he argues, ‘will defend better their birthplace, are more deeply penetrated with the national sentiment, and opposed themselves better against foreign invasions.’139 moreover, in order to achieve the fixation of a positive image of the romanian peas-ant, it was necessary to delimit him from the figure of the barbarian, with whom the romanians had for so long been associated by foreign writers. bălcescu makes this distinction subtly at the beginning of his brochure of 1850, Question économique des Principautés Danubiennes. Speaking of the residue of roman inhabitants of dacia following the withdrawal by aurelian in 274 ad, he wrote:

the disdainful attitude of the barbarian peoples towards agriculture was well known. they did not even touch the plough, reports ammianus mar-cellinus: Nemo apud eos arat nec stivam aliquando contigit. this disdain for the land saved the romans, who remained masters of it. they conserved the practices and customs of their ancestors, and equality for them was a sacred law and the consequence of all the peoples’ hatred of the name roman.140

thus the romanian could continue to be allied with his ancestors the romans, through the invocation of the cult of agriculture; and simultane-ously the peasant could be rescued from the possible indignity of confu-sion with the barbarian.

at the same time, however, as the peasant and the land become sacral-ized images of the nation, they also become subject to the laws of cir-culation and exchange: as one Conservative deputy in the Wallachian assembly put it, ‘the peasant is the boyar’s capital’.141 bălcescu was think-ing along similar lines: ‘the soil, a fixed capital, becomes a circulating capital, like any currency, without losing its quality, only slightly less

139 bălcescu, ‘discurs despre împroprietărirea ţăranului’ [1848], in idem, Opere, 2:23.140 bălcescu, Question économique des Principautés Danubiennes [1850] in idem, Opere,

2:44. a similar sentiment in b.p. hasdeu’s historical drama Răzvan şi Vidra [1867], in idem, Scrieri, 1:271.

141  a.G. Golesco, De l’abolition du servage, 46.

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mobile’.142 but the peasants themselves explicitly attempted to resist this commercialization of landlord-peasant relations; at the property Commis-sion set up in august 1848, which actually had to decide on the problem, the villagers do not ‘cry out with a single voice’ but merely ‘manifest their unwillingness’.143

furthermore, the more frequent the outward expression of unity between peasant and boyar, and the more legitimate the peasant’s voice becomes, the more distant the relation between peasant speech and the language of the cultured. thus the poet and playwright vasile alecsandri, in his essay of 1844, O primblare pe munte [‘a stroll in the mountains’, 1844], is for the first time placing the moldavian vernacular accent in inverted commas, drawing attention to the different style of speech used by the writer and by the character. In his famous Poezii populare ale româ-nilor [‘folk poems of the romanians’, 1852, 1866], we sometimes come across the same images that appeared terrifying when used by tudor vladimirescu, circumscribed by annotation and by assurance that they are part of the natural treasure of the romanians. tudor had referred to the boyars as ‘dragons which swallow us alive’, and as ‘the snake that when it comes out in front of you, you should beat with your club to defend your life’. In Poezii populare, this potentially dangerous image recurs in the bal-lad ‘balaurul [the dragon]’, with the note: ‘the romanians have many superstitions concerning snakes, some of them based on experience, others born of imaginings.’ While objectifying the image of the snake on the literary level, alecsandri removed the political venom from it, and explicitly distanced himself from the actual enunciation of the words, which come from the gura poporului, the mouth of the people.144 I don’t want to insist here on the more difficult-to-prove question of exactly how

142 bălcescu, Question économique, in Opere, 2:90–91.143 ‘to this proposal, nearly all the villages manifested their disagreement’, records the

secretary of the property Commision, meeting I; see bodea, 1848 la români, 2:717. both bălcescu and, following his lead, Jules michelet, actively misrepresented the peasants as being in favour of a purely economic-contractual basis to property relations: compare the text of the debate with bălcescu’s account of it in Question économique, in Opere, 2:85–90; michelet’s version in Légendes démocratiques du Nord, 282–3. research by economic his-torians has shown that while peasants were surprisingly willing to pay their dues to the boyars and to the government in money, they had absolutely no interest in the solidifica-tion of property rights: their economic activity necessitated considerable movement and the ability to get out of long-term obligations quickly when required (Lampe & Jackson, Balkan economic history).

144 vladimirescu, ‘Cea dîntîi proclamaţie’ [23 ian 1821], in bodea, 1848 la români, 1:83; alecsandri, Poezii populare, 17–18.

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alecsandri amended and sanitized the folk poetry that he collected. much of it retains its value anyway. however, it is only the recent circumstance of the creation of a literary language that made the popular language differentiated, objectivized, or ‘a clean source.’ the peasant, then, could only become an objective ideal once his language as well as his social being had become dramatically, manifestly other than the language of government.145 Interestingly, although in his romanian writings alecsan-dri always referred to the ‘peasantry’ or the ‘people’ in the third person, as a particular social ‘other’ of which he did not form part (he was of noble origin); in his dealings with foreigners he was remarkably willing to claim for himself the characteristics of the peasant. In a letter to a female french correspondent in october 1848, he bemoaned his status, describing him-self ironically as ‘un paysan du danube, quasi barbare, un moldave, enfin, c’est tout dire!’146 While at home, romanian writers described the peasant as a creature with certain essential traits but as fundamentally different from themselves; abroad, they assumed his posture, and saw the peasant as somehow representative of the position of the romanians in europe.

even at this time, however, the term ţăran, with all its potentially national significance, was not the major term used by the poets, ora-tors and revolutionaries. the favoured word was popor. this term too was undergoing an alteration in meaning as a result of changing circum-stances. as we have seen, in 1821 the usual word for the masses had been norod or prostime; by 1848 everybody was speaking of popor or popolu. originally in romanian it had signified the congregation or parish popu-lation of a church: now it became the focus of an intense nationaliza-tion, culminating in the figure of Christ-the-people, borrowed from the writings of Lammenais, michelet or mickiewicz. even in writings which treated subjects that were apparently exclusively concerned with peas-ants, the word popor, popolu, or populaţiune would be given preference over ţăran.

So the historian George bariţiu’s historical account of what is now known in romanian historiography as a peasant revolt, claims to deal with ‘a civil war that broke out between democracy and the aristocracy’ between the representanţii poporului and the familii patriciane, with only intermittent reference to the populaţiune rurală, lăcuitorii ţărani

145 Cf. duţu, European intellectual movements, 13–14.146 alecsandri, ‘Lettre à une correspondante française’ [14 october 1848].

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or poporul ţăran.147 another author, Cezar bolliac, could write an article about ‘the social mosaic’ of the romanian principalities, dividing the population into seventeen ‘classes’ and five ‘castes’, without referring once to the ţăran, and with only a short passing reference to a stylized ‘caste of plugari [ploughmen], which alone supports the entire state on its shoulders.’148 even as late as 1861 alexandru odobescu used the formula Muncitorul român [the romanian labourer], for his idyllic depiction of a specifically rustic scene:

no mistake, the labourer is the pillar of romania! may we learn from him to love our fatherland! being in unbroken relation with the earth of our land, he knows how to love it and to honour it!149

nevertheless, although the word ţăran did not then come to be generally used to mean ‘the people’, it was indisputably gaining ground as the com-monly accepted term for the socially dependent residents of the country-side. the work of nicolae bălcescu shows how a writer who previously preferred the terms muncitor, plugar or lăcuitor to designate the peasantry, was subsequently ‘converted’ to using the word ţăran. bălcescu had ini-tially treated the agrarian question in a work entitled On the social condi-tion of the labouring ploughmen in the Romanian Principalities in different ages, which was published in 1846.150 the title of this work did not refer to ţărani at all, and the text only occasionally. however, when bălcescu returned to the same theme immediately before his death in 1852, in his unfinished epic historical narrative The Romanians under Prince Michael the Brave, he now explicitly entitled the section dealing with michael’s enserfment of the free population of Wallachia, Robirea ţăranului [The enserfment of the Peasant]. bălcescu is known to have shown a marked preference for literary archaisms and ‘traditional’ language and phras-ing when composing his later works, often eliminating neologisms used in pre-1848 versions and searching for old romanian words to give an antique aura to his prose style.151 In this case, however, the anachronism works the other way around: he is applying not an archaic meaning of the word ţăran, but a new one, which looks timeless but is in fact relatively recent.

147 bariţiu, ‘despre resbelul civil transilvan’.148 bolliac, ‘mozaicul social’ [1858] in Scrieri, 2:135.149 odobescu, ‘muncitorul român’ [1855], in Opere, 1:31–32.150 bălcescu, ‘despre starea soţială a muncitorilor plugari în principatele române în

deosebite timpuri’ [1846], in Opere, 1:151–61.151  anghelescu, ‘n. bălcescu şi romanul istoric românesc’.

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the political effects of this gradual definition and appropriation of the peasant can be seen in the debates about the emancipation of the peas-ant which took place in the ‘ad-hoc councils’ of 1857 in the romanian principalities. these councils were convened following the stipulations of the treaty of paris, in the wake of the Crimean War. the european pow-ers had been prepared to support the romanian pleas for autonomy from russian and ottoman control; but had insisted that the moldavian and Wallachian councils give greater attention to the matter of the emancipa-tion of the peasantry and the development of a modernized agricultural economy.

at these councils, held in Iaşi and bucharest, some deputies represent-ing the rural population were allowed to put their case, and this is what they said:

the cornfields were sown, the wheat grew green, the fields came out in flower, for our sweat watered them . . . the river of our sweat flows the width of the danube, and goes overseas and abroad, where it is turned into rivers of gold and silver; but we had neither good order nor our rights.152

mihai Kogălniceanu, who spoke for the landed classes in reply, was fully aware of the impact that these metaphors could have on the political opinion: ‘the village deputies came of a sudden and hurled the thing in our face, in all its terrible nakedness. this crude narration’, he continued, has put off many liberals who would otherwise support their reform. It is as if the indelicate style of their rhetoric disqualified them from obtain-ing political rights. Kogălniceanu himself preferred to give a new, syn-thesized definition of the ţărani: ‘they are the most powerful element of romanian nationality; the peasants themselves are the country [ţăranii sunt însăşi ţara].’ the difference is that the boyar defines them as ţăranii, and ‘the most powerful element of romanian nationality’, whereas the village deputies continue to describe themselves as sătenii [villagers].153 It seems that, although the term ţăran carried negative connotations for most levels of society, a particular campaign was now at work to promote and dignify the word. to give just one example, this was the period in which there first appeared a newspaper in romania with the title Ţeranul Roman (1861–1863), of which there were to be numerous instances in the

152 ‘Jalba deputăţilor săteni’ [1857], 36.153 m. Kogălniceanu, speech on peasant-landlord relations to the divan ad-hoc of mol-

davia, 18 dec 1857; in Opere, 3–i: 83–9.

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twentieth century. It was edited by the agronomist Ion Ionescu de la brad, and argued vigorously in favour of the peasants’ emancipation.154

It was Kogălniceanu who was primarily responsible for seeing through the legislation of 1864, under the rule of alexandru Ioan Cuza, which legally emancipated the peasant from extensive labour dues and promul-gated the resettlement of part of the peasantry on the boyars’ estates, with proprietary rights over the land. this agrarian reform has been greatly criticized: many subsequent writers of both liberal and conservative ori-entation looked upon it as a failure in some degree. but there can be no doubt that the Statut of 1864—enshrining the right of the peasants to pri-vate ownership of land in the romanian Constitution, after their rights had been substantially whittled away over several centuries—changed both the status of the peasant and the nature of the discourse about him. although the law itself referred throughout to peasants as sătenii, the ministerial circular to the county prefects, which served to inform them of the law’s promulgation and significance, declared that:

from that day [the next St. George’s day] in the whole extent of romania, the ţărani shall be free masters of their arms and of their lands. this being done, we must concern ourselves with the necessary measures to ensure that agriculture, our great national treasure, does not collapse.155

although the law claimed to give the peasants equal status with the rest of society, in fact it extended enormously the number of juridical speci-fications as to what săteni may or may not do. for instance, those who received land were forbidden to sell it for a period of thirty years. In a later modification, the terms sătean [villager] and agricol [agricultural] were even given legal meanings: different conditions of landholding and labour contracts were applied to ‘villagers’ and ‘agricultural’ work, from those conditioning the rest of society.156 at the same time, the law completely failed to take into account a large number of categories of rural labourer, who were subsequently prejudiced in their rights to land ownership. this is not the place for a detailed discussion of the social conditions prevailing in post-independence romania;157 suffice it to note that, simultaneously

154 hangiu, ed. Presa literară românească, 192–3.155 ‘Circulara ministrului de Interne către toţi prefecţii’, Acte şi legiuiri, 1st ser., 2:905.156 ‘Lege pentru modificarea legii tocmelilor agricole votată de senat şi amendată de

adunare’ [1872], in Acte şi legiuiri, 2d ser., 1:64–7. for the definition of sătean see eidelberg, Great Rumanian peasant revolt, 47.

157 the subject is well covered in english: mitrany, The land and the peasant, 1–117; eidelberg, Great Rumanian peasant revolt; Stahl, Traditional Romanian village communi-ties; Chirot, Social change; hitchins, Romania, 166–83.

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with his emancipation, the peasant underwent juridical delimitation and constraint: that such a process was in his detriment is shown only too clearly by the revolts of 1888 and 1907.

the occasion of the Universal exhibition at paris in 1867 was a symboli-cally important one for the infant romanian state. It was the first such fair at which the romanians would be permitted to show off the prod-ucts of their nation in a space separate from that of the ottoman empire: they thus had the chance to display their autonomy to the world, as well as to indicate a particular style of achievement in cultural and economic spheres. at the exhibition in London in 1851, the moldavian Gheorghe asachi had sent plans for the erection of statues of Stephen the Great in various picturesque locations in his country, together with lithographic plates representing scenes from moldavian history, or classicized moun-tain landscapes.158 this time around, alexandru odobescu was charged with collecting materials for exhibition and selecting the areas in which romania could best contribute. ‘romania being an essentially agrarian country,’ he wrote for the catalogue, ‘the government wished above all to put on display, at the exhibition, this part of the national industry.’ there was a debate as to whether, for their pavilion, the romanians should con-struct a model of a peasant smallholding, or one of an orthodox church. eventually the latter was preferred, but nevertheless, an architect’s plan of the smallholding was sent, together with a selection of peasant cos-tumes, ‘which relate, on one side, to the costumes of the peoples of Latin origin inhabiting the South of europe (Italy and Spain), on the other to the clothes worn in the northernmost lands, peopled by Slavs, magyars and even bretons. In certain respects too, they are close to purely oriental costumes.’159

Unfortunately for the romanians, neither the orthodox pavilion nor the peasant costumes struck a chord with the parisian spectators. the costumes were dismissed by the director of the Louvre as ‘an almost sav-age display, rude furs, straw-packed specimens of the fauna of the forests and mountains, men’s clothes in embroidered leather, wool in various colours, a few women’s dresses in which already the orient is manifest.’160 Clearly this critic had not been convinced of the fine distinction between

158 Călinescu, Istoria literaturii române, 97.159 a. odobescu, ‘Casa, veşmintele şi petrecerile ţăranului român’ [1867] in idem, Opere,

2:334, 337. the model orthodox church can be seen today at the muzeul de artă ‘frederic Storck şi Cecilia Cuţescu-Storck’, strada vasile alecsandri 16, bucharest.

160 d. Kaempfen, in Paris-Guide [1867], cited ibidem (textual notes), 632.

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the hard-working, roman peasant and the savage peoples of the east. however, the orthodox church proved no less bemusing to another commentator:

Strange destinies of peoples! Why have the roumanians turned towards the Greek church, while they kept the use and the traditions of the Latin language, which they still speak today as if by a natural gift? Why do the roumanians remain schismatic between Catholic poland and miscreant turkey?161

the battle of images was proving a difficult one.162however, if the peasant was diffidently received in what was probably

his first state-sponsored outing as a representative symbol of the roma-nian nation, this did not stop his cult from growing apace. While, on the one hand it became common for romania’s orthodox inheritance to be played down in the latter part of the nineteenth century—some ortho-dox churches such as the metropolitan church at Iaşi and the episcopal church at Curtea de argeş, were rebuilt by Western architects and redeco-rated in neo-byzantine style. on the other, the stylistic accoutrements of the peasant were beginning to be fully appropriated as a national trea-sure. a significant index of this are the images of the new prince Carol of hohenzollern and his family that circulated in the 1860s and 1870s. the initial photo- and lithographs issued immediately after his election showed Carol in military uniform; by 1876, the prince and his family were to be portrayed in the Leipzig magazine Illustrierte Zeitung wearing peas-ant clothes, called ‘national costume’.163

If, then, in internal matters, the peasant was defined by intellectuals and politicians in the third person, in foreign affairs the romanians were affirming themselves as peasants. It is an obvious trait of the idea of the peasant—and the paysan du Danube theme is an outstanding example— that the word is attributed not to oneself (as in, say, the category ‘intel-lectual’), but to other people. In nineteenth-century romania, however, an unprecedented discourse of self-definition as peasants was beginning to operate. this is illustrated not only by the above attempt at aesthetic publicity, but also by a curious pamphlet published by a romanian dep-uty at the time of the Congress of berlin, when romania obtained official recognition of her independence but also ceded the territory of Southern

161  Cited by duţu, ‘y-a-t-il une europe orthodoxe?’, 23.162 on the evolution of romania’s strategies at World exhibitions, see vlad, Imagini.163 Ionescu, ‘fotografia’, contains numerous illustrations.

the traditions of invention 59

bessarabia to russia. the author, emanuel Quinezu, wishing to protest to the foreign powers, framed his pamphlet as nothing less than a ‘letter from a peasant of danuby to a russian’, and argued that

the most superficial study of our country and its history, will plainly show you, on one side, the clerics and the whole of Caesar’s europe; on the other, the roman society on the danube which along has remained, ab antiquo, a civil, republican and elective society par excellence, with its high priests and sovereigns always chosen by the suffrage of the nation and the people . . . 

of what are we guilty, we poor peoples and nations, who pay with our blood and our gold, for the excesses and faults of the diplomats?164

What had been mere ventriloquism on the part of the writers who devel-oped this idea, and possibly also a strategy for depiction of the other in an ironical mode, is reworked into an eminently self-defining rhetorical plea. however, what eugen Weber has remarked of romanians’ attitudes to their own society was equally true of the Great powers’ attitude to roma-nia itself: ‘the reality was different from the lore. Giving the peasant his due in literature seemed to absolve the cultivated ruling classes from giv-ing him his chance in fact.’165

In a recent article examining the history of romanian ethnography, the point is made that ethnographic research can and did develop as a result of two impulses: empire-building, involving the search for the primitive in distant, usually overseas lands; and nation-building, involving the con-struction of a domestic genealogy of virtue.166 What gives peculiar interest to the romanian case is that the ‘nation-building’ phase of peasantism— usually seen as beginning more or less where this article ends, around 1880—was not only preceded by, but also in many ways was significantly influenced by, the older imperial traditions. the actual legacy of the vari-ous imperial interactions with romanian peasants is complex, and can-not be rendered through blanket judgements. but it is clear that in the important process of class-formation, involving both real and imaginary conditions, the intersections of these impacts merit further study.

164 e. Quinezu, Question Bessarabienne [1878], 124, 132.165 Weber, ‘romania’, 503.166 mihăilescu & hedeşan, ‘making’.

part two

travel and alterity

Chapter two

a provinCial imperialist and a Curious ACCount of WAllAChiA: ignaz von Born*

inventing Eastern Europe

empires conquer peoples and places which they then investigate and represent. the production of such representations, it is now widely rec-ognised, is not an innocent or incidental preoccupation but integral to the legitimation of authority. the problem has been much discussed, but largely in terms of european encounters with the non-european world.1 this article is about a comparable encounter and its representations, this time between europeans.

imaginings of east european peoples have been related less to ideas of empire than to the establishment of an east-west dichotomy, alleg-edly a by-product of western cultural dominance. in ‘the enlightenment era’, it is said, ‘western travellers’ produced ‘hegemonic discourses’ about ‘eastern europe’; apparently, they ‘invented’ it as a category, and west-ern europe became identified with ‘civilization’ and eastern europe with ‘barbarism’. such at least is the argument put forward by larry wolff in his influential book inventing Eastern Europe.2

that certain peoples now called east european were then labelled bar-barous is unquestionable. however, wolff’s account of how and why this came about has been faulted on several grounds. disparaging discourses about the region existed prior to the enlightenment, and in non-west- european sources; ‘barbarous’ usually meant ‘uneducated’ rather than ‘ violent’, and barbarism’s relation to geography was being criticised as much as upheld in the eighteenth century. nor was the term ‘ eastern

* European history quarterly 36:1 (2006), 61–89.1  asad, ed., Anthropology; said, orientalism; porter and rousseau, eds., Exoticism and

the Enlightenment; Bitterli, Cultures in conflict; schwartz, ed., implicit understandings; pagden, ed. facing each other; osterhammel, Geschichtswissenschaft, 179–239.

2 wolff, inventing Eastern Europe. recent work pursuing this ‘west invents east’ para-digm includes wolff, ‘inventing galicia’; Jezernik, Wild Europe; and Bisaha, Creating East and West.

64 chapter two

europe’ widely used.3 moreover, a brief but important earlier study showed that in many eighteenth-century texts, the east-west division was evoked only intermittently.4

others studying images of Balkan peoples have invoked edward said’s paradigm of orientalism (and, implicitly, western imperial interests) to interpret them, but also affirmed ‘Balkanism’’s distinctness, notably with respect to the degree of otherness attributed to the object.5 prefixes like ‘para-’, ‘quasi-post-’ or ‘crypto-’ colonial are deployed; theses are formu-lated to the effect that in eastern europe non-colonial discourses mask colonial practices of extraction, or, conversely, that colonial discourses accompany non-colonial power relations.6

here i treat a case in which an east european people were compared to indian and american natives and seen to be not so much ‘similar but different’ as ‘similar but similar’. i look at an account of the romanian population of the Banat which is today extremely obscure, but which was reproduced at least a dozen times in four languages in mainstream publi-cations in leipzig, Frankfurt, london, venice and paris between 1774 and 1800. i identify the author and reconstruct the context in which he first wrote his Account; then i follow the ways in which it travelled, was trans-lated, transformed, travestied and finally forgotten.

the habsburgs’ conquest, colonization, exploitation and representa-tion of their south-eastern frontier is, i argue, best understood not as part of a process of defining eastern europe, nor as a ‘semi-’ or ‘para-’ imperial enterprise, but one that bears legitimate comparison with colonial experi-ences elsewhere. to propose such a thing means either establishing a pre-sentist definition of ‘colonial’ and measuring the material history of the region against it,7 or considering the representational framework in which the region was seen at the time. here i pursue the latter approach.

3 Confino, ‘reinventing the enlightenment’; evans, review of wolff; dupcsik, ‘postcolo-nial studies’; petrungaro, ‘l’est europeo’; adamovsky, ‘euro-orientalism’.

4 Jager, ‘les limites orientales’, 21.5 todorova, imagining the Balkans; Fleming, ‘orientalism, the Balkans and Balkan his-

toriography’; wolff, ‘the innocence and natural liberty of morlacchia’.6 Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, 13; ruthner, ‘Central europe goes postcolonial’;

herzfeld, ‘the absent presence’; hammond, ‘the uses of Balkanism’.7 Kosáry, ‘antécédents’ questioned the application of the colonial paradigm to habsburg

rule in hungary and transylvania; verdery, ‘internal colonialism’, accepted it but with sev-eral reservations. But the Banat of temesvar was separately administered by vienna until 1778: Jordan, Die kaiserliche Wirtschaftspolitik; roider, ‘nationalism’; thomas, ‘anatomy’; and Bérenger, history, 88 all stress the region’s ‘coloniality’.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 65

however, although i want to think comparatively about how images of savages relate to ideas of empire, my aim is not to formulate a unitary theory of colonial discourse. many scholars have already questioned the utility of such an enterprise.8 instead, i try to take up insights from work on the contemporary diffusion and reception of travel texts,9 as well as on genre and authority in travel writing,10 as a means to understanding precisely how and why scientific and literary ideas and images of the ‘wal-lachian’ other entered the republic of letters. i reconstruct the purposes for which the Account was written and the contexts in which it was pub-lished, but also how the text might have been read—as field report, as pen-portrait, and as lurid popular entertainment—by different audiences in late eighteenth-century europe.

A Curious Account of Wallachia

the curiosity of europeans about the southeast of their own continent grew rapidly in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century: at least a hundred first-hand accounts of the region or parts thereof were com-posed. this coincided with the general rush to know and map territories all over the world at this time; but also reflected the specific policies of the Christian states who were starting to win wars against, and appropri-ate territory from, the ottoman empire. the habsburgs had taken over hungary, transylvania and the Banat of temesvar by 1718, and even held serbia and ‘little’ (i.e. western) wallachia for twenty years, until 1739. rus-sia annexed parts of poland in 1772 and the Crimea in 1783, and pushed her southern frontier to the river dniester by 1792. austrian and russian statesmen therefore wanted to know about the contents, human, organic and inert, of these acquired territories, or the acquirable ones beyond them. so did people in other countries, whose interests these changes affected. more texts were therefore produced; quite a few were published. so far, so colonial: the process may be treated as relatively analogous to

 8 asad, Anthropology, 18; thomas, Colonialism’s culture, 51; lyons and papadopoulos, eds., the archaeology of colonialism; velychenko, ‘postcolonialism’.

 9 marcil, ‘tahiti entre mythe et doute’; rupke, ‘a geography’; thomas and Berghof, ‘reception’; withers, ‘geography’; Knopper, ‘Öffentlichkeit und meinungsfreiheit’.

10 pratt, imperial Eyes; turner, British travel writers; leask, Curiosity.

66 chapter two

imperial conquest and investigation by europeans in any other part of the world during the same period.11

one of the shortest, strangest and most obscure items in this series of reports and investigations is a text called A very entertaining, comical and curious Account of the manners and customs of the inhabitants of Wallachia, with a particular description of that country. it was published in london in 1779 as an annexe to a much more notorious ‘wild-man’ adventure story called the life and Adventures of Captain socivizca who was commander of a numerous body of robbers of the race of the Morlackians, commonly called Montenegrins, which furnished readers with an account of a notori-ous Balkan brigand of that name.

the story of socivizca, and the wider investigations into the customs of the so-called ‘morlacks’ of istria and dalmatia, are well known to students of noble and other savages in eastern europe. First told in print by the dalmatian writer giovanni lovrich in his observations on various parts of Abbé fortis’s travels in dalmatia, to which is added the life of socivizca, it inspired both philosophers and writers of fiction and drama, and was the subject of much commentary, adaptation and imitation: those who treated the theme included such figures as goethe, herder and madame de staël, as well as countless less famous contemporaries of theirs. mod-ern commentators have also been plentiful.12

the curious Account of Wallachia, on the other hand, went almost com-pletely unremarked for two hundred years, until it was unearthed by the romanian scholar andrei pippidi. in an article in the Cahiers roumains d’études littéraires of 1979, which was reprinted in a book of his the fol-lowing year, pippidi provided a characteristically erudite tour d’horizon of the traditions of early Balkan ethnography, and showed the Account to be ‘a veritable synthesis of the information a westerner might have about the romanians, and a brutally clear summary of the prejudices clouding such a representation, although the image seems nonetheless plausible’.13

11  as anglophone anthologies (most recently Fulford and Kitson, eds., travels) ignore travel to southeastern europe, and wolff, inventing, offers no bibliography, scholars must consult the corpuses established by romanian, Bulgarian and greek scholars: Călători străini; Chuzhdi pŭtepisi; Xenoi taxidioti. vingopoulou and polycandrioti’s bibliography, ‘travel literature on southeastern europe’, covers greek territory better than the more northerly lands treated here.

12 [g. lovrich], osservazioni; see wolff, Venice and the slavs.13 pippidi, ‘naissance’. like pippidi, and in spite of the objections of, among others,

venturi, settecento riformatore, 4–ii; 695, i translate Wallachen, valacchi as ‘romanians’: for as Born and many others noted, that is what they called themselves (rumâni or români). however, i use ‘wallachians’ when following a contemporary source.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 67

pippidi also republished the Account, which, briefly, treats the follow-ing aspects of romanian life: their manner of living (‘extremely rough and savage’); their agricultural productions and means of subsistence (maize, rakie, oats, livestock and so forth); their clothing (‘long white woollen trowsers, as the hungarians, but wider; soles of raw skin tied about the feet instead of shoes’ for the men; for the women, among other things long shirts, ‘an annular bolster stuffed with hair or straw upon their head’, ‘pieces of money tied round the head and neck’); the age of marriage (very young: ‘the man not above fourteen, the wife even not twelve years of age’); characteristic trades (cartwrighting, weaving); their religion (‘they have scarce more religion than their domestic animals’; ‘the ignorance and superstition of the bonzes cannot possibly be above that of their popes’); their funerals (accompanied with ‘dismal shrieks’) their belief in vampires (or ‘strolling nocturnal blood-suckers’); practices of blood- brotherhood (‘generally a rite previous to robberies’); and various other beliefs and superstitions, including their preference for impaling over hanging (because ‘in their idea, a rope ties the neck and forces the soul out of the body downwards’).

the one question pippidi did not address in his otherwise compre-hensive analysis was that of authorship. he treated it as a scurrilous and anonymous production of the london popular press, printed on bad paper and by a publisher, John lever, whose rival productions included the life, strange voyages and uncommon adventures of Ambrose Gwinett, formerly known to the Public as the lame Beggar; the strange voyages and adventures of Domingo Gonzales to the World of the Moon; or the wonder-ful, surprising and uncommon voyages and adventures of Captain Jones to Patagonia. in this context, the anonymous status of the work seems like an obligatory corollary to its ludicrousness; as well as a bogus guarantee of its objectivity.

in fact, far from being the product of a forgotten grub street hack who had never been near wallachia, the Curious Account was extracted from a book written by a native of transylvania, one of the most distinguished scientists of his time. his name is ignaz von Born.

ignaz von Born

Born was born in Karlsburg in transylvania (today’s alba iulia, romania) in 1742, and educated in his home town; in nearby hermannstadt (today’s sibiu); and then in vienna. he spent sixteen months as a novice in the

68 chapter two

Fig. 1. view of schemnitz (Banská Štiavnica), site of maria-theresa’s mining academy (from r. Bright, travels from Vienna through lower hungary, 1818).

order of Jesuits (1759–1760) before leaving to study law in prague.14 after travels in western europe, he returned to prague in 1763 where he pub-lished his thesis on the limits of natural law, but then switched fields, choosing to dedicate himself to Montanistik, or mountain studies, a new and exciting discipline in which the empress maria theresa had just estab-lished the first chair in europe in that city’s university. in 1765 he married the daughter of a prague merchant, and three years later was ennobled in the Bohemian landestafeln: he later bought an estate at alt-zedlisch (today’s staré sedliště, Czech republic). in 1770, he undertook a scientific trip to lower hungary, transylvania and the Krajina. he had to cut short his journey when he was appointed assessor of the Bohemian mining and minting directorate in prague. his activity in this field soon became controversial: in 1771 he published poda’s treatise on the machinery at

14 later writers borrowed freely from the early portrait by Born’s friend ignaz de luca, Das gelehrte oesterreich, 40–6; cf. schlichtegroll, ‘i. edler von Born’; townson, ‘anecdotes of Baron Born’; von hormayr, oesterreichischer Plutarch, 9:158–64. see now lindner, ignaz von Born (convincingly refutes older claims that Born was born in Kapnik, maramureş); reinalter, ed., Die Aufklärung; mitu, ‘Un fiu al transilvaniei’.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 69

schemnitz (today’s Banksá-Štiavnica, slovakia). this brought him into conflict with his boss, Kolowrat, president of the imperial mint and min-ing Court Chamber, who forbade the publication of any works relating to mining, considered to be sensitive intelligence in a time of war and inter-national tension. Frustrated, and even threatened with charges of treason, he resigned in 1772, and dedicated himself instead to playing an active role in promoting the arts and sciences, and public culture generally: he founded one of the first learned reviews in Bohemia, the Prager gelehrter nachrichten, after the model of the leipzig nova acta eruditorum, and established a Private society for Mathematical undertakings, from which later emerged the royal Bohemian society for the sciences.

in 1776, he was back in royal favour: the empress summoned him to vienna to reorganize her naturaliencabinet and tutor one of her many daughters; he was named acting Counsellor in matters of numismatics and orography. after 1780, he took up the editorship of the most impor-tant viennese journal of the period, the realzeitung der Wissenschaften, Künste und der Commerzien. several years later, in 1784, he discovered a new technique for amalgamating silver and gold. he hoped to secure his fortune by selling his discovery to the state, and at the same time sum-moned what was perhaps the first international scientific Congress, at glaserhütte (today’s skleno, slovakia), where he laid out extensive pro-posals to solve problems of communication, data-sharing and professional loyalties in the scientific world. although his amalgamation method was recommended for use throughout the empire, and a share of the prof-its promised to him, the emperor’s money men were still quibbling over the sums in Born’s project proposal when he died, heavily burdened with debt, in June 1791.

like many intellectuals who escaped the clutches of the Jesuits, Born was also a leading freemason, master of the Zur wahren Eintracht [true Concord] masonic lodge in vienna, frequented by both haydn and mozart. in 1785, after Born’s discovery of the amalgamation process mozart composed a piece of music, Die Maurerfreude [the masons’ Joy], in his honour. Besides a diverse set of writings and treatises on miner-alogy, industrial processes, orography, palaeontology and numismatics, Born is also remembered for two other works. one is his Physiographia Monachorum, or natural history of monks, an anticlerical work satirizing vices of the monastic orders of the empire, and ranking them according to a linnaean system of classification. the other is his learned masonic trea-tise, Über die Mysterien der Aegyptier [on the mysteries of the egyptians],

70 chapter two

from which the more abstruse masonic references in the libretto to the Magic flute are said to have been borrowed.15

Born’s name is therefore well known to historians of science, of freema-sonry, of mozart’s life and particularly to interpreters of the Magic flute.16 several more general accounts of habsburg or hungarian society in this period cite Born as an instance of the new class of enlighteners with ambi-tions to attack the inefficient bureaucracy and the obscurantist roman Catholic Church, and transform the hidebound culture of the empire in the 1770s and after.17

Because he died in debt, many of Born’s possessions were sold off, which means we have a detailed auction catalogue of his personal library,18 but no personal papers and only such private correspondence as has been preserved in archives of those people or institutions with whom he came into contact. it is therefore no easy task to form a clear picture of Born’s position within habsburg society. his editorial and masonic activity is often read as constitutive of an enlightened environment, mediating between public and private spheres independently of the state.19 however, the general interpretation of freemasonry as an autonomous, progressive force in the european enlightenment has been much questioned in recent years, and its occasional complicity with rather authoritarian aims noted.20 Born’s loyalties were indeed rather ambiguous; freemasonry’s ostensibly cosmopolitan raison d’être became compromised as the lodges’ popularity made them into sites for advancing the political projects of the emperor. apparently, Born initially supported Joseph’s attempts to introduce some state control over the plethora of lodges, but soon became disillusioned, and abandoned freemasonry in the autumn of 1786.21

15  reprinted with english translation in eckelmayer, Cultural context, 2:239–475.16  teich, ‘Born’s amalgamation process’; Basso, l’invenzione della gioia; Beaurepaire,

l’Europe des franc-maçons, 135–45; Beales, ‘Court, government and society’. Chindriş, ‘horia şi masoneria?’, suggests Born might have been involved in the sparking of horia’s peasant uprising in transylvania in 1785. the evidence is slim, beyond some interesting romanian-language oaths taken at the Zur wahren Eintracht lodge.

17  horwath, ‘literature’, 717; Bernard, Jesuits and Jacobins, 75–7; wangermann, ‘reform Catholicism’, 139; evans, Austria, 40, 46, 47, 143; Kosáry, Culture and society, 180; Bérenger, A history, 123; robertson & timms, eds., the Austrian Enlightenment, 162; Balázs, hungary and the habsburgs, 272; vocelka, ‘enlightenment’, 207; okey, the habsburg monarchy, 31–2; Fichtner, the habsburg monarchy, 164.

18  von Born, Catalogus bibliothecæ.19  helmut reinalter, most recently in ‘die träger’.20 Blanning, Joseph ii, 164–70; Beales, ‘Court, government and society’; van horn

melton, rise, 252–72; daniel, ‘how bourgeois was the public sphere?’.21  reinalter, ed., Joseph ii. und die freimaurerei; Basso, l’invenzione, 488–97.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 71

his account of the wallachians has escaped serious critical attention.22 For this we have to turn to his first book, namely Briefe über mineralogische Gegenstände, auf seiner reise durch das temeswarer Bannat, siebenbürgen, ober- und nieder-hungarn . . . geschrieben [letters on mineralogical mat-ters, written on his journey through the Banat of temesvar, transylvania, Upper and lower hungary]. it is hardly an obscure work: first published in leipzig in 1774, it was translated into english, italian and French within six years. geologists still cite it today, as the first scientific account of ore deposits in the southern Carpathians.23 historians, anthropologists or literary scholars have done it far less justice: standard works on foreign travellers in romanian lands, and on german-language representations of romanians, do not even mention Born’s book.24 this is unfortunate, not just because it provides us with the original source for the text of our 1779 london pamphlet, but because it can tell us a lot generally about how romanians were represented in the european media; by whom, to whom and where.

the Context of Born’s travels and their Publication

when Born made his journey, in may 1770, the province of wallachia proper, to the east of the Banat, was under occupation by a russian army, and would remain so until 1774, when the treaty of Küçük Kay-narca was signed. we have too little information about Born’s journey to know whether it also bore a hidden strategic purpose, or whether it was connected in any way with the little-known journey undertaken by the emperor Joseph ii to the Banat a mere month previously. Joseph had first visited the province in 1768; so, according to his own testimony, had Born.25 in his request for leave to travel, dated 2 may 1770 and preserved in the hofkammerarchiv für das Münz- und Bergwesen, Born mentioned a desire

22 only one of the many above-mentioned scholars (Bernard, Jesuits, 76) paused to gloss Born’s description of the wallachians, claiming it shows him ‘possessed of a highly developed social conscience’.

23 e.g. nicolescu, Excursion guide.24 iorga, istoria românilor prin călători; heitmann, Das rumänenbild. the first roma-

nian scholar to discuss Born’s book appears to have been lăzărescu, imaginea româniei, 1:239–47; excerpts, annotated and translated by maria holban, then appeared in Călători străini, 10–i:92–123. none connected Born’s text with that published by pippidi.

25 Born, Briefe, 10. Joseph wrote of the inhabitants’ ‘indescribable ignorance and stupid-ity’ (szentkláray, száz év, 1–i:207). But he does not mention Born in his 1770 travel notes, published by Feneşan, ‘die zweite reise Kaiser Josephs ii.’

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to visit the goldmine at nagyag, as well as a need to put his father’s pos-sessions in order.26 however, the investigation of the material and human content of the region was of such major interest at this time that it is dif-ficult, even without evidence, not to speculate about a political interest. if so, it would not be the only austrian politico-territorial description in the period to be published later under a more ‘literary’ guise.27 But no hint that Born was part of an official project is produced in the text, which is presented as being ostensibly motivated by the friendship of two scien-tists and their common interest in nature.

two other works appeared in leipzig in the same year, which sought to meet the increased interest, generated by the recent conflict, in the empire’s southern and eastern frontiers. the first, swedish scholar Johann erich thunmann’s untersuchungen über die Geschichte der östlichen europäischen Völker [researches on the history of the eastern european peoples], was a rather abstruse dissertation dedicated to exploring the linguistic similarities between romanian and albanian. it was to become a key point of reference in discussions over the origins and homelands of both these peoples.28 the other was a completely fabricated fantasy nar-rative entitled sehr merckwürdige Begebenheiten eines teutsche nicht nur auf seinen reisen sondern vornemlich Was im in der turkischen sclaverey und ungarischen feldzeugen begegnet [most remarkable adventures of a german, not only in the course of his travels, but also what he encoun-tered in turkish slavery and the hungarian campaigns], which purported to reproduce a diary of some military escapades from the beginning of the century.29 these works followed closely on from the publication three years before, in german translation, of the illustrious prince dimitrie Cantemir’s Descriptio Moldaviae, originally compiled in about 1715 at the behest of peter the great; and of nicolaus Kleemann’s account of his exploratory voyage down the danube to the Black sea and the aegean.30

like many works of scientific exegesis, Born’s letters, although seriously concerned to document the discoveries made, are framed by a series of

26 lindner, ignaz von Born, 42–3.27 general splény’s 1775 report on Bucovina was summarised and published as a

travel account in Canzler’s Magazin (grigorovici, ed., Bucovina, 10–14); librettist ratschky was commissioned by Joseph to write an account of galicia in the 1780s (rosenstrauch- Königsberg, Zirkel und Zentren, 103–20).

28 gyémánt, Mişcarea naţională, 60–71; malcolm, ‘myths of albanian national identity’.

29 holban, ‘pretinsele aventuri’.30 Kantemir, Beschreibung; Kleemann, reisen.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 73

stylistic and rhetorical devices. the most obvious of these is the epistolary form: the travels are written up as letters addressed to a learned corre-spondent, professor Ferber of the University of leipzig. Born had already participated in this common form of publication, as addressee and edi-tor of Ferber’s letters dispatched from his geological travels in italy.31 he was also to receive the various reports despatched by Balthasar hacquet, Joseph mueller and tobias gruber from their exploratory travels in the tyrol, Carniola, Croatia and slavonia.32 his significance as a catalyser of scientific travel in fact went far beyond the confines of austria: the first systematic geological descriptions of north america were addressed to and published by him, as were the path-breaking south american reports of the Czech traveller thaddaeus haenke.33

in letter two of his own book, after describing the geographical and administrative situation of the Banat, Born goes on to discuss the regi-ments of so-called ‘national troops’ recently established in the military Frontier bordering on the ottoman empire, and the gaol in temesvar (today’s timişoara, romania) where he saw a famous robber, formerly a rich merchant in serbia. he is, however, detained in the city for lon-ger than he would wish by the business of his travelling companion, an unnamed Court Commissar; an experience which causes him to compare his situation with that of the roman poet ovid who had been exiled by the emperor augustus to the shores of the Black sea. ‘if you be happy,’ he wrote to Ferber in leipzig, ‘remember your friend in pontus’.34 it is at this point that Born offers his detailed survey of the manners and customs of the romanians of the Banat. he took pains to justify his digression on sev-eral grounds: that he had already travelled to the Banat two years previ-ously; that he was a native transylvanian; and that, in the absence of data pertaining to the field of natural history, his account ‘may, if not please you, at least entertain you’ (7). at the end of his account, Born promised to return in his next letter to matters ‘more in our field’ (17).

elsewhere, strictly technical questions prevailed. letter ten came with two long appendices, amounting to almost a seventh of the whole book: a Proposal for the softening of copper, by delius, assessor of the Banat min-ing directorate; and some observations by mr. Koczian on gold-washing

31  Ferber, Briefe aus Wälschland.32 hacquet, ‘lettera odeporica’; mueller, lettre; gruber, Briefe.33 schöpf, Beyträge, first published in Born’s review Physikalische Arbeiten in 1785. on

haenke see haenke, trabajos.34 Born, Briefe, 10.

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techniques in the province (62–93). But Born did not restrict himself com-pletely to mines and metals. almost every chapter contains little asides about the usual traveller’s concerns, such as itineraries, or the weather, or the possible dangers of the road. on the frontier between the Banat and transylvania he reflects on the ambiguity of the public exposure of impaled criminals, identified as an ottoman practice, which helps reduce the incidence of highway robbery but may also be considered intolerably cruel (94). letter Fourteen opens with a brief rustic interlude in a tran-sylvanian village in which, ‘hungry, thirsty, and tired’, Born accepts the hospitality of a cheerful romanian boatman, of whom Born writes that ‘i would have wished for such a boy as my own son’ and who serves them an improvised repast on an upturned tun under a straw awning, in the company of farm dogs and sparrows. the company try to mark the birth-day of Born’s distant correspondent Ferber by toasting his health, but the country wine proves so sour that Born toasts Ferber with water instead. at the end of the meal, the tun is transformed from dining table into writ-ing table, and Born continues with his mineralogical observations (131–3). the passage’s fate in fact constrasts starkly with that of the more famous ‘curious account’ of the wallachians of the Banat, with which we are prin-cipally concerned here: it was omitted from all subsequent translations.

Born’s was not the first text to treat romanian cultural and spiritual life (or the lack of it) in such a critical manner: negative appraisals of their mores can be found in travel texts dating at least from the sixteenth cen-tury, if not even earlier,35 and were given contour and specificity, notably through the observations of Catholic missionaries, in the seventeenth.36 austrian administrative reports on the Banat very frequently adopted a similar tone.37 But few of these had found their way into print. the 1770s was a very important period for the development of a critical public dis-course of travel in the german-speaking world. scholars have noted an emphasis on the personal and the verifiable; use of the epistolary form; a

35 Barbu, ed., firea românilor, 11–37 extracts ethnographic observations from Călători străini. on the medieval tradition see armbruster, Der Donau-Karpatenraum.

36 Catholic missionary accounts in Călători străini, vols. 5–9, passim; tóth, ed., rela-tiones missionariorum; Bur, ‘Catholic missionaries’; Codarcea, ‘rome et Byzance’; tóth, ‘missionari italiani’. aspects of this tradition may have been available to Born through his Jesuit apprenticeship.

37 Feneşan, Administraţie şi fiscalitate, 7–8. Cf. szabo, ‘austrian first impressions’, 49–60.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 75

turn towards domestic travel; and a general rise in publications, as well as attempts to exploit the political stakes of describing territories.38

specifically in this context, Joseph was unhappy with the administra-tive situation in the Banat and had accepted the resignation of the gov-ernor, Clary, at the beginning of the year.39 another writer in austrian service, inspector Johann Jakob ehrler, had focused on the condition of the region’s inhabitants and the need to improve their lot, publishing in 1771 a brief account of the romanians’ origin and present state in a local newspaper, the short-lived temeswarer nachrichten. this appears to have been expanded into a much more detailed—but unpublished—report during the course of 1774, as a prelude to substantial reforms.40 But there were limits to what could be put before a wider readership.

reviewing ruritania

Born’s work was reviewed at least four times in german publications. the Zugabe zu den Göttingischen Anzeigen von Gelehrten sachen [supplement to the Göttingen notices of learned Matters] complemented the author for treating

one of the richest and most remarkable mines in europe with the greatest attentiveness; all that adds to our knowledge of minerals and mountains is described with great care: nor are other circumstances, such as customs, diet, and so forth, neglected.41

the most important german paper, the Berlin-published Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, was also broadly favourable, and remarked dryly on the importance of Born’s observations:

would the parlour philosophers believe that in today’s europe there might be found people so outlandish that they take a solar eclipse to represent the struggle of the devil in hell with the sun? herr von Born has found them in the Bannat of temeswar.42

Closer to home, the viennese journal Wiener Anzeigen was slightly more critical; its reviewer, the hungarian scholar samuel ab hortis, despite

38 stewart, Die reisebeschreibung; Bauer, ‘Journalistische Briefform’; Knopper, le regard.

39 Feneşan, Administraţie, 76.40 ehrler, Das Banat; neumann, ‘Cultura din Banat’.41  anon, review of Born, Briefe, in Zugabe zu den Göttingischen Anzeigen, 289–94.42 anon, review of Born, Briefe, in Allegmeine Deutsche Bibliothek, 278.

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describing the work as being of interest, took umbrage at Born’s rather negative remarks about cultural life in hungary, claiming that ‘unpreju-diced readers, who have a more exact idea of the inhabitants of the king-dom, may question herr mining Counsellor Born’s judgement.’43 the Physikalische Bibliothek merely praised the letters for being ‘very remark-able’, but while recommending them to ‘any lover of mineralogy’, the reviewer overlooked the ethnographic and other content.44

Born’s letters were translated into english amidst what was something of a heatwave for British enlightenment historiographical and philo-sophical publications. Johnson’s Journey to the Western isles of scotland had appeared two years earlier, adam smith’s inquiry into the nature and Causes of the Wealth of nations and the first volumes of edward gibbon’s history of the Decline and fall of the roman Empire the previous year. 1777 itself saw the publication of william robertson’s history of America, voltaire’s universal history in english translation, david hume’s posthu-mous autobiography, and georg Forster’s Voyage round the World, his innovative and controversial account of Captain Cook’s second voyage. But Born’s travels—now entitled thus and not letters, and accompanied by a translation of Ferber’s Mineralogical history of Bohemia—held their own against this heady competition, and received lively comment in the reviews. the translator, rudolph erich raspe, was an ambitious but impecunious littérateur and scientist who had moved from göttingen in georgian hanover to london in search of fame. he would later, having attempted to discover marble in the outer hebrides, achieve notoriety as the author of the fantastic Adventures of Baron Munchausen.45

there were reasons why a book about the mineralogy of hungary and transylvania might prove interesting: adam smith, following the lead of montesquieu, had mentioned the mines of the Banat of temesvar as an instance of how a system of material extraction functioned more effi-ciently with a free labour force than it had done under the turks with an enslaved one.46 latin-reading mineralogists could have used Köle-séri’s Auraria romano-Dacica (sibiu 1717) and Fridvaldszky’s Minero-logia magni Principatus transylvaniae (Cluj 1767). But few up-to-date accounts

43 ab h[ortis], review of Born, Briefe, in K. K. allergnädigst priviligierte Anzeigen, 97–101, 107–9.

44 anon, review of Born, Briefe, in Physikalische Bibliothek, 309–13.45 Carswell, the prospector.46 smith, Wealth of nations, Book 4, part ix, para. 47; cf. montesquieu, Esprit des lois,

Book 15, part viii, para. 3. montesquieu had been in person to Upper hungary (Balázs, hungary, 26) but not to the Banat.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 77

of hungary were available, and none at all of the wallachians. in english, details gleaned from the odd translation like that of merin’s Journey (1732), Keysler’s travels (1756) or Büsching’s new system of geography (1762), were pretty much all the mainstream public had to go on.47

the Monthly review was rather circumspect, declaring that the coun-tries described were

so little known to the rest of europe, that this attempt to display their sub-terranean riches, cannot but be acceptable to persons engaged in the useful studies of mineralogy and fossilogy. to such, however, it is almost solely appropriated: since the ingenious travels are confined to his relations to the subject so exclusively, as to admit scarcely any of those observations on the manners of the people, and the general appearance of the country, which might furnish amusement for miscellaneous readers, or such who turn over books of travels, merely in search of entertainment, or with the laudable view of killing time.

the third letter, which is almost the only exception, describes the inhabitants of the Bannat, as a people sunk in the deepest ignorance and superstition.48

the Critical review, on the other hand, took issue with this assessment. the reviewer compared Born’s work with that of his correspondent and editor Ferber, whose travels in italy had also been translated into english by raspe and put out by the same publisher; and whose Mineralogical his-tory of Bohemia formed an appendix to this edition of Born’s work.

mr. Ferber wrote in a country where every subject, except that of natural history, was exhausted by former travellers; he therefore was obliged to confine himself entirely to mineralogy, and to write a work which illiterate and superficial readers will throw aside as tedious and unentertaining. on the contrary, transylvania and hungary are little known to the enlightened western world, and Baron Born has sometimes interspersed the abstruse scientifical parts of his book with accounts of the inhabitants, and their manners, clothing, and dwellings; a method which certainly deserves great commendation, as it is founded on that great horatian rule omne tulit punc-tum, qui miscuit utile dulci.49

47 Brief accounts of hungary formed interludes in the oriental travels of richard poco-cke (travelled 1737, published 1745; edmund Chishull (travelled 1702, published 1747); and lady mary wortley montagu (travelled 1716, published 1762). see gömöri, Angol és skót utazók.

48 anon, review of Born, travels, in Monthly review, 233.49 anon, review of Born, travels, in Critical review, 207.

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the reviewer in fact found Born’s description of the wallachians so well done that he reproduced the entire passage. this review has in its turn been cited as a model of the appreciation of travel texts in Britain accord-ing to the horatian principles originally laid down by addison at the beginning of the century.50

Born Again, and Again, and Again

Contemporary rivals clearly liked it too: so much so that two periodi-cal publications, the Annual register and the london Magazine, carried extracts of Born’s descriptions of the wallachians.51 Both these versions were edited so as to give the impression of a specially written, separate work; any personal references and first-person statements were sup-pressed. the Annual register version is preceded by an ‘authentic account of the burning of a gentoo woman alive with her husband, at her own request, at azumabad’ and followed by an ‘account of the savage tribes of america’ (extracted from robertson’s history), which gives an idea of how extensive the range of comparative ethnographic inquiry had now become. around this time, both journals carried similar extracts from the works of Fortis on the morlachs, and lovrich’s account of socivizca.52

in the london Magazine, however, the text is presented as an account of wallachia, rather than of some wallachians located in the Banat of temesvar. a brief preamble was added explaining wallachia’s geographi-cal and political position. some cuts were also made: a part at the begin-ning about the wallachians’ origin and language; a part in the middle about their ablutions; and a brief passage at the end comparing the quali-ties of the serbs and the wallachians (the former is ‘fierce, proud, bold, cunning, a friend of trade, fit to be a soldier. his popes are less ignorant than those of the Wallachians’, while the latter ‘has no idea of haughti-ness, is a better husbandman, a friend of ease, and abhorring military life. they agree in being born robbers and slaves to their popes and national magistrates’).

50 Batten, Pleasurable instruction, 29.51  Born, ‘account of the inhabitants’; idem, ‘Curious account’.52 Fortis, ‘description’; lovrich, ‘adventures’. on the prehistory of these texts see now

Bracewell, ‘lovrich’s joke’.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 79

this rebranding fitted the piece into a tradition of small and eye-catching set-piece descriptions of rare, distant or wonderful things, sometimes set apart from the main narrative. examples of such accounts are numerous: nicolaas van graaf ’s 1719 Voyage aux indes orientales came with a rela-tion curieuse de la ville de Batavia; elizabeth Justice’s 1739 Voyage to russia with A curious account of the relicks which are exhibited in the Cathedral of oviedo; while A curious account of the cataracts at niagara by Mr. Peter Kalm was annexed to John Bartram’s 1751 north american observations. according to nigel leask, the epistemological prestige of such ‘curios-ity’, characterized by ‘fleeting, superficial accounts of foreign lands and peoples, and the novelty, singularity, and dazzle of the traveller’s “first impressions” ’, was on the decline towards the end of the century, but con-tinued to be prized as a literary quality.53 the elimination of first-person references, a common strategy of the period, rendered the account simul-taneously more readable and more authentic.54

it is from here, then, that the anonymous london pamphleteer drew his text. the adaptation in many ways satirizes this squeezing of an indi-vidually experienced, authored and dated account into ‘a consolidated body of moral perceptions expressed through a uniform aesthetic’.55 the smoothness of the delivery has become comically at odds with the sav-ageness of the object described. the interpretive environment and the information’s genesis disappear from view; the description is condensed, made ‘harder’ and ‘thinner’ (and cleansed of reference to ethnic groups other than wallachians).

Born’s travels in france and italy

the appearance of an italian translation of Born’s travels in venice in 1778 was almost certainly due to the efforts, if not the hand, of giovanni arduino (1714–1795), the so-called Father of italian geology, upon whose system Ferber had based his aforementioned description of italy. arduino had already supported Born’s and Ferber’s election to the siena academy of sciences in 1773. Ferber did the same for Born and arduino with respect

53 leask, Curiosity, 4–5.54 turner, British travel writers, 22–3; rogers, Boswell and Johnson, 108–38 shows how

dr. Johnson third-personized his (originally epistolary) account of his tour of scotland.55 Benedict, Making the modern reader, 165.

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to the society of Friends of natural history in Berlin in the same year. Born had arranged for the translation of arduino’s raccolta di Memorie Chimico-Mineralogiche into german and would do likewise for Fortis’s lettere geografico-fisiche sopra la Calabria e la Puglia, as well as for the lettere odeporiche of the venetian naturalist and writer Francesco grise-lini, who had been working in the Banat in habsburg service since 1775.56 in June 1774, arduino received Born’s description of the extinct volcano at eger in Bohemia together with a large series of mineral samples. part of the former appeared in the Giornale d’italia (3 & 10 september 1774). this paper was also to host a serial reproduction through late 1776 and early 1777 of Born’s letters to Ferber,57 in addition to griselini’s.58 the pub-lisher of the Giornale—Benedetto milocco, printer of voltaire’s works in italian, as well as of a number of arduino’s own productions—put out Born’s letters in book form in 1778. the work is today extremely rare, and unfortunately did not come to the attention of arduino’s biographer, who has otherwise assiduously documented the relationship between the two men.59 But it presents few peculiarities. the translator has cut passages also excised by the French and english translators (administrative details, the meal in a wallachian village in letter 14, the favourable reference to the Catholic faith in letter 20), which leads one to suppose that Born him-self may have been in a position to have supervised, or at least recom-mended cuts for, all three translations. one or two other minor details present in the other versions (such as the reference to transylvania as his ‘solum natale’ in letter 17) were also cut. the treatises by Koczian on goldwashing, and delius on softening copper, were shortened and moved to the end of the book.60

in 1780, Born’s work was presented to the French public in a neat duo-decimo format by antoine grimoald monnet, an ambitious scientific systematizer of modest origins who had studied at Freiburg and recently published a nouveau système de Minéralogie (1779). monnet, who soon

56 vaccari, Giovanni Arduino, 291–2; muljačič, ‘su alcuni scritti sconosciuti di a. Fortis’, 261–6.

57 Born, ‘lettere’, nuovo giornale d’italia 1 (1776–7), 57–63, 73–7, 81–5, 91–6, 116–20, 137–42, 149–51, 158–9, 175–6, 182–4, 227–32, 233–9, 249–56, 257–9.

58 griselini, ‘lettere’, nuovo giornale d’italia 3 (1778), 34–40, 43–7, 53–6, 62–4, 68–72, 79–80, 83–9, 91–95.

59 vaccari, Giovanni Arduino, 245–6, 252–3, 286–7, 294–5. nor does Franco venturi’s wide-ranging overview of ‘wallachian’ appearances in contemporary italian media (settecento riformatore, 690–712) mention Born.

60 Born, Viaggio mineralogico, 184–204.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 81

afterwards was to initiate the project of a geological map of the whole of France, clung fiercely to his specialism, and was none too keen on descriptions of peoples: Barbara stafford’s claim that ‘the natural histo-rian as plinean traveller was instrumental in refashioning that aspect of the eighteenth-century vision seeking to recover a world purified of the human component’61 applies rather better to him than it does to Born. monnet was not afraid to defend his position in his preface:

up until now, it is as if travels have been limited to the observation of the customs, mores, and habits of nations; . . . the soil and nature, the composi-tion and parts of the globe have rarely attracted their attention. the time has finally come when people are starting to travel to study and meditate upon nature.62

he remarked on how Born’s researches into mines complemented Ferber’s interest in minerals:

had these two friends traversed these interesting countries together, their united labours would have produced a comprehensive work in which the public would have found all the necessary details and the most useful obser-vations . . . even if mr de Born’s mineralogical voyage does not meet these two ends precisely, we hope to have brought pleasure and satisfaction to the friends of natural history, in presenting them with this translation.63

monnet’s impatience with descriptions of mankind was slightly at odds with Born’s text, which at certain points explicitly sought to justify the focus on humanity and friendship. But in fact monnet made fewer cuts from the text than raspe: the passage corresponding to our Curious Account is rendered more or less faithfully here. For instance, Born’s explanations of the administrative status of a mine on the border of transylvania; the pay and working conditions of the miners; and the terms whereupon mines are leased by the state to private companies, were omitted by raspe but retained by monnet.64

in 1799, the Curious Account was again singled out to French audi-ences as being of particular interest. France was in conflict with austria

61  stafford, Voyage into substance, 345.62 Born, Voyage minéralogique, v–vi.63 ibid., viii–ix. on the reception of Born’s work in France there is now excellent infor-

mation in marcil, la fureur. marcil identified 3 reviews, 3 short notices, and 4 bibliographi-cal notices. this made it one of the most noticed works on eastern europe (536) but still less reviewed than works on other regions (100).

64 Born, Briefe, 20–4; 29–30; 150; cf. Born, travels, 27, 32, 152.

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throughout this year, and information about the habsburg empire’s dominions was naturally in demand. robert townson’s travels in hun-gary, out in london since 1797, was duly translated. in a long preface, the revolutionary théophile mandar stressed townson’s socially progressive attitude. on the other hand, he questioned his acceptance of the hun-garian elite’s right to lord it over the romanian peasants. townson had described the wallachians as ‘the most ferocious inhabitants of hungary’ and offered a semi-pornographic account of romanian peasant women bathing in a pond outside grosswardein (today’s oradea, romania), in which he used mock-linnaean latin tags to describe their breasts.65 this passage, obviously designed for entertainment and possibly for serial excerption on the model of Born’s description, was nevertheless consid-ered by contemporaries to be in poor taste. as a counter to this, and as an implicit critique of the aristocratic regime in hungary, mandar presented to his readers ‘what m. de Born wrote in 1780, on the inhabitants of wal-lachia, and we refer to the details with which this naturalist scholar has furnished us, concerning these unfortunate and enslaved peoples.’66 the third volume of this edition also carried a reprint of monnet’s translation of Born’s letters 20 to 23.67 this printing was re-issued in leipzig in 1800, and again in paris in 1803.

so, Born’s view of the romanians had been rapidly reproduced in a range of contexts: first, as private letters between scientists, during the voyage itself; second, in book form in german in 1774; third, in an italian journal in 1776; fourth, in english translation in 1777; fifth, sixth and sev-enth as newspaper extracts in the years immediately following; eighth, in book form in italian in 1778; ninth, as part of a dubious popular brochure in 1779; tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth, in French in 1780, 1799, 1800, and 1803.68

65 townson, travels in hungary, 257, 252–5. 66 townson, Voyage en hongrie, 1: xxxviii–lvi. 1st reissue: leipzig 1800; 2nd reissue: paris

1803.67 ibid., vol. 3, 239–312.68 note also that of three copies of the german edition in the British library, one (shelf-

mark 990.d.4, bearing the autograph of sir Joseph Banks), appears to be a reissue. a list of errata appears at the end, and before the title page, which is nevertheless identical to that in other editions and bears the date 1774, an engraving of Born by Jacob adam dated 1782.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 83

later Echoes

despite this extensive public dissemination, Born’s work does not apear to have set alight the contemporary imagination. he clearly influenced the local topographical and literary tradition: echoes of his work can be found in the much better-known accounts of the Banat by the venetian Francesco griselini (1780), and the temesvar-born writer Johann Friedel (1784), among others.69 in Britain, however, he appears to have been little read, despite the fact that books about mineralogy were in demand at this time.70 the sole surviving set of borrowing records from english librar-ies of the period, those of the Bristol library, shows only three borrow-ings in the interval 1782–84: this compares poorly with the tens and even hundreds of borrowings of books about Cook’s voyage.71 robert townson, whose rather more lurid account of the romanians has already been men-tioned, testified to the importance of Born as mineralogist, ethnographer, and viennese society figure. his sketch of Born’s life was in turn excerpted in the Annual register.72 For the wealthy english antiquary edward daniel Clarke, passing through the Banat at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-tury, Born’s travels was ‘a work full of valuable information, as it related to mines the least known’, and Born himself ‘the best mineralogist of his age’, while his observations on funeral shrieking ‘seem to prove the Celtic origin of the wallachians’.73 a scottish traveller to the Banat in 1814, richard Bright, mentioned Born regularly, and may have been inspired by him when he insisted, after having given an account of some rather wild romanians, that ‘i must not be understood as wishing to represent the whole nation under a similar form’.74 Finally, large chunks of his text were reproduced as valid contemporary ethnography (with nodding refer-ence to ‘an old german author’) in a work by an american surgeon, James noyes, written at the time of the Crimean war.75 Born’s scientific work suf-fered more painful transmutations than this: the 1791 english translation of his new Process of Amalgamation of Metals is to be found in a list of

69 Călători străini, vols. 9–10 lists accounts of the Banat and its ‘wallachians’ in chrono-logical sequence to 1800 (de Feller, Friedel, ehrler, griselini, steube, sestini, spallanzani, sulzer, salaberry, lehmann, hofmannsegg, von goetze, nayss, damas).

70 porter, Making, 98–9; hamblyn, ‘private cabinets’, 194.71  Kaufman, Borrowings, 80.72 townson, travels, 410–22; idem, ‘anecdotes’.73 Clarke, travels, 8:284, 260.74 Bright, travels, 559.75 noyes, roumania, 161–70.

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‘works of which all the unsold Copies were destroyed by Fire, and which will probably never be reprinted’.76

Mapping the “Account”

in an older study, hayden white remarked on how a history of a given idea can sometimes ‘look more like an archaeologist’s cabinet of artefacts than the flowing narrative of the historian’.77 he bemoaned the fact that this gives out ‘a sense of structural stasis rather than a sense of the devel-opmental process by which various ideas came together and coalesced to produce the ‘noble savage’ of the eighteenth century.’ the problem is perennial; but it is precisely the discordant effects of static representa-tions, rather than a traditional history of ideas about wallachians, that interests me here. in an attempt to recreate the distinct compartments in which Born’s work was displayed in public, i summarize some of the information presented hitherto in four comparative tables. this may then ‘facilitate a more complex and nuanced articulation of the complexities of how scientific description operates within a larger cultural frame’, as the scholar richard nash has argued in his study of literary representations of wildness in this period.78 By schematizing the contexts in which the wal-lachians were selected for analysis, description, publication or consump-tion, i am not (or not only) travestying the juxtapositional techniques of eighteenth-century collecting, but also trying to enable a twenty-first cen-tury audience to see what wallachians might have been compared to by audiences in different places and at different levels of 1770s society.

in leipzig in 1774, then, readers could have chosen Born’s travels alongside one of two other genres: the abstruse work of philology offered by thunmann, which nevertheless set a liberal agenda for the study of stateless nations; or the cheap fantasy comprised in the pseudo-biography of a german soldier said to have crossed wallachia:

table 1. leipzig Valachica, 1774.

Johann erich thunmann ignaz von Born anon

researches letters Adventuresphilology ethnography Fantasy

76 anon, ‘literary intelligence’, 338.77 white, tropics of discourse, 150.78 nash, Wild Enlightenment, 6.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 85

Browsers through the Annual register in london in 1777, in contrast, will have come across the wallachians in different company, between the gen-toos of india and the savages of america. the juxtaposition was a politi-cally tantalizing one: the wallachians occupied a kind of middle ground between the colony that Britain was losing in the western hemisphere, and the one she was consolidating in the east. in anthropological theory, too, being placed between india and america meant standing between the two poles of contemporary interpretation of the manners of savages.

american natives were seen as peoples without history, and could there-fore be used as an object of ‘conjecture’: study of them might enable con-clusions about the primitive state of european peoples. indian culture, by contrast, was placed genealogically in relation to the european, an empirical basis for establishing europe’s concrete pre-history, as in wil-liam Jones’s celebrated positing of sanskrit as the ur-language of most european peoples.79 the Curious Account is in fact not nearly so philo-sophically ambitious, but the idea of the wallachians as occupying some kind of intermediary position between two major kinds of savages and two major approaches to them, clearly struck an editor as suggestive.

this in its turn sheds light on the array of titles offered by John lever in 1779.

79 on america and india see the classic works of gerbi, la disputa and schwab, la renaissance, both also in english translation; on their shifting position as ideal types in the following period: thom, republics, nations, tribes.

table 2. intercontinental ethnography in the london press, 1777.

1777—Annual register

anon ignaz von Born william robertson

Authentic account of the burning of a Gentoo woman alive

Account of the Wallachians Account of the savage tribes of America

old world eastern europe new world

table 3. london popular pamphlets, 1779.

1779—John lever

anon anon [lovrich/Born] anon anon

Ambrose Gwinett socivizca/ Wallachia Captain Jones Domingo Gonzaleslondon Balkans patagonia moon

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the street-level cultural producer has raided high culture for his source material, in a direct act of appropriation; and reproduced the elite’s fasci-nation with human and geographical diversity for a new audience: the phi-losopher’s case study becomes the common man’s wild man narrative.

a fourth and final figure enables us to return to the problem of how the wallachians fit in in Born’s own classificatory career, in which unusual objects becomes subject to unprecedented analytical attention, descrip-tion, study, satire or lucubration.

in some of Born’s work (monks, egyptian mysteries), satirical or arcane motivations determined the selection of the object; in others (fossils, mines), its analysis is directly connected with power, stocktaking and the marshalling of material possessions, preoccupations generally considered to be upmost in the minds of the empire’s administrators, particularly since the defeat by prussia in the 1740s had given food for thought on the question of maximization of resources.

Born’s selection (inventio) of the romanians as a discursive object may be considered to have been driven by both these factors. he was a key figure of empire not only by virtue of his scientific work and his social exem-plarity as a freemason: his success as a provincial who made it big in the centre was also emblematic for the times. numerous scholars have noted that he sometimes referred to Bohemia as his Fatherland: Bohemia was the province into which he married and was ennobled, and whose culture he did much to promote.80 his activity has also been considered poten-tially constitutive of a unified austrian state conciousness (Gesamtstaats-bewußtsein), an interpretation which has nevertheless been criticized as motivated by a retrospective desire to provide an early and enlightened genealogy for the modern austrian state.81 But in his travels, Born in fact

80 vávra, ‘ignaz von Born’, 141–6; teich, ‘Bohemia’, 151–2; haubelt, ‘Born und Böhmen’; agnew, origins, 30, 203–4; Kroupa, ‘the alchemy of happiness’, 174.

81  see Klingenstein, ‘the meanings of “austria” and “austrian” ’, 425.

table 4. Frameworks for comparison: ignaz von Born’s other works.

1772–1775 1774 1783 1789 1785

lithophylacium Bornianum

Account of the Wallachians

Physiologia Monachorum

Bergbaukunde Mysteries of the Egyptians

palaeontology ethnology anticlerical satire mineralogy masonic arcanaFossils Frontier people defunct social

ordermountains ancient civilization

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 87

put more stress on his transylvanian origins than on any other loyalty.82 he defended the qualities of both wallachians and gypsies of transyl-vania as being ‘more humanized’ than those of the Banat, and asserted that their spoken language was much more elegant than that of those of wallachia; while criticizing the standards of literary and scientific life in hungary, vienna and prague.83

scholars writing about alexander von humboldt’s representations of american people and landscapes have drawn attention to the influence on his work of the problem of the german empire: ‘in all this talk of far flung and distant empires, it has perhaps been forgotten that, in central europe at the end of the eighteenth century, the notion of empire struck quite close to home . . . the local status of provinces was up for negotiation’.84 as a provincial who both criticized and sought to improve the state of learn-ing in the empire, Born may also be likened to the innovative historiog-raphers of scotland, or those of spain where ‘perhaps the provinces were more interested in crafting a spanish identity than the core. valencians, aragonese, asturians and Catalans were at the forefront of the movement to write new, patriotic, yet critical histories of america’.85

it is this tension between province and empire that surely provides the key for understanding the work of Born; certainly more so than the notions of eastern and western europe, which he did not employ, even though the first book to contain the words ‘east european’ in the title—thunmann’s untersuchungen—was published in the same year as his travels. german and habsburg empire-builders invented not only schools of mining and international conferences, but also the very term ‘ethnography’, as recent researches have shown.86 Born was just one of a number of scientist-bureaucrat-travellers who were to prove immensely influential in creating administrative systems and textual machinery for recording observations of russian and east european peoples, systems at least as sophisticated as those set up by the British in india.87 moreover,

82 Born, Briefe, 7, 104, 105, 134, 150.83 ibid., 94, 137 (more humanized); 11 (language more elegant); 202–3, 224, 228 (critique

of scientific life).84 dettelbach, ‘global physics and aesthetic empire’, 258–9; cf. rupke, ‘a geography of

enlightenment’.85 Cañizares-esguerra, how to write the history of the new World, 4.86 stagl, history of curiosity; vermeulen & alvarez roldán, eds., fieldwork and foot-

notes.87 Carmichael, ‘ethnic stereotypes in early european ethnographies’; withers, ‘the

geography of scientific knowledge’; wingfield, ed., Creating the other. among many recent studies on russian imperial ethnography, see slezkine, ‘naturalists versus nations’; sunderland, taming the wild field.

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his critique of wallachian mores went beyond a mere lament about the barbarity of foreign customs to what thomas habinek in his reading of ovid has identified as ‘demonstrating and enacting the transferability of imperial institutions to an alien context.’88

german scholars using similar methods were busy defining Jews and gypsies in the period, in ways that can without anachronism be consid-ered racist.89 Born’s work bears some relation to theirs; but it would be reductive to identify him with any movement towards theories of immu-table ethnic distinction. Born’s account did not oblige a unitary accep-tance of a romanian identity; on the contrary, he explicitly differentiated between the character of the romanians and gypsies of transylvania and those of the Banat, thus creating problems for the crudely essentialist account produced by heinrich moritz grellmann in 1783, which sought to argue that gypsies, as an oriental people, were uniformly pernicious in their behaviour and difficult to change.90 nor is his account fixated on any one characteristic of the romanians: recourse is had to a variety of attributes.

how did this actually affect policy? as mentioned earlier, austria enter-tained ambitions to take over more romanian-inhabited territory at vari-ous stages in this period. But in the event, maria theresa considered that

Unhealthy provinces, without culture, depopulated or inhabited by perfidi-ous and ill-intentioned greeks, would be more likely to exhaust than to aug-ment the forces of the monarchy.91

even her chancellor Kaunitz, who was much more keen to prosecute claims to wallachia and moldavia, confessed to his employer that they were ‘full of the wildest people’.92 these statesmen certainly didn’t need intellectuals to tell them how to disparage natives, and their attitudes render somewhat questionable the view that attributes racism in travel

88 habinek, Politics of latin literature, 151–69; white, tropics, 183–96. in Byzantium too, a classicizing frontier ethnology had helped to restore a sense of imperial order: see ste-phenson, ‘Byzantine conceptions of otherness’.

89 e.g. willems, in search of the true Gypsy; hess, ‘Johann david michaelis’. 90 grellmann, Dissertation, 41–3, 206.91  maria theresa, letter to Comte de mercy-argenteau, 31 July 1777, cited by ragsdale,

‘evaluating the traditions of russian aggression’, 94. ‘greeks’ here could mean any eastern orthodox peoples (i.e. romanians included), or particularly the governors of wallachia and moldavia, appointed from the greek-speaking orthodox of istanbul.

92 roider, Austria’s Eastern Question, 132.

a provincial imperialist and a curious account of wallachia 89

texts to social insecurity.93 But their discourses on savagery, while essen-tially similar to those of French and British writers outside europe, were designed to justify not colonization but a refusal to colonize.94

in 1774, the habsburgs, tired of war, gave up any thought of recover-ing wallachia and satisfied themselves with annexing a small corner of moldavia which they rechristened Bukovina and retained until 1918. But they went to work on the human resources available to them in these ter-ritories, subjecting romanians to unprecedented programmes for social integration and educational improvement. in this enterprise, they some-times commissioned reports from loyal local actors, including some who knew Born personally through masonic circles in vienna. through this process, romanians came to draw up ethnographies which share a num-ber of features with Born’s account. their texts, initiating tropes which ran throughout early nineteenth-century romanian culture, emphasized the brutish and animalistic behaviour of the romanians. they thus initi-ated a critique which has been associated with the domestic development of theories of identity and national character.95

Conclusions

the history of the genesis and fate of Born’s curious account is significant, then, for many reasons. as a text by an east european author represent-ing another group of east europeans as profoundly different, it is by no means unusual.96 as the first detailed ethnography of the romanians to be published in english, it deploys the language of barbarism in the ser-vice of empire, but need not necessarily be seen as geographically essen-tialist or racist. more broadly, its serial exposure to different audiences with different expectations served a plethora of purposes. in austria,

93 e.g. hunt, ‘racism’. on the empress’s antisemitism see vocelka, ‘enlightenment’.94 roider, ‘reform and diplomacy’, 312–3; Jones, ‘opposition to war’, 48.95 see notably vasile Balş, ‘Beschreibung der Buccowina’ [1780], in grigorovici, ed.

Bucovina, 330–58; and ion Budai-deleanu, ‘Kurzgefasste Bemerkungen über Bukowina’ [1805], ibid., 378–424. on these romanians’ contacts with Born see duţu, ‘Josephinis-mus’. Cf. pratt, imperial eyes, 143, who sees latin american authors ‘transculturating ele-ments of metropolitan discourses to create self-affirmations designed for reception in the metropolis’.

96 Călători străini, vols. 9–10 lists other east european representers of romanians: the hungarian de tott; the dalmatians Boscovich and raicevich; the pole mikoscha, the tran-sylvanian wolf, etc. in earlier times too, most describers of ottoman lands came from venice, the habsburg lands and points east, as yérasimos, les voyageurs clearly showed.

90 chapter two

Born’s wallachians were a symbolically liminal people on the ovidian model; an object of concern, but also a link in the chain of transformable human and natural resources. intricate networks saw them reframed and re-presented to a london readership as the chief dwellers of a semi-fictional land, comparable to the moon and anticipating the phantasmagorical ruritanias and transylvanias of a hundred years on; a vignette interposed between Britain’s contrasting imperial experiences overseas. in some con-texts, comparability and improved understanding were enabled; in oth-ers, difference was commodified, explanation refused, and particularities became the object of ridicule. the Curious Account’s metamorphosis from sombre field report to paraliterary bizarrerie was rapid, but characteristic of the times. like so many attempts to pin down the essence of man, it ended up not as a definition but as a series of representations.97 if, as diderot claimed, ‘it is the presence of man which makes the existence of things meaningful’,98 then the meanings to be deduced from the presence of wallachians in the 1770s were various indeed.

97 on the allegorical qualities of enlightenment discourse on human nature see, among others, pratt, ‘scratches’; macdonald, ‘the isle of devils’, 191–2; munck, the Enlightenment, 14; wilson, ‘thinking back’, 362. on the ulterior development of the ‘ruritanian’ tradition in British culture, see goldsworthy, inventing.

98 Cited by smith, ‘the language of human nature’, 102.

Chapter three

‘at ten Minutes past two i Gazed eCstatiCally upon Both liGhthouses’: self, tiMe and oBjeCt in early

roManian travel texts*

an allegedly central feature of romantic travel writing, which has been the object of much critical discussion, is the development of the focus on the self as an object of literary description. this focus takes many forms, but is particularly often considered in terms of emotional reaction to landscape. George r. parks, writing over forty years ago, identified three principal components in the ‘turn to the romantic in the travel literature of the eighteenth century’: 1) an interest in mountain scenery; 2) a ref-erencing of natural observation to the techniques of landscape painting; and 3) a language of enthusiasm, in other words a focus not just on the scene in front of the traveller but on the emotions the latter undergoes upon seeing it.1 similarly, roger Cardinal contrasts the ‘didactic . . . sober, analytical, philosophical’ enlightenment author who disdains the first person, with the romantic author, a ‘recording mechanism equipped with a subjective lens’ who could ‘assume the role of director and even scriptwriter of the travel scenario.’2 Moreover, while acknowledging the importance of ‘encounters with foreign peoples and explorations of dis-tant cities’ for the ‘collective discourse’ that is romantic travel, Cardinal argues that ‘characteristically romantic ways of thinking and imagining’ may be best illustrated by reference to ‘the relation of the romantic trav-eller to the natural world’.3

Mircea anghelescu has analysed the phenomenon from a comparable, but not quite identical perspective: the motive for travelling. the latter, according to anghelescu, becomes in the romantic period ‘neither curios-ity nor tradition, but an impulse arising from the core of [the traveller’s] being, or a yearning difficult to elucidate in terms of rational or logical principles’. he gives the example of Goethe being impelled to undertake

* in Romantism şi modernitate, ed. a. Mihalache & a. istrate (iaşi, 2009), 23–45.1  parks, ‘the turn to the romantic’, esp. 27–8.2 Cardinal, ‘romantic travel’, 136. one is tempted to add ‘lead actor’ to Cardinal’s list of

roles performed by the traveller in his film-making.3 ibid.

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his italian journey not in order to carry out a mission or gather informa-tion, but to fulfil an urge prompted by recollections of images of rome seen in his childhood. ‘what interested Goethe was his own individual response to what he experienced.’4

similar views can be found in many more books on travel literature of the period,5 even if scholars differ in their accounts of precisely how and when the interest in the self-representation became a dominant feature of such texts.6 although i do add some documentation to the dossier, the aim of this chapter is not to resolve this localised question. there is prob-ably something in the nature of travel writing, its status as ‘montage’, that calls for an ‘open’ critical approach which can see texts as having not one object, still less a unitary meaning, but as being understood in a series of contexts and relations.7

My main intention, rather, is to examine how certain basic problems of the representation of the personal experience of time and space was addressed by first British, then romanian compilers of travel accounts in the period running broadly from 1750–1840. was there a turn away from the inventorization of the world, towards meditation on the self ?

4 anghelescu, ‘romantic travel narratives’, 167. Goethe in this way anticipates not only Chateaubriand (‘j’allai chercher des images—voilà tout’) and the proto-tourist stendhal (‘i do not travel to learn about italy but for my own pleasure’) but also freud, whose visit to the acropolis was motivated by an intense urge to make verifications of the reality of images seen in childhood.

5 e.g. Moussa, La relation orientale, 8.6 parks (‘turn’, 32) ventures 1779 as ‘the date when the new mode for including

emotional passages in accounts of journeys in europe was fully accepted’; anghelescu (‘romantic travel’, 166) places Goethe (1786) at the beginning of the tradition; an opinion shared by slovak literary historian zlatko Klátik (Vývin slovenského cestopis, in Chirico, ‘the travel narrative’, 28–9). Korte (English travel writing, 40–65) likewise distinguishes between ‘object-oriented’ travel accounts full of historical and encyclopaedic informa-tion, and ‘a shift towards the travelling subject’, locating the latter in the 1760s; fabricant (‘eighteenth-century travel literature’, 708) posits sterne (1768) as the symbolic initiator of ‘travel as primarily an individual activity’, divorced from ‘the concrete historical media-tions that tie any journey, no matter how personal or paradigmatic in nature, to the social and material conditions enabling its existence’; viviès (English travel narratives, 25) rejects the search for a single origin as ‘reductive’, preferring a broad ‘historical backcloth’ stretch-ing from 1760–1780; leask (Curiosity, 47–8; cf. 7) proclaims the existence of a ‘residual’ discourse of antiquarianism’ coexisting ‘in loose solution’ with both subjectivist and scien-tific approaches; leading him to locate the true disjuncture between scientific and literary travel ‘in the decades after 1790–1820’.

7 viviès, English travel narratives, 107–8.

self, time and object in early romanian travel texts 93

at a basic level of analysis, taking the texts at face value, i simply con-sider what things our authors—or more precisely ‘author-narrators’8— reckoned to be worthy of note. at a slightly more complex level, the presentation of noteworthy objects is considered in relation to the inevi-tably temporal nature of literary description. this almost always intro-duces the problem not just of the ‘correct’ rhetorical technique following (explicit or implicit) rules, but also the (explicit or implicit) modulations of the author’s sensibility in the face of what he is seeing or experiencing. finally, relating my analysis to recent insights in the cultural theory of travel writing, i ask to what extent the development of romantic motifs in romanian texts might be considered typical of travel literatures and cultures elsewhere in the world. are they characteristic of a ‘european’ tradition, or do they constitute the outcome of unequal relations in the literary and political spheres?

some examples from British travel accounts may help to clarify what i am talking about. these texts played an influential role in establish-ing norms for travel culture, form and sensibility not just in english but throughout europe during this period. however, as will become clear later, British texts almost certainly did not function as models for roma-nian travel writers, or at least only after considerable mediation through european (french, and also German and russian) texts. i am not positing British texts as paragons or paradigms, still less as ‘imperialistic’ forms from which romanians sought to emancipate themselves.

Fielding: ‘An agreeable companion to a man of sense’

in his fascinating book Telling Time, the critic stuart sherman has estab-lished the impulse towards what he calls ‘diurnalization’ as a central component of the transformation of British literary culture in the period 1660–1785. starting out from the public deployment of clocks and diaries, sherman then identifies travel literature, and specifically the travel journal, as ‘a kind of conduit whereby the book of continuous days . . . emerged into public consciousness’.9 the travel journal was ‘for most of the eighteenth

8 travel writing is predicated on an alleged (and implicitly accepted by the reader) identity between author and narrator (Chirico, ‘the travel narrative’). and yet with travel writing, as in biography, ‘it can be difficult to say whether it is a real or a fictional personage that we are dealing with’ (joseph, Language and identity, 2; cf. anghelescu, Mistificţiuni).

9 sherman, Telling time, 167.

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century virtually the only kind of journal to find its way from manuscript to print’ and therefore capable of recreating in the public sphere a sense of the intimate immediacy of successive experiences.10

But for such an account to appear successive—part of a continuous thread in time—its annotations should not be excessive. it should avoid the trap of the boring travel text, that lists everything seen, that ‘itemizes, in the literal sense of the word, and exposes the object to a relentless view’.11 henry fielding realised this when he set out to write an account of his voyage to lisbon in 1754: ‘to make a traveller an agreeable compan-ion to a man of sense, it is necessary, not only that he should have seen much, but that he should have overlooked much of what he hath seen.’12 actually, travellers are not merely overlooking; even from what they do manage to observe, they are selecting material for inclusion in their work. and they arrange it in one way or another.

despite his admission of selectivity, fielding nevertheless attempts to create for the reader the illusion of undergoing successive experiences in continuous time. in the preface to his Journal, he explicitly endorsed travel literature’s pretensions to empirical status by insisting on its status as ‘history’, albeit as a branch of that discipline which, perplexingly, ‘alone should [have been] overlooked by all men of great genius and erudition, and delivered up to the Goths and vandals as their lawful property’.13 he particularly sought to distinguish travel texts from the poetical and myth-ological contributions of the ancient poets; and even while greatly admir-ing the modern english authors Burnet14 and addison,15 he expressed doubts as to whether ‘the former was not perhaps to be considered as a political essayist, and the latter as a commentator on the classics, rather than as a writer of travels’ (8).

specifically, fielding’s Journal has entries for each successive day (‘Wednesday June 26, 1754 [. . .] Thursday June 27 [. . .] Friday June 28’), with only a few exceptions through the fifty that his voyage occasions, even if towards the end of the work only the day is supplied, and not the precise

10 ibid., 161.11  Bann, Under the sign, 102–3, quoted in leask, Curiosity, 34. leask is applying Bann’s

critical remarks about older travel catalogues, to pococke’s Description of the East (1743).12 fielding, Journal, preface.13 ibid., 7. fielding’s view anticipates that of volney, to the effect that ‘travels belong

to the department of history, and not that of romance.’ Travels, 1:vi, quoted in schiffer, Oriental panorama, 343.

14 Burnet, Some letters.15 addison, Remarks.

self, time and object in early romanian travel texts 95

date. More than that, many of the entries take the reader through that day in temporal succession. a selection of the opening lines of the first few paragraphs of day 1 will, i hope, suffice to illustrate this point:

[para. 1:] on this day, the most melancholy sun i had ever beheld arose, and found me awake . . . [2:] in this situation, as i could not conquer nature, i submitted entirely to her . . . [3:] at twelve precisely my coach was at the door . . . [4:] in two hours we arrived at redriffe . . . [5:] to go on board the ship it was necessary first to go into a boat . . . [6:] i was soon seated in a great chair in the cabin . . . [7:] a surloin of beef was now placed on the table. (27–29)

all this increases the reader’s sense of proximity to the narrator’s experi-ence; even if details are being omitted, the order of them is not being rearranged. as onno oerlemans has remarked, ‘part of the pleasure of such reading is in vicariously tracing one’s own way through an unknown landscape . . . travel writing encourages a curious repetitive meticulous-ness in locating oneself in physical space’.16 Consequently, this kind of writing partakes of ‘an apparent spontaneity, its ability to portray seem-ingly unpredetermined slices of the lives of travellers’.17 in fielding’s case, this effect is heightened by our knowledge of the author’s extreme illness, and the fact that he died shortly after arriving at his destination, which would have left him little time for rearrangement of his material: the inci-dentality of the quotidian intersects with the ominousness of the confes-sional, leaving the status of the account somewhat ambiguous, ‘oscillating between chronicle and creation’.18

Account, Letters, Journal, or Tour?

the title pages of these British books give us some indication of what kind of thing their authors thought they were: Observations, Remarks, Reflections, Incidents; Memoirs, Sketches, Letters, a Journal, an Account, a History, a Description; sometimes metonymically Travels, a Journey, a Voy-age, a Tour.19 the author might thus privilege the act of displacement; the sensations experienced during it; or the mode of accounting for or

16 oerlemans, Romanticism, 164.17 ibid., 150.18 viviès, English travel narratives, 24.19 on the significance of travel book titles, parman, ‘a harrowing true mysterious pil-

grimage travel adventure’, is both amusing and instructive.

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representing them. in some cases they felt the need to refer to more than one of these things, and as the eighteenth century was not squeamish about lengthy titles, they often did so. in 1769, for instance, the young james Boswell, still in his twenties, published An Account of Corsica, The Journal of a Tour to that Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, all between the same two covers.

Boswell is known to have attended adam smith’s lectures on rhetoric and Belles-lettres at the university of Glasgow, in 1759–60. it is possible that he heard the latter expounding the then novel view that the best method of describing the qualities of an object is not to enumerate its several parts, but ‘by describing the effects this quality produces on those who behold it’.20 this may have instilled in him a sense of the value of representing self-experience as well as describing things encountered. so may have his discussions with jean-jacques rousseau in 1764, which directly preceded his journey. we do not, however, know what specific advice Boswell took when planning the structure of the Account of Corsica which made his name (and even for a time, his nickname—before he became famous as samuel johnson’s biographer, he was known for many years as ‘Corsica Boswell’).

Contemporaries certainly remarked upon the novelty of the book’s structure. Boswell solved the problem of travel composition effectively by drawing a distinction between the description of the island, including a fairly comprehensive scholarly verification of much of the known data concerning natural history, all collated against classical and other sources; and the journal of his tour, where observations are correlated not to docu-ments, but to personal experience. the latter is as scrupulously dated and contextualized as any written source; and indeed depends on circumstan-tial detail to acquire vividness and plausibility.

sherman has related this impulse towards separation of historical analy sis from diurnal narrative, to some remarks made by johnson on historiographical composition as early as 1743, when he was contemplat-ing a (never realised) history of the British parliament. in a letter to his publisher, johnson distinguished between

20 smith, Lectures, 67. this lecture dates from december 1762, but as smith gave the same lectures year after year, it is quite possible that Boswell heard him expounding this view in 1759–60. see pottle, ‘Boswell’s university education’, 246–8.

self, time and object in early romanian travel texts 97

a journal which has regard only to time, and a history which ranges facts according to their dependence on each other, and postpones or anticipates according to the convenience of narration.21

each form had weaknesses: history, construed as ‘spirit’ in a remarkably modern, almost hegelian manner, is ‘contrary to minute exactness’; while the regularity of a journal is ‘inconsistent with spirit’. perhaps something akin to these considerations led johnson twenty-six years later to praise Boswell’s method thus:

your history is like other histories, but your journal is in a very high degree curious and delightful. there is between the history and the journal that dif-ference which there will always be found between notions borrowed from without, and notions generated from within. your history was copied from books; your journal rose out of your own experience and observation. you express images which operated strongly on yourself, and you have impressed them with great force upon your readers.22

this observation was to become a staple of the newer ruminations on the methodology of travel composition, such as can be found in the prefatory remarks of arthur young,23 and of countless other travellers from the late eighteenth century onwards.

Romanian Travel Theory and the Problem of Description

But how was this fundamental question addressed by romanian authors? the problem seems to have been comparatively little addressed by mod-ern critics. despite a pioneering article on romanian ‘mountain litera-ture’ by paul Cornea, which brought together a wide variety of primary works and potential interpretive approaches,24 most subsequent exegesis of the rhetorical structures of romanian romanticism has continued to privilege poetry and fiction.25 this is perhaps surprising, not least in light of the observation that both in Moldavia and in wallachia, the first texts

21  Cited in sherman, Telling time, 187.22 as reported by Boswell, Life of Johnson, cited in viviès, English travel narratives, 35.23 ‘there are two methods of writing travels; to register the journey itself, or the result

of it. in the former case, it is a diary, under which head are to be classed all those book of travels written in the form of letters. the latter usually falls into the shape of essays on distinct subjects.’ young, Travels in France (1792), apud Batten, Pleasurable instruction, 32; also in Korte, English travel writing, 57.

24 Cornea, ‘literatura muntelui’.25 see e.g. Cornea, ed. Structuri tematice.

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to adopt the adjective romantic (in an older form romanticesc, influenced by russian morphology) were travel accounts.26 the situation of travel literature has improved considerably, notably through the appearance of new editions and bibliographies,27 but this seems not to have incited crit-ics to look much at this genre as a site for the cultural interpretation of romantic postures, mentalities and ideologies.28

the first explicit discussion of such a distinction that i have found in romanian travel literature occurs in ion ionescu de la Brad’s Excursion agricole dans la plaine de la Dobruja (1850), the result of an assignment by the reformist ottoman government of the period to survey the condition of this frontier province between the danube and the Black sea. ionescu virtually reproduces young’s words:

il y a deux manières d’écrire les voyages scientifiques: la première est de raconter jour par jour ce qu’on observe; la seconde de présenter l’ensemble de toutes les observations en suivant non plus le cours du temps, mais la liaison des matières qu’on expose en chapitres.29

ionescu openly acknowledged young’s influence and announced his inten-tion to follow the latter’s methods, which he presumably learnt about dur-ing the course of his studies in agrarian economics at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in 1840s paris.30 he followed them not only in this book but in a series of pioneering ethnographies of romania, Mace-donia and other parts of european turkey.

in this sense, however derivative his ideas, he can be considered the first romanian theorist of travel as history, or as we would say, as a social science. But that is not to say that the problem of narrative versus

26 Cornea, Oamenii, 271. the texts in question are wallachian dinicu Golescu’s Însem-nare a călătoriii mele (1826), referring to a ‘most beautiful and romantic walk’ in Bern, switzerland; and Moldavian daniil scavinschi’s poem Călătoria dumnealui hatmanul Con-stantin Palade (1828 ms.), referring similarly to a ‘beautiful and romantic view’, this time in the Moldavian hills.

27 particularly the work of Mircea anghelescu, with his editions of the writings of dimi-trie rallet, nicolae filimon, dinicu Golescu, ion heliade rădulescu &c.

28 notable for their combination of cultural history and literary analysis are anghe-lescu, ‘utopia as a journey’; ioncioaia, ‘viena’; and Mihalache, ‘Metaphor and monumental-ity’. a recent edited collection—Bocşan & Bolovan, eds. Călători români—contains little textual analysis, but some interesting new texts are brought to light—the 1832 journey of the transylvanian saxon Carl stühler to italy (by ittu) and the student letters of the oltenian nicu Gărdăreanu from 1840s paris (by Mihai).

29 ionesco, Excursion, 10. summary information on ionescu in english can be found in Constantinescu, Bădina & Gáll, Sociological thought, and in Michelson, ‘ion ionescu de la Brad’.

30 ionesco, Excursion, 15.

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analytical exposition had not already presented itself to the two dozen or so romanian travel authors to have written in the eighty or so years before him.31 each of them solved the problem, a perennial one in the history of prose description, in his own way. and examination of practice rather than theory might prove more enlightening in this case, especially since ionescu, like young before him, subordinated the theoretical problem to the utilitarian one of producing the most accurate statistical account of the regions travelled through.

Diurnality Monastic and Bureaucratic: Hegumen Venedict (1769) to Teodor Codrescu (1844)

perhaps the earliest evidence of a romanian traveller practising an extended diurnal travel journal is that of the Moldavian monk venedict. hegumen of Moldoviţa monastery, venedict travelled to st. petersburg after Christmas 1769 as part of a delegation to request political aid from the russian court (russia, the leading orthodox power, was then at war with the Moldavians’ islamic suzerain, the ottoman empire). his diary, as one might expect from the modest initiator of a tradition, perhaps over-egged the diurnal pudding, as his editor, publishing the text seventy years’ later, indicated not without irony:

our author who calls his travel impressions, The going of our route from Mol-davia to Petruburhu, is most parsimonious with historical and geographical notations; the chief thing for him is to sleep and eat well, which he never even once forgets to write down with a special predilection, as our readers will be able to establish for themselves. But for all its gastronomical monot-ony, his journey nevertheless contains much information of interest to us. leaving aside, then, his passage through townships and villages where his holiness, seeing nothing else, confined himself to sleeping and eating, we shall publish in the Arhiva only those annotations which have something new to offer for us, while nevertheless preserving faithfully the style and the distribution of the author.32

perhaps unfortunately for his readers, but luckily for us, Kogălniceanu—who was one of the key creators of romanian literature, history and liter-ary history33—appears not to have carried through his intention of editing

31  drace-francis, ‘romanian travel writing’, lists accounts in book form only; a longer but still incomplete list is in BIR 1:62–70 (to romanian lands), 449–60 (abroad).

32 Kogălniceanu, preface to vartolomeu & venedict, ‘Călătoria’, 249–50.33 drace-francis, ‘Mihail Kogălniceanu’, gives a cursory introduction and bibliography.

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out references to eating and sleeping (or at least if he did, we can only imagine a text even more soporific and less digestible than the one he published). translation of merely the initial portion of venedict’s account serves easily to illustrate the point:

December27. sunday i set off from solca monastery, and passed the night in solca

village.28. Monday i went to rădăuţi, and passed the night there.29. tuesday, setting off i went to frătăuţi, and there i ate victuals; and from

there i passed the night at Bainţi village.30. wednesday, travelling i ate victuals at stărcea village, on the siret river;

from there i passed the night at Mihăileşti village, by Cuciur forest.31. thursday i went to Cuciur, estate of putna monastery, there i ate vict-

uals, and also passed the night.

January 17701. friday i went to Cernăuţi, and i ate victuals there; going ahead, i passed

the night at Mătăeşti village, an estate of suceviţă [monastery]2. saturday, eating victuals there, and going ahead i passed the night at

Coşmani village, an estate of the diocese of rădăuţi.34

venedict’s obsessive annotation of his eating and resting habits inevitably appears risible to an enlightened readership accustomed to being either amused or instructed by travel texts; but we should also place it in its proper context, that of a religious man seeking to mark the cycle of his daily actions, that he be seen to be observing them in some kind of order. the success of his mission would depend not only on the political encoun-ter at petersburg which would take place at the end of it, but perhaps also on the correct ‘performance’ of the journey (which begins immediately after the Christmas festival, at the end of a long forty-day fast, as impor-tant as lent in the orthodox monastic calendar). what appear to us as banal materialities take their place alongside the other active and passive omens of the journey: snowdrifts, but also veneration of holy relics at the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev, encounters with russian hierarchs, the ‘great ceremony’ at the Bogoyavlenskii (theophany) Monastery to mark the funeral of andrei Galistyn, and so forth. By february venedict himself apologises that

34 venedict, ‘Călătoria’, 250. shortly afterwards Kogălniceanu interrupts the text: ‘as you can see our author eats victuals and passes the night too much; and so as not to excite such a hunger for food and rest in our readers too, we shall follow our traveller only through those localities where he noted something other than table and bed’ (251).

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having set off from Kiev on a staging route that goes day and night [without stopping], i have left off showing the days of the month, and have written the townships and villages, and from which town how much to the next, how many versts.35

it is the fact of ‘two weeks having passed’ that causes him to ‘set off from Moscow to petersburg’; and it is on palm sunday—a feast surely not without significance in this context—that an audience is granted with the empress. there is a kind of assumption that profane occurrences will not be written down, so that even quite detailed sensory inventorization of the contents of the imperial apartments and gardens serves to sanctify rather than to debase the experience:

May 8. saturday st. john the evangelist i went to church at Court, and after the holy liturgy i walked in the imperial Gardens which is up at the palace, where there are all kinds of images carved in marble, and fruit-bearing trees, lemons, figs, laurels and others. likewise an înrăngerie [orangerie, editor’s note], that is a winter garden, where there are also many kinds of fruit trees and flowers, glass walls, and stoves inside; there are also birds, and english crows, and canaries endowed with all kinds of feathers. the canaries also have nests with their young there, among the trees. there are also some birds called fazani [i.e. pheasants, ad-f]: their tail and wing feathers are red, while on the belly and under the wings yellow, and on the neck striped in three colours, with yellow and red feathers. i went through the apartments around the garden, which are furnished with many fine things, like religious and historical paintings [kartine], painted to look as if they were really alive; there are also many animals of great size. there is also a clock, which when it strikes after each hour, plays all kinds of tunes in panpipes for a quarter of an hour or more.36

the empress’s move from her summer to her winter residence is marked by ‘eating of victuals’ (257); ‘eating of victuals’ with the archimandrite platon is accompanied by ‘spiritual and other chanting’ (258); but also by the political bulletins arriving from the home and foreign fronts—tartar raids back home in Moldavia, the public knouting of thieves in peters-burg. as sacred and political time intersect in this way, the closest hegu-men venedikt gets to expressing some kind of personal emotion is again on a feast day, st. peter’s, when at another imperial banquet there were

many french and italian songs, women singing, and especially a girl with an amazing, indescribable voice. and giving thanks after dinner we went

35 ibid., 251.36 ibid., 255–6.

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into the third galdarea [galérie, editor’s note] or house, which again was decorated with many beautiful objects. and making the sign of the cross and giving thanks after coffee, i went out, and walked in the imperial gar-den where there are innumerable torchlights, and all kinds of wild animals, stags, hinds, goats and many other indescribable beauties; this garden is on the sea shore, and you can see Kronstadt from it.37

the pleasure described is closely intertwined with sense experience and personal movement through sounds, tastes, sights, buildings and land-scapes. on the fourth of july, or rather in the entry for that day, venedikt makes a more general meteorological observation, both pre- and post-dated, that from 15 May to 8 july, ‘the sky having been so cloudless and clear, stars were hardly seen, for night hardly even fell’.38 saint elijah’s day, tuesday 20th july, brings ‘tidings of joy’, concerning Count rumyantsev’s victory over the turks and the tatar Khan; but only on the 22nd does he tell us he has been ill, which has cost him the first eighteen days of the month and 30 lei in doctors’ fees. of the journey home, begun on tuesday 27th july, day of the Martyr st. panteleimon, not much incident is recorded, with a final entry on the first of september 1770.

judging by Kogălniceanu’s editorial derision, this appears at first sight to be a text which has entered the circuit of public criticism and apprecia-tion too late for it to be properly understood. reviewing a similar process, namely the way in which readers of addison’s Remarks on Italy became increasingly uncomprehending of his purposes with the passing of the later decades of the eighteenth century, critic Charles Batten noted ‘how fundamental problems arise when readers do not comprehend the con-ventional aims of travel literature and when literary historians are igno-rant of the tradition in which travellers write’.39 a monolithic reading of romanian cultural transition ‘from medieval to modern’ might lead us to assume that some kind of general schism intervened between 1770 and 1840, leaving the old literature unintelligible to the new, ‘realist’ genera-tion. such a reading, present in so many late twentieth-century analyses,

37 ibid., 259–60. i have interpreted fantaluri as a misprint for fanaluri ‘torchlights’.38 ibid. this is followed by a curious interpolation in the manuscript, a forfeit ‘for the

drunkard’, that, being on a separate sheet, can only be read, charitably, as just that, an interpolation: ‘Catch a gadfly and put it in hard spirits, to kill it, and give it to the drunk-ard, saying: as cattle run from the gadfly and hide, so should so-and-so flee from the inn, and drink no more’.

39 Batten, Pleasurable instruction, 19. Cf. anghelescu, Mistificţiuni, 57, on the misreading by later critics of romanian traveller dinicu Golescu’s Însemnare a călătoriii mele.

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was being constituted even in the 1830s and 1840s: Moldavian writer and traveller alecu russo made so bold as to assert that

in the 16 years from 1835 to 1851, Moldavia has lived more than in the five hundred historical years from the descent of dragoş in 1359 to the days of our parents. our parents lived their lives very much as their ancestors did [whereas] our life has no connection to theirs, we could even say that we are not their children.40

that this was far from being the case can be appreciated by an analysis of a new travel account published by a young Moldavian intellectual of relatively humble origins, teodor Codrescu (1819–1894), whose O câlâtorie la Constantinopoli was published for the first (and only) time in iaşi in 1844. Born in Galaţi, the main port of Moldavia on the danube, Codrescu underwent summary primary schooling in his home town before being orphaned, whereupon he moved to iaşi and studied at the recently founded public higher school, the Academia Mihăileană.41 in the patron-age system of the time, his chance came when he was given the position

40 ‘studie moldovană’ [1851] in russo, Scrieri, 11; also cited in Michelson, ‘alecu russo’, 117.41  Mănucă, ‘teodor Codrescu’.

fig. 2. emmanuel-adolphe Midy, ‘le rencontre’, c. 1840. encounter between a boyar of the older generation in oriental dress, and a younger boyar in european

dress. detail from lithograph, romanian academy library.

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of romanian-language tutor to prince Mihail sturdza’s brother-in-law nicolae vogoridi (1820–1863), son of stefan vogoridi, a wealthy phanariot of Bulgarian origin.42 accompanying nicolae vogoridi to Constantinople, Codrescu felt that

i could not stop myself from making a few notes on the objects most worthy of being seen and known, that can be found there, as well as, at the same time, the customs of the people there.43

the introduction to this work is something of a political essay insisting on the reforms that had been taking place in the ottoman empire and com-bating the views of ‘those who, not having encountered the turks at close quarters . . . considered them utterly barbarous, confounded in idiotic prejudices and that nothing good can be done in this empire’.44 and the greater part of the book is not arranged temporally but in a tableau of the kind often produced by western writers: separate chapters treat Constan-tinople (21–36), religion (37–56), schools (57–67), the Nizam or reformed military (69–74), ‘observations’ (75–93), and ‘visits’ (95–101). But during the chapters on departure (9–19), and return (103–11), a specific, and not just diurnal but literally minutious account of the journey is given.

on saturday the 5/17 august at 8 ½ hours in the morning,45 we set off from the port of Galaţi to Constantinople, on the steamboat seri-pervas, property of the austrian danube company. the weather was favourable, the day fine enough and cooled by a plentiful downpour that caught us on our entry into Galaţi, on friday at 6. leaving that place, we reached saccea at 10 minutes past eleven, on the right side of the danube, a fortified locality. (11)[. . .]at thirty minutes past twelve o’clock we reached tulcea (12)at five past six in the evening we reached the mouth of the danube, called sulina (12)sunday, at four minutes to nine we reached the isthmus of Kaliakri (15)at eight minutes to 12 we reached the bay next to varna (16)sunday at 12 hours and twenty-five minutes past midnight, i was told that the lights of the Bosphorus could be seen (17)

42 stefan vogoridi had used his influence at the porte to sponsor sturdza’s ascent to the Moldavian throne; in return, sturdza accepted vogoridi’s daughter’s hand in marriage.

43 Codrescu, O câlâtorie, 3.44 ibid.45 the two dates represent, respectively, the julian or ‘old style’ calendar which most

orthodox nations still followed until the early twentieth century; and the Gregorian or ‘new style’, in use in most of western europe.

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Most of the information that punctuates this extremely punctual account— or, reversing the hierarchies, that is punctuated by its timekeeping—is historical in nature, with some human and political geography. near isac-cea, the foundations of an old fortress, possibly from the time of stephen the Great, the fifteenth-century prince of Moldavia (‘there was a time when the princes of Moldavia entitled themselves rulers also over the Black sea’—11). near tulcea, settlements of russians and Germans, with another of arabs nearby (12). sulina inspires an account of the delta, for-merly of six channels but now only three, and of the russians’ civilizing efforts: a lighthouse, for which each boat pays a toll of a thaler, formerly two (12–13); at Kaliakri, again ‘the ruins of a fortress of the same name, whose foundations, battered constantly by the waves, seem to take root in the depths of the Black sea’ (15). But on finally entering the Bosphorus,

at ten minutes past two i gazed ecstatically upon both lighthouses [the asian and the european], their lights striving to cut through the fog of steam emanating from the sea on a beautiful august night, to lighten the path of our entrance into the Bosphorus, whose waves gently rocked us. (18)

Codrescu’s text brings to mind the kind of travel description ridiculed by the anthropologist Claude lévi-strauss.46 this man, who apparently has no difficulty looking at a view and at his watch at the same time, begins his chapter on Constantinople with a panorama of the city, seen from the Kule-Kapısi watchtower, where—he notes with satisfaction—‘there is also a clock’. however, he appears not to have availed himself of the latter

46 lévi-strauss’s impatience with the picturesque, and attempt to distinguish between the ‘truth’ of ethnography and the ‘sediment’ of description, became paradigmatic, and quasi-obligatory for the discipline: ‘we may endure six months of travelling, hardships and sickening boredom for the purpose of recording (in a few days, sometimes a few hours) a hitherto unknown myth, a new marriage rite or a complete list of clan names, but this residue of memory—‘at five thirty in the morning, we entered the harbour at recife amid the shrill cries of the gulls, while a fleet of boats laden with tropical fruit clustered round the hull’—this worthless recollection can hardly be worth me taking up my pen to write down.’ lévi-strauss, Tristes tropiques, 17. Cf. johnson’s much earlier critique of travel writ-ers, these ‘wanderers’ who inform us ‘that on a certain day he set out early with the cara-van, and in the first hour’s march, saw towards the south, a hill covered with trees . . . that an hour after he saw something to the right which looked at a distance like a castle with towers . . . then he conducts his reader thro’ wet and dry, over rough and smooth . . . and if he obtains his company for another day, will dismiss him again at night, equally fatigued with a like succession of rocks and streams, mountains and ruins’ (Idler, no. 97 (1760), partially cited in sherman, Telling time, 198). the problem of anthropology’s simultaneous distancing from and complicity with ‘literary’ modes was brilliantly reexamined by pratt, ‘fieldwork in common places’.

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facility, and from this point on he ceases to time his annotations, moving rapidly towards a general tableau mode:

the view of this city is one of the most enchanting in the world, and one can justly say that: here nature made everything, and man nothing, for its elevated position, the combination of trees, houses, and minarets which it displays; the grand entrance of the Bosphorus, filled with caiques; the exten-sive port, surrounded by the suburbs of Galata, pera and st. demetrius; the whole of scutari rising opposite; the greenish hills extending behind in the form of a shadow; the sea of Marmara with its smiling islands, further off, snow-covered Mount olympus, the fertile plains of europe and asia all around. (23)

this dithyrambic landscape is, unfortunately interrupted by reality, for

as soon, however, as one enters into its midst, a feeling of astonishment and disgust prevails. this extensive city is poorly built, being composed of a collection of ill-proportioned shacks and of narrow and poorly paved lanes. Most of the habitations are of wood and are located on the peaks of the hills or on both shores of the Bosphorus. (24)

the return to Moldavia occasions a return to diurnal notations, as

on tuesday 12th september, at 1¼ hours after noon, we left Constantinople for Moldavia on the Metternich steamboat, . . . arriving at sulina at 1½ hours after midnight. . . . we stayed here until 6 o’clock in the morning (105).

a favourable account is given of the quarantine, which the Moldavian authorities had been responsible for erecting: ‘so well built that seen from the danube from a distance it looks like a fortress’; unlike Constan-tinople, this picture ‘does not become a deception if one passes into its interior; there is a well-kept garden here to amuse the freely-detained passenger’. a distinguished foreign traveller, the austrian engineer Karl von Birago,47 assures Codrescu that ‘our quarantine does great honour to Moldavia, and can compete with the first in europe in matters of clean-liness and good order’ (106). ever eager to give favourable mentions of recently-established modernizing institutions—the schools in the towns of Galaţi, tecuci and Bârlad, the threshing machine and plate manufac-tory at his patron vogoridi’s future father-in-law’s estate at Ţigăneşti—or people (the austrian consul huber at Galaţi), Codrescu leaves aside his former exigency in timekeeping matters, and signals the date of his entry into iaşi as taking place ‘after a journey of fifty-two days’ (110), in other

47 freiherr Karl von Birago (1792–1845), military engineer and bridge designer.

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words on the 26th of september / 6th october. strangely, nowhere in the text is the year of the journey given, and only by confronting the days of the week assigned to certain dates against calendars for given years, and collating this with various circumstantial details, do i feel confident in establishing the date of this journey as being 1839.

in contrast to hegumen venedict, and as part of the new civil official-dom that was expanding in Moldavia in the period of the russian pro-tectorate, when the so-called Organic Regulations offered modernization and a semi-constitutional regime, Codrescu tried to assume the role of the modern professional layman. his travel text and his temporal regime remain that of a bureaucrat, despite a keen geographical and ethnographi-cal eye. as florea ioncioaia has noted, the nineteenth-century traveller, as a mediating representative of the paradigms and mentalities of his home culture, almost comes to resemble a public functionary.48

Romantic Paradigms? Mihai Kogălniceanu and Alecu Russo

the installation of ‘romantic structures’ in romanian culture is frequently associated with the year 1840 and a number of now ‘canonical’ statements concerning the need to cultivate a national literature, and particularly national history and landscapes.49 Mihail Kogălniceanu, for example, in the programmatic introduction that appeared in that year in the first number of his review Dacia litterară, fulminated against the mania for translations which he saw as threatening native talent, and insisted that

our history has sufficient heroic deeds, our beautiful lands are large enough and our customs picturesque and poetic enough for us to find subjects for writing among ourselves, without needing, for this purpose, to borrow from other nations.50

likewise, Kogălniceanu’s fellow Moldavian, alecu russo, writing in the same year:

Could there be anybody so unjust as to say or believe that Moldavia were a steppe country, in which the sun toils endlessly on the horizon, where the pale and enfeebling greenery makes you sad? no, Moldavia contains all kinds of landscapes, merry, sombre, bucolic, enriched by nature’s bounty. what is more, it bears the ineffable mark of suave melancholy, like the scent

48 ioncioaia, ‘viena’, 417.49 General analyses include popovici, Romantismul românesc.50 Kogălniceanu, ‘introducţie’ [1840], in idem, Opere, 1:223.

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of a delicate flower. the wildness of its hills possesses a primitive je ne sais quoi, that causes you to forget life’s momentary misfortunes, and lulls you into a soft and silent state of contemplation.51

But, it has to be said, the theoretical elaboration of a romantic pro-gramme was not always consistently followed by its practical develop-ment. Kogălniceanu himself left some fascinating unpublished material, in the form of 128 precocious adolescent letters recounting his experiences as a student travelling first to lunéville and then to Berlin, in the period 1834–1838;52 and also in a series of miscellaneous notes documenting trav-els through vienna in 1844, and to france and spain in 1845–1847.53

the texts form instructive contrasts. the first, the letters, are those of a conscientious son and brother recounting facts and figures about his stud-ies, travels, and about france and Germany in general. these letters are of course dated (as with Codrescu’s text, in two dates, the ‘old’ and ‘new style’—another temporal indicator of the disjunction between romanian and what was explicitly called ‘european time’). while including a number of original observations, Kogălniceanu sometimes has recourse to the ‘cut and paste’ method of excerption and translation from local guidebooks. a letter of 8 april 1836, for instance, contains a description of the Berlin arsenal written in romanian ‘but also in french, so that the sisters can understand’, which description ‘i have extracted from a book entitled Le conducteur du voyageur à Berlin’.54 on 19 May another description, this time of the university, is transcribed; on 9 june, one of the Gendarmes’ square; on 9 august, one of the royal court.55 Both these latter are appar-ently accompanied by illustrations, some of them on special headed paper

51  russo, ‘la pierre du tilleul’ [c. 1840] in idem, Scrieri, 206.52 the letters from this period are published in Kogălniceanu, Scrisori, ed. haneş, 1–188.

this volume also contains five later letters from vienna and paris, 1844–1846 (189–97) and thirty-nine from exile in austria and france in 1848–1849 (198–232).

53 Kogălniceanu’s account of vienna and Notes sur l’Espagne in Opere, 1:487–542. his viennese journal was written in (a small initial portion of) an elegant leather album; a ‘voyage sur le bas danube’, mentioned in a plan of work for 1845, has not surfaced. on Kogălniceanu as traveller, besides dan simonescu’s useful editorial notes to the Opere (whence i have the aforementioned information), see ioncioaia, ‘viena’, and tudorică-impey, ‘an eastern gate’.

54 Kogălniceanu, Scrisori, 83. this interestingly implies that his sisters, educated by francophone tutors back home in iaşi, may not have been able to read romanian, then still written in the Cyrillic script. Certainly Kogălniceanu consistently wrote to his father in romanian and to his sisters in french.

55 ibid., 86–7, 88–9, 94–5.

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which Kogălniceanu has managed to buy, each one with a separate image of Berlin.56

the second, entitled Notes sur l’Espagne, in a mixture of romanian and french, has been characterized as a ‘literary mosaic’, a ‘disorderly’ collec-tion of historical, literary and picturesque jottings.57 again here, original observation is interleaved with quite extensive translation from, among other sources, George Borrow’s Bible in Spain and william robertson’s History of Charles V, both through the intermediary of french versions. in this sense, Kogălniceanu hardly followed his own advice to steer clear of the ‘mania’ to translate. But his text also contains some ‘instructional’ notes betraying an attempt to meditate on questions of perspective and distance their effect on the traveller’s experience:

the first duty of any traveller who desires to see and to remember is, imme-diately upon arriving at a noteworthy town or locality, to climb up the dominant mountain or hill, or in the absence of one, up the highest tower. then he may study the local physionomy, position, direction and form of the buildings, and thereby, in some sense, their soul. the panorama unfurl-ing before him repays the effort of climbing up. that is what i did climb-ing the tower above the vaulted entrance to the escorial. i could judge the form of the ensemble. on one side we have the mountains still covered with snow, on the other the plain with its olive forests in the heart of Castille, and Madrid visible in the distance.58

these remarks have been dismissed, perhaps somewhat superciliously, as having a ‘puerile-scientific character’.59 a more charitable view would remind the reader that these texts were either written in early youth or in great haste, and, not having been prepared by the author himself for publication, were never subjected to the processes of ‘literary’ revision common to most of the works mentioned hitherto.

similar reservations apply partly to the writings of Kogălniceanu’s con-temporary alecu russo (1819–1859). like Kogălniceanu, russo belonged to the boyar or noble class and was a member of a progressive generation who had been sent abroad for education in western europe, albeit not as far as paris. having spent much of his adolescence at boarding school in Geneva (1829–35), russo returned to take up a number of positions in the Moldavian bureaucracy. in the meantime he produced a miscellaneous

56 letter of 23 March, ibid., 82.57 simonescu, notes to ‘notes sur l’espagne’, in Kogălniceanu, Opere, 1:534–7.58 Kogălniceanu, Opere 1:531–2.59 popa, Călătoriile, 243.

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œuvre of journalism, literary criticism, plays and memoirs, a large part of which were written in french and appeared only posthumously (his dra-matic works have not survived). works such as he did publish in roma-nian during his lifetime were signed either with his initials or, on one occasion, with a pseudonym.60

in terms of the question at hand, that of travel literature’s oscilla-tion between interest in the self and interest in landscape, russo’s most relevant and important text is, without doubt, La pierre du tilleul [‘the linden stone’].61 named after a curious limestone rock formation in the neamţ region of Moldavia, about which legend records that a shepherd planted a linden tree on it to ward off the devil, the piece in fact embeds travel annotations and the recounting of popular and historical legends within an extended reflection on his and his generation’s relationship to travel and to knowledge of their homeland. russo’s text bears the subtitles Légende montagnarde. Fragment d’un voyage dans la haute Moldavie en 1839, and begins with a rhetorical defence both of domestic travel and of writing about it.62 the actual travel-descriptive element is relatively short, and yet russo does momentarily assume the ‘diurnal’ mode, recounting his departure from iaşi in early september, his arrival in piatra neamţ on the fourth of that month, and his entry into ‘the heart of the mountain[s]’ on the eleventh.63 even at the commencement of the ‘diurnal’ section the exigencies of ‘unmediated’ annotation seem to make him feel awkward, as if the hybridities of his discursive styles were a direct outcome of the unevenness of the modes of transport, and the terrain itself:

i ask your pardon, for now, for all these reflections, observations and land-scapes, dreamt up on the spot, for i am having a hard enough time keeping my balance in these delicate carts. each bump threatens to send me on an aerial journey; it is most pleasant. the driver only overturned me twice the whole way to piatra. My mineralogical studies were profound, my progress in human psychology boundless.64

60 faifer, ‘alecu russo’. russo’s principal prose works are, in romanian, ‘amintiri’ [rec-ollections] unfinished, partially published in the review România literară, 1855; and ‘studie moldovană’, published in Zimbrul, 1851; in french, and posthumous, are La pierre du tilleul; Iassy et ses habitants en 1840; and Sovéja, journal d’un exilé politique en 1846.

61  despite its importance being signalled by Cornea (‘literatura muntelui’, 383), there has been little detailed analysis of the narrative structure of this text.

62 russo, ‘la pierre du tilleul’ [1840], in idem, Scrieri, 205–9.63 ibid., 209–17.64 ibid., 210.

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But the attempt to write a simple diary is somehow at odds with the pur-pose of the journey, which is to return to see the homeland scenes he had been put in mind of when facing the better-known landscapes of the rhone valley, where he had been sent for his Genevan education from the age of 10. he tells his driver (whom he calls ‘the dacian’, after the country’s autochtonous inhabitants) to

stop, dacian, for you cannot know how this breeze of life blowing from the hills used to dry the tears of my childhood, cajole the dreams of my youth, and has just found me again, after a long separation, an aged youth, with furrowed brow, broken heart, disillusioned! how beautiful and delicate my dreams were, like those light splashes sketched by the stones i used to skim on the surface of the rhone!65

russo’s efforts at a full-blown travel journal are inevitably interrupted by his disposition towards reverie, and after a couple of non-diurnal head-ings (‘Itinerary’—‘poetry’), returns to essayistic mode, reflecting on the character of the Moldavians, the mountains, or on direct description of the scenery; continuing into a ‘story within a story’ in the form of the eponymous legend, recounted by ‘a villager who had joined our party’.66 his encounter with picturesque nature and ancestral inhabitants is fre-quently correlated not only to his early childhood—the classic technique of landscape as trigger for recollection of origins, to be found in literary and psychological writing from wordsworth to freud—but also to his for-eign adolescence, on which his ‘enlightened’ sensibility and francophone literary education depends but from which he is simultaneously attempt-ing to emancipate himself. this explains his reaction on encountering the linden stone of the piece’s title; he dismounts from his horse and carves his name into the stone ‘like a true tourist who has traversed switzerland, the land of towers, and as one who knows his dumas by heart’.67

elsewhere, he meditates at greater length on potential comparisons between the alps and the Carpathians:

i have frequently heard people comparing our Carpathians to the mountains of switzerland, although those who did so never saw beautiful switzerland

65 ibid.66 ibid., 225. the technique of embedding folkloric legends into travel narratives is also

used by russo’s friend and compatriot vasile alecsandri, in his ‘o primblare la munţi’ [1844], which, by means of similar artifices, incorporates stories and legends previously published separately. see alecsandri, Proză, 133–61. on this technique in early romanian fiction, see Mancaş, ‘structura naraţiei’, 212–13; roman, Le populisme, 158–64.

67 russo, ‘la pierre’, in Scrieri, 225.

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even in a dream. what can i say? our mountains are genuinely beautiful, grand, and with a thousand picturesque views, but lonesome, pleasing only to those genuinely infatuated with such things, and covered with a nebulous veil of melancholy, that forms the distinctive mark of our landscape, but not broad tableaux, sometimes focused and almost purposefully framed, some-times unfolding in the distance with their rich pastures, such as nature has sown in switzerland. there is also grandeur and sublimity in the peaks ris-ing crowned with dark fir trees and their sides eroded by torrents of water, covering the valleys in stones and ruins; but it is not the grandeur of the alps. faced with the latter, the eye is astounded, judgement powerless. faced with our mountains, the soul drifts into dreaminess, as in an endless elegy. as if you were seeing fallen grandeur, or spirits wounded by contact with the real world, having experienced life’s disappointments.68

russo earlier admits that his interest in the countryside and the pictur-esque had been stimulated at least in part by his knowledge of foreign accounts that, however superficial and stereotypical in their treatment of Moldavia, nevertheless made it seem ‘bearable’.69 this has been analysed by wendy Bracewell in terms of ‘a sense that value and originality lay elsewhere, that the domestic and indigenous could only ever be a reflec-tion of a copy . . . while at the same time beset with an uneasy nostalgia for the domestic ways they have been taught to despise’, leading to a sense of the nation as being ‘both inferior and infinitely precious’.70 in this pos-ture, the romanian discovery of landscape does indeed accompany and metonymise a fascination with the self, but it is a discovery mediated and overshadowed by the encounter with the other.

as raymond williams reminded us in The country and the city, the very etymology of the word country suggests otherness, deriving as it does from contrée, i.e. that which faces us, it opposite us.71 this has sometimes been analysed in terms of unequal relations between metropolis and hinter-land, or european imperialist attitudes towards depicting remote regions.72

68 ibid., 217. a later Moldavian traveller, visiting switzerland in the 1860s, produced a cruder numerical comparison between the two ranges: ‘imagine, on top of our Carpathians, another row of Carpathians, and you would scarcely have the altitude of these mountains.’ (Gane, Păcate mărturisite, 211). ford, ‘relocating an idyll’, argues that the Carpathians con-stituted ‘surrogate alps’ for British writers, especially from the 1860s onwards.

69 russo, ‘la pierre’, in idem, Scrieri, 208.70 Bracewell, ‘the limits of europe’, 105–6.71  williams, The country and the city; cf. Muecke, ‘Country’.72 e.g. pratt, Imperial eyes, 28, for whom nature description is ‘a story of urbanizing,

industrializing europeans fanning out in search of non-exploitive relations to nature, even as they were destroying such relations in their own centers of power . . . a narrative of anti-conquest, in which the naturalist naturalizes the bourgeois european’s own global pres-ence and authority.’

self, time and object in early romanian travel texts 113

part of russo’s task may indeed be to stylize and ‘ancestralize’ the native places and inhabitants, while praising the beneficent paternalism of the Moldavian landowners. But his is not a discourse of othering ‘in a timeless present . . . without an explicit anchoring either in an observing self or in a particular encounter’.73 unlike his compatriot Codrescu travel-ling to Constantinople in the same month of the same year, he notes not just the month but also the year of his journey, and gives considerable voice to the locals he encounters. although he does little to undermine patriarchal boyar-peasant relations, he also invokes ‘an imagined west’, in a moral geopolitics which, as józsef Böröcz has written, comes not only from the western observer or postcolonial subject, but also ‘from the frustrated location of inadequate (‘eastern’, &c.) europe’.74 in this case, perhaps what is other is not so much the landscape itself but the for-eign, romantic, ‘implicitly’ european tradition of writing about it, espe-cially when placed in a certain relation to cultural identity and personal memory. at the same time both his journey and his meditations on it are anchored in history and provide a reflective commentary on the present and on the dilemmas of Moldavian selfhood. as mentioned above, one of russo’s gestures when faced with the linden stone, the ancestral symbol of his homeland, is to inscribe his name on it. this gesture is returned to in the dénouement of the piece, when a peasant remarks

–  a strange thing you did there, sir . . . –  what thing, mon brave?–  well, what were you doing with your knife? a fine knife, i don’t

deny . . . –  i was signing my name.–  and why?–  for other travellers, coming after me, to see it.–  a worthless task, sir, unless you be joking with me . . . for twenty-five

years, since i have known the linden stone, although many boyars and upstarts have passed by here, i have never seen even one stop, let alone to write their name!75

73 eadem, ‘scratches on the face of the country’, 120–1 (referring to descriptive tech-niques in British travel accounts of africa).

74 Böröcz, ‘Goodness is elsewhere’, 134. see also dainotto’s interesting interpretation of southern european self-positionings vis-à-vis the european ‘centre’ (dainotto, Europe).

75 russo, ‘la pierre’, in idem, Scrieri, 235.

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in conclusion, russo leaves the solution of the mystery of his graphic ges-ture to the devil and to the reader. as far as i am aware i am only the second anglophone reader to engage in such a diabolical hermeneutic contest. the first, paul Michelson, in a sensitive presentation of russo’s œuvre, stressed particularly the theme of historicism and the national past, and argued that romanians, to be able to engage in a successful assumption of selfhood, needed to analyse and situate, rather than simply reject, their native traditions.76 here i have tried to show the worth of paying attention not just to reflections on the nature of history, but also to the specific forms of narration at work in the representation of place, time and landscape, which in turn have important consaequences for the presentation of self-identity, as well as enabling us to elucidate certain problems of the status of such texts as historical documents. traditionally, analysis of such forms has been applied by literary critics to fiction, but they have relevance for the historian too.

in its early textual development, the romanian travel account did not necessarily move from a dry analytical discourse to a minutious, intro-verted diurnality. on the contrary, the perfunctoriness of the journal was criticised and abandoned, much as it had been in the western Middle ages.77 at the same time, romanian travel discourses (and here i have focused almost exclusively on the Moldavian variant of these discourses) took a variety of forms, as can be seen by the examples of Codrescu and russo, who produced such different texts despite having travelled almost simultaneously. however, the growth of the reflective mode, particularly in the era of romanticism, served as a platform for discourses of histori-cal value to be displayed through a symbolic personal journey, in which temporal and spatial travel, not to mention reverie and reality, often inter-sected and overlapped. this mode, precisely while privileging an explic-itly subjective and fragmentary approach towards recollecting the past, sought also to define collective identities and act as a spur to action in the present.

76 Michelson, ‘alecu russo’.77 howard, Writers and pilgrims, 18–19, argues that western pilgrimage narratives

undergo a ‘move towards literature’ as they emancipate themselves from the mere log of details and gain in narrative consistency.

Chapter four

‘Like a member of a free nation, he wrote without shame’: foreign traveLLers as a trope in romanian

CuLturaL tradition*

in october 2004 the prominent romanian writer horia-roman pata-pievici—perhaps the archetypal representative of bucharest’s current metropolitan intelligentsia—launched a literary-intellectual review enti-tled Ideas in Dialogue. the title of the review indicated a programmatic intention to supply a forum for a type of cultural discussion perceived to be lacking in romania. patapievici took up this theme in an essay intro-ducing the first number, which begins thus:

if a foreign traveller were to undertake a sojourn in romanian cultural life of recent decades, he would be struck by the fact that there is no intellec-tual debate here, original books fail to provoke discussion, while schools of thought are, in reality, borrowed trends or interest groups whose coher-ence is maintained by force of profitable convictions. although not exactly a cultural desert, romania is a field where people shout, prattle or titter, but where there is little listening, still less understanding, and the calm sound of discussion is rarely heard.

modern romanian culture was created in the nineteenth century, grow-ing around the nucleus of the model of general education. and general edu-cation, in its turn, was built around belles-lettres. You could be considered cultured, if you knew the names of a few canonical authors, if you were up on the literature which circulated, if you listened to a certain music and you proved yourself capable, either orally or in writing, of handling in an assured fashion the classic locutions of the pink pages of Larousse. in short, to be cultured meant to have read high literature.1

how should we interpret this opening gambit? a ‘domestic’ writer, attack-ing the sterility and superficiality of contemporary romanian intellectual life, calls upon the testimony of ‘a foreign traveller.’ no explanation is required: his readers are assumed to be aware of the importance—and,

* in Travel and ethics, ed. C. forsdick, C. fowler & L. kostova. abingdon: routledge, 2013, 183–203.

1 patapievici, ‘Calmul discuţiei’, and in a slightly different form in his book Despre idei & blocaje, ch. 1. in his autobiographical memoir, Zbor în bătaia săgeţii (1995), patapievici describes himself as having cultivated this immersion in high culture during the Ceauşescu period, within a context of resistance to the dominant ideology.

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it is implied, accuracy—of the putative foreigner’s putative verdict. the trope of the foreign traveller is therefore, it seems, a ‘classic locution’, to cite the phrase patapievici uses to denote widely-detained cultural knowl-edge. but what, precisely is the nature and role of this ‘foreign traveller’? how did he acquire such symbolic authority?

scholars—mainly in romania—have enumerated, translated and anal-ysed the relatively large number of foreign accounts of romanian life and culture that were produced from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.2 Critiques have appeared in english, largely pursuing a neo-saidian approach, showing how ‘westerners’ elaborated a superficial and deroga-tory discourse about small, balkan or ruritanian cultures.3 at more or less the same time, scholars in romania and elsewhere in eastern europe were starting to take a more scholarly and critical look at the evolution of discourses of national identity, and precisely identifying a reaction to foreign writings about them as being a central trope in this ideology.4 for instance, it was posited that the paradigm of east european alterity imposed itself ‘not only as an ambivalent and necessary ingredient of west european identity, but also as an essential element of the self-identification processes of local elites’.5

a further notable assumption often made by analysts of romanian identity issues is that the description of romanian lands by foreign trav-ellers, as an act of cultural hegemony, will tend to produce as a symptom a split, stigmatized identity or ‘inauthenticity complex’ among the people constituted as objects of travel description.6 this has sometimes involved the transposition of the thesis of ‘incompleteness’ or ambivalence which was elaborated by homi bhabha to denote a state engendered in colonial subjects as a result of mimicry or fixation on the colonizer’s discourse.7 i have already attempted to question this diagnosis in an earlier chapter dedicated to dinicu golescu, the author of the first romanian travel

2 the compendium Călători străini registers over 300 accounts for the period 1700–1850 (vols. 8–10 of the old series and 1–5 of the new).

3 see introduction.4 Zub, ‘political attitudes and literary expressions’; verdery, ‘moments’; mitu, National

identity, 15–53. some relevant primary texts are now accessible in english, in e.g. trencsé-nyi & kopeček, eds. Discourses, and bracewell, ed. Orientations.

5 antohi, Imaginaire culturel, 269.6 verdery, ‘moments’, 58–9, speaks of an ‘interstitial subject’; antohi, Imaginaire, of the

constitution of a ‘stigmatic social identity’; alexandrescu, Identitate în ruptură, of ‘identity fragmentation’; cf. roman, Fragmented identities.

7 according to bhabha, ‘the ambivalence of mimicry’ produces ‘an uncertainty which fixed the colonial subjects as “partial” presence’, i.e. ‘both “incomplete” and “virtual” ’. bhabha, ‘of mimicry’, 86.

‘like a member of a free nation, he wrote without shame’ 117

book and a figure considered paradigmatic for the national tradition of ‘occidentalism’.8

in this chapter, i propose to continue this debate with reference to some sources which enable a more precise focus: romanian discourses not just about foreigners, but specifically about foreign travellers. in doing so, i seek to raise questions concerning not just the status of western travellers as imputed ethical arbiters, but also some of the problems and dilemmas raised by the presence and function of this trope in a variety of forms within an allegedly ‘minor’ culture.

more specifically, i will analyse a series of texts, composed between 1702 and 1858, in which romanian authors either describe british and french travellers, or respond to the latter’s writings about their country or people. i identify various modes of treating the theme, which range from rela-tive indifference at an early stage, to high indignation, through to a later phase where anger is displaced by the use of irony and literary distanc-ing to perhaps indicate that the theme has crystallized and can become the object of humour. without wishing to make these examples bear too much interpretive weight, i propose that this roughly corresponds to the establishment of the ‘foreign traveller’ as not merely an occasional object of remark but as a motif of cultural significance as used by patapievici in the early years of the twenty-first century. it bears some relation to tropes of ‘writing back’ against metropolitan misrepresentations—but the attitudes evinced are in themselves complex and contrasting, for some identify with the traveller as a source of authority, while others explicitly polemize against him, questioning his legitimacy.

in the wider scholarly discussion, some attention has been paid to the role and influences of western practices of topographical representa-tions on ‘peripheral’ self-identities. mary Louise pratt has coined the term ‘travelees’, to denote the inhabitants of the described lands. she did so by making an analogy with ‘addressee’, meaning ‘persons traveled to (or on) by a traveller, receptors of travel’.9 the term is a useful way of drawing attention to the function of travel descriptions in casting certain actors in positions of passivity or objectivization. however, it encompasses quite diverse potential roles, involving greater or lesser degrees of contact and

8 see chapter 5 above. see also the critique of a related diagnosis, that of romanian ‘passivity’, made by deletant, ‘fatalism’.

9 see pratt, Imperial eyes, 242 n.42. Cazimir, Alfabetul, 118, uses the suggestive term ‘objects of transition’, as romanians were cast both as static in relation to the moving travellers, and as in transit between eras and cultures.

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more or less active or passive relationships with travellers. furthermore, despite the morphological homology, there is also a semantic opposition between travelee and addressee, in that travelees are often specifically excluded from the group of recipients of the message. whether they are excluded from speaking, pratt doesn’t say. the romanian travelees i am referring to here are relatively independent commentators on travellers, who neither appear to be taken into account by the authors of travel accounts, nor necessarily address their commentary to the traveller’s cultural milieu, although they use both vernacular and metropolitan lan-guages. in conclusion, i argue that part of the importance of these roma-nian texts lies in the way in which, through responding to foreign (not necessarily western) discourses, they reorganize the relationship between traveller/travelee and addresser/addressee. sometimes this involves not just writing back at foreign travellers, but of finding ways of representing them, either by ironizing their persona or simply it as a mask to speak to domestic agendas.

Greceanu on Paget

in a number of standard accounts of romanian (or, more broadly, ‘balkan’) occidentalism, a fascination with western culture and society, often mediated through travellers, is seen as a new development appear-ing at the end of the eighteenth century or during the course of the early nineteenth.10 but romanian observations on foreign travellers can be found as early as the late seventeenth century, when quite extensive his-toriographical chronicles began to be composed and disseminated both in moldavia and in wallachia. while these sources may not be classic instances of ‘reverse gaze’ literature such as is furnished by say, arab views of Crusaders, or native american responses to european conquistadores, they merit more attention than they have received, particularly in terms of what they tell us about cultural attitudes to outsiders.

most of these early texts of encounter involve descriptions not of ‘westerners’ but of neighbouring peoples, poles, swedes, russians, tartars, germans, magyars, serbs, bulgarians, albanians, greeks or turks, brought

10 e.g. Călinescu, History, ch. 2; georgescu, Political ideas; marino, Littérature roumaine, 10–48; Jelavich, History of the Balkans, i:185–6; berindei, Românii şi Europa; michelson, ‘romanians’; heppner, ‘einleitung’, 16; Zub, ‘europa’, 275; Cipăianu, ‘opţiunea’.

‘like a member of a free nation, he wrote without shame’ 119

into view by the accidents of war and politics.11 a rare, but detailed and significant, example of a description of an english traveller through the romanian lands can be found in wallachian chronicler greceanu’s History of the Reign of Prince Constantin Brancoveanu.12 Like many early romanian chronicles, greceanu’s work is centred on the deeds of the prince, on the principle that ‘truly the virtues and deeds of man are to be praised, and held in greater honour than his wealth or possessions’ (preface, 7). these ‘deeds’ frequently involve reaction to external events, as at the turn of the eighteenth century wallachia found itself caught between the rival designs of habsburg, ottoman and russian strategy. representatives of all three of these powers, or intermediary forces like the ones mentioned above, are frequently sent into wallachia, or, conversely, summon the prince to send envoys to resolve issues of military requisitioning, territorial delimitation or appointment of officials. about halfway through this episodic ‘history’, Chapter 55 offers an elaborate description of the visit to bucharest in 1702 of Lord paget, the british ambassador to the ottoman empire, and his entourage.13 paget, ‘a great, honourable and wise man’ according to the chronicler, had acted ‘entirely in the porte’s favour’ in the recent negotia-tions at the treaty of karlowitz, and therefore merited special hospitality in his route through wallachia towards england.14 on his arrival at tutra-kan on the south bank of the danube, ‘two great boyars with princely carriages, marquees and all equipage, with a few equerries such as were worthy of performing office’ received paget ‘with all possible honours, and with great pomp brought him to the princely seat at bucharest’. the next day, brâncoveanu sent two of his sons and three great boyars to greet paget at văcăreşti, to the south of bucharest, whence he was brought with

11 berza, ‘turcs’; volovici, ‘polonii’; Ciobanu, ‘imagini ale străinului’; ioncioaia, ‘veneticul, păgînul şi apostatul’; mazilu, Noi şi ceilalţi.

12 the full title is Începătura istorii vieţii luminatului şi preacreştinului domnului Ţării Rumâneşti, Io Constantin Brîncoveanu Bassarab Voievod, dă când Dumzezeu cu domnia l’au încoronat, pentru vremile şi întîmplările ce în pămîntul acesta, în zilele Măriei-sale s-au întîmplat [outline of the history of the life of the enlightened and most Christian prince of wallachia, Constantin brincoveanu bassarab voevod, from the time of his coronation by the Lord, recounting the times and events which took place in this land in the days of his majesty]. see the latest critical edition in Cronicari munteni, 403–671.

13 greceanu, Începătura, 517–21. there are no translations into western languages, but iorga, Histoire des relations, 40–8, gives a longer précis of the episodes.

14 on paget see heywood, ‘paget’; tappe, ‘documents’ signalled a Latin ms. account of the journey from the british archives, while, in the romanian ones, Cernovodeanu, ‘Contributions’, found some accounts for the costs of entertaining paget.

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great ceremony to the prince’s lodgings. official dinners were accompa-nied by the firing of cannon and other guns, and toasts were offered

with great merriment, so that not only he [paget] but also his entourage, became drunk (although they hadn’t been forced to by anyone). and when they got up from table, his majesty the prince dressed him in a robe with sable lining, and sent him to his lodgings to rest.

aside from this early signalling of a british propensity to inebriation when on Continental travels, greceanu’s account is on the whole more concerned with detailing the ceremonies of the wallachian court than with developing a symbolic discourse around this western traveller, who features here as just one aspect of the political calendar requiring the attention of a chronicler.

some useful comparative light on paget’s visit to bucharest, and on its perception, can be obtained by considering the account composed by a member of paget’s entourage, edmund Chishull, chaplain of the english factory at smyrna.15 in his posthumously-published Travels in Turkey and back to England, Chishull made some incidental observations on his way through wallachia, which he describes as ‘luxuriantly rich, but desolate for want of culture and inhabitants’. by way of example, ‘a miserable col-lection of cottages, scarcely deserving the name of a village’ is juxtaposed to ‘a pleasant wood, enriched with lily of the valley, and other flowers’.16 on the whole, however, he gives a comparatively favourable account of the local culture and conditions: his lodgings, for instance, are reckoned

fair and gentile, built of stone and covered agreably to the custom of this place with wooden tiles; and being furnished with apartments after the Christian fashion, may be esteemed magnificent when compared with the barbarous edifices of the neighbouring turks.17

after a similar description of courtly ceremonies, and visits to the print-ing presses of bucharest—where he was able to witness the production of some of the earliest printed arabic books, being prepared by the patriarch of Jerusalem for the orthodox Christians of the middle east—Chishull described ambassador paget as taking leave of bucharest ‘with a deep sense of the generous, honourable and affectionate treatment he had received in this court.’18

15 on him see Constantine, Early Greek travellers, 34–52; and gibson, ‘Chishull’.16 Chishull, Travels, 77.17 ibid., 78.18 ibid., 80.

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in conclusion, the reciprocal images produced by early english and romanian chroniclers were relatively even-handed; colourful and criti-cal notes are included, but there is no sign of them metastasizing into grosser stereotypes. scholars have used this and other material to posit— rightly or wrongly—that in the pre-modern period, romanians stood in a complex-free relationship with europe, which they referred to as ‘our europe’.19

Carra and His Critics

before the second half of the eighteenth century, information in western languages on the romanian lands tended to be confined to these kinds of incidental observations by scholars, traders or diplomats usually on their way between larger centres such as vienna, istanbul, warsaw or st. petersburg. and in the context of a relatively reduced reading pub-lic, and limited commercial or communicational networks between the romanian lands and the west, it is unlikely either that Chishull’s book was read in bucharest, or that greceanu’s chronicle was taken note of in London.20 the possibility of comparing notes, or even of offering conflict-ing reactions to reciprocal encounters, increased during the course of the eighteenth century as the circulation of both people and books grew more rapid and frequent.

a particular stimulus for interest in the area was the renewed con-flict between russia and the ottomans which broke out in 1768, and was often cast as part of the broader question of the revival of greece.21 in the absence of any designated territory of greece during this period, the sta-tus of moldavia and wallachia as lands governed semi-autonomously by ‘phanariot’ princes appointed from istanbul, as well as their location in the path of the russian armies on their way south, rendered them the focus of ‘european’ attention.22 in this context, it is understandable that foreign

19 georgescu, The Romanians, 106–7; pippidi, ‘pouvoir et culture’, 285–94; antohi, Imag-inaire culturel, 232; michelson, ‘romanians and the west’, 12. a different, longer-term view in verdery, ‘moments’, 31; marino, ‘vechi complexe’; and deletant, ‘romanians’.

20 Chishull’s text (with a translation by Caterina piteşteanu) was presented to the romanian academy in march 1921 as ‘unknown’ by bianu, ‘un călător englez necunoscut’. however, it had previously been signalled by beza, ‘early english travellers’; and iorga, Histoire des relations, 45. when considering the phenomenon of ‘writing back’, it is worth remembering how some texts are subjected as much to oblivion as to indignation.

21  Constantine, Early Greek travellers, 168–87; augustinos, French Odysseys, 131–73.22 see georgescu, The Romanians, 73–80; and ragsdale, ‘evaluating the traditions’.

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debates over the status and quality of the region have been labelled by modern literary historians as ‘the polemic of ottoman greece’.23 however, the label ‘greece’ hides not only the localized nature of a number of these polemics, but also the fact that local actors engaged in them from a rela-tively early stage. in the following section i will examine some polemics of ottoman moldavia and wallachia, which clearly show the impassioned responses of travelees to travel writing concerning their countries.

the first monographic work on these lands appeared in french in 1777 under the title Histoire de la Moldavie et de la Valachie: avec une disserta-tion sur l’état actuel de ces deux provinces, with the author’s name only hinted at by the designation ‘m[onsieur] C.’. scholars have long since identified ‘C’ as Jean-Louis Carra (1742–1793), an erratic and somewhat tempestuous citizen of the republic of Letters, who spent the early part of his career writing political and diplomatic memoranda and attempting to find patronage; the middle part espousing the fashionable subjects of electricity and mesmerism;24 and the final part as a Jacobin instigator, which activities led to his death on the parisian scaffold in 1793.

Carra’s Histoire, a pretentious compilation of geography, history, travel and cultural analysis, takes a bold stance on questions of the political economy of knowledge:

it is not at all the business of these barbarian, ignorant peoples to get to know us first; on the contrary, it is for us, whom the favourable influence of a temperate climate and the fortunate advantage of the exact sciences have raised so far above the other peoples of the globe, in courage, in industry and in enlightenment, to discern the character, the genius, and even the physionomy of the modern peoples, placed on this earth as if subject to our observations and criticisms. it is, in the end, for us to know these very peoples, before these peoples may know themselves and, in their turn, seek to know us.25

and at the end of his book, he sees fit to draw some ‘philosophical’ con-clusions, using his findings to question Jean-Jacques rousseau’s praise for the simple life:

23 Leask, ‘byron and the eastern mediterranean’; kostova, ‘degeneration, regeneration’. both these studies cover much wider ground than their titles suggest.

24 he features as a minor character in robert darnton’s classic work of cultural his-tory (darnton, Mesmerism). there is now a comprehensive scholarly biography: Lemny, Jean-Louis Carra.

25 Carra, Histoire, xvi–xvii.

‘like a member of a free nation, he wrote without shame’ 123

after all this, if m. rousseau would fain tell us once more that the barbarous and lawless peoples are worth more than the civilized ones, i would entreat him to go and live for a year in the forests of moldavia.26

while Carra’s book was favourably received in some quarters—the Journal Encyclopédique described it as containing ‘precise and judicious observations’—it was also reckoned to include ‘certain rather frivolous remarks [plaisanteries] which the moldavian nation may well deserve, but constitute something of a digression from history’.27 in other circles, it attracted criticism, being adjudged ‘so confused and poorly digested that it would be hard to extract any element capable or arousing the curios-ity of our readers’.28 furthermore, later scholarship has shown that Carra recycled a fair amount of the historical information that he used from the previously published accounts of the indigenous historian prince dimitrie Cantemir.29

despite these scholarly exposures of Carra’s work as a superciliously negligent compilation, and some attention from the newer orientalism-derived critiques,30 what is less well known outside a small group of spe-cialists is that it was the object of a counterblast that was published as early as 1779, and to which Carra responded.

the piece in question, entitled Letter to the authors of the Bouillon Jour-nal [i.e. the Journal encyclopédique, adf] on their review of a book entitled ‘Histoire de la Moldavie, et de la Valachie . . .’ appeared as a pamphlet in vienna in 1779, and offered a searing critique of Carra’s text.31 the author— whose identity i will discuss shortly—describes himself as having ‘has-tened to acquire this history’ being persuaded that ‘as regards knowledge of those countries which we europeans visit least, and of their inhabitants, as well as of their customs, practices, laws and politics, we are ordinar-ily much deceived by travellers’ reports, be they ignorant, credulous or composed in bad faith’. however, perusal soon led him to ‘surprise’ and

26 ibid., 197.27 Journal encyclopédique, 15 july 1778; Journal de Paris, 22 sep 1778, cited after Lemny,

Jean-Louis Carra, 85–6. Lemny has the first of these sources as 15 june, but 15 July is correct.

28 Affiches, annonces et avis divers, 21 octobre 1778, cited after Lemny, Jean-Louis Carra, 86.

29 see esp. holban, ‘autour de l’Histoire’; more recently eadem, ‘Jean-Louis Carra’. Cf. kellogg, A history, 89.

30 wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 291–2; drace-francis, Making, 27.31  Lettre à Messieurs les auteurs du Journal de bouillon sur le compte qu’ils ont rendu

d’un livre intitulé histoire de la moldavie (vienna, 1779); cited after the edition in alexan-dru Ciorănescu, ‘Le serdar gheorghe saul’.

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‘deflated expectations’, when, on closer examination, he found the work to be ‘nothing but an assemblage of gross errors for which one would not even excuse a schoolboy’ (50). the critique focuses initially on matters of classical history and historical geography, particularly the false local-ization of certain places or their inaccurate correlation to classical ones; then goes on to mock Carra’s treatment of more recent political history, apparently ‘nothing but a series of anachronisms, absurdities and puer-ilities’ (57). his allegation that the princess of moldavia was unable to read or write was labelled ‘most impolite and coarse’; his speculations on the balkan policy of the courts of vienna and berlin showed him to be a ‘charlatan’; while his critique of the austrian administration of the banat of temesvar apparently proved that ‘mr. Carra has never seen the banat’ (57–58). his observations on the princely court were ‘calumnious and mis-placed platitudes’ (60).

the following month, the editors of the Journal wrote that

we were going to review this brochure, when we received the reply which m. Carra saw fit to give, of which we publish an extract. it seems to us exces-sively crude in many respects, even if he had been attacked in too harsh a fashion. (63)

Carra’s response is addressed largely in the second person to a ‘seigneur saul’, who has been identified as gheorghe saul, a moldavian courtier whose erudition Carra had himself praised in his Histoire.32 however, another contemporary author, the swiss german franz Josef sulzer, indi-cated a different source, attributing the pamphlet to a certain ‘bosniak’ designated by the initial r., who in turn has been identified as ignaz ste-fan raicevich, a dalmatian who acted first as secretary to the prince of wallachia, alexandru ipsilanti, then as austrian agent in wallachia, and himself was to publish an important book on the principalities in 1788.33

32 Ciorănescu, ‘Le serdar gheorghe saul’, attributes the Lettre to saul on the basis of Carra’s response; Lemny, Jean-Louis Carra, 87, considers this probable, without commit-ting himself fully.

33 holban, ‘autour’, 173–5; eadem, ‘Jean-Louis Carra’, 239, defends her ground against Ciorănescu’s attribution, arguing that sulzer ‘designates raicevich fairly clearly’. what sulzer actually said in his Geschichte is inconsistent. 1:12, he mentions the pamphlet derisively but is coy about giving any names; 2:92, he mentions the ‘gedungene verfasser des ehrenruhrigen briefes an die Journalisten von bouillon’; 3:142 mentions ‘herr r.’ as being the one who called Carra a ‘kalumnianter’, which is at odds with 3:76 where he speaks of two authors flinging their ‘bosnian fists’ at ‘the poor swiss’ (he might be using ‘bosnian’ as a catch-all pejorative term to refer to raicevich, a dalmatian, and/or saul, who had an albanian/ greek background). in general sulzer is very rude about him, calling him a ‘fehlge-schlagener arzt und starker Cholerikus’ (3:142, cf. 3:49, 3:53) and well disposed towards saul

‘like a member of a free nation, he wrote without shame’ 125

the author of the pamphlet defines himself as being one of ‘us europe-ans’ for whom ‘these countries’ are ‘among those we frequent the least’ (50), and as being of western dress: ‘they have as much right to mock our curled wigs, our small hats, our justaucorps, as we do to laugh at them, e.g. at their beards, turban and their long shorts’ (61). however, he also seeks to defend the prince and indeed the sublime porte’s policy as a whole, which makes it likely that he had some links with the local courts, and possible that his work was commissioned therefrom.34 we have evi-dence that the bishop of râmnic in wallachia read Carra’s book, finding that ‘it contains many errors’, and suggested to the person who sent it to him ‘that it would be good to print another book to correct those errors’.35 there was also, apparently, a second reply, a Réponse au libelle diffama-toire (warsaw, 1779), which sulzer attributed to ‘a friend of his’ but may well have been his own.36

none of this information enables us to solve definitively the mystery of this pamphlet’s authorship. what is perhaps interesting from our point of view is that, irrespective of the true identity of the participants in this polemic, it presents itself not as a case of powerful western authors lam-basting wretched and mute romanians, but as a many-sided skirmish in which provincial french, swiss german, dalmatian and possibly greco-albanian authors all jostle and position themselves as the detainers of truer information concerning the state of the principalities. the modern

(‘den beruhmten und gelehrten doktor und gros-serdar’, 3:160), ‘mein hochzuverehrende freund’ (3:542); from whose letters in french about the bishopric of milcov he quotes large extracts (3:569–70). on raicevich see guida, ‘un libro «italiano»’, although guida misses numerous contemporaries’ piquant characterizations of him: bentham (Letter to william eaton, 8 January 1786, in Correspondence, 437) called him ‘a man of industry and extensive knowledge’ but added that ‘his good qualities are tinctured by a certain hauteur which might be spared’; neapolitan envoy Ludolf (quoted by popescu, ‘La vendetta dell’abate’) described him as ‘a man of great spirit and most learned, but ruined by an excess of vanity’. griffin, Fathers and sons, 41 n.43, has him down as a mere ‘serb pig dealer’.

34 Ciorănescu, ‘Le serdar gheorghe saul’, 50, 61. in 1779 raicevich was still in the sec-retarial service of the prince ipsilanti. moreover, there are other instances of ipsilanti’s courtiers printing works in his favour on the presses of central europe: see for instance eliades, Λογος εγκωμιαστικος / Oratio panegyrica.

35 bishop Chesarie of râmnic, letter to hermannstadt merchant hagi Constantin pop, october 1778, in iorga, ‘Contribuţii’, 196; cf. Lemny, Jean-Louis Carra, 87. saul spent some time in hermannstadt at the end of the 1770s & early 1780s: iorga, Ist. lit. rom. în sec. 18. 1969 edn., 2:107, citing an austrian diplomatic letter of 1785.

36 sulzer says it is written by an ‘ungenannte’ (1:126), ‘einer von meinen freunden’ (2:93), and that it contains information concerning his own maltreatment at the wal-lachian court. Cf. baidaff, ‘note marginale’. no copy has surfaced, nor any mention in another source.

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western-language historiography of moldavia and wallachia is thus imprinted at its origins with the mark of polemic and denunciation.

Golescu on Thornton

from the 1770s to the 1820s, interest in western countries and cultures grew steadily in the principalities. however, for the kind of direct engage-ment by a native with a western travel text, we have to wait until after the outbreak of the greek revolution, which led not only to ‘europe fixing its eyes upon us’ but an increased attentiveness by locals to foreign publica-tions about them. in 1826, the wallachian boyar dinicu golescu published the first account in romania of a journey to ‘europe’, in his case hungary, austria, bavaria, switzerland and northern italy. his own book was not a history of his native land, but an account of his personal confrontation with what he insistently asserted to be the superiority of ‘european’ insti-tutions. he encouraged his compatriots to take seriously the critiques of foreign travellers:

we have come to be ridiculed in the world’s opinion, and foreign pens have painted us accordingly. but what good will it do us if we want to keep such things hidden amongst ourselves, and we make believe that they are not known, when all nations read them, as they are written by people who wish us ill? it is better for us to know them, to acknowledge them, and make a determined decision to rectify ourselves . . .37

in the same year, 1826, there appeared a romanian translation of thomas thornton’s well-known book on the ottoman empire, The Present State of Turkey.38 on account of golescu’s clearly expressed views on the need to pay attention to foreign writers’ assessments, early scholars naturally attributed the authorship of the translation to him.39 while this opinion is no longer upheld by modern literary historians, it remains likely that somebody from golescu’s circle carried out the work, possibly at his insti-gation or under his patronage.40 the anonymous author of the preface emphasised the shame of the wallachians that their country appeared

37 golescu, Însemnare, 29.38 thornton, Present state. this was not the first western text about the principalities

to be translated locally. earlier, in 1789, general bawr’s Mémoires historiques on wallachia had been translated into greek (then the language of the elite in the principalities) and printed in bucharest as Περιγραφη της Βλαχιας (1789).

39 haneş, Un călător englez despre Români.40 see anghelescu, ‘dinicu golescu’, l–lii.

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in the eyes of european travellers to be so badly governed; but justified the publication of his work by arguing that the european evaluation was correct:

some would reproach me and, i think rather would defame and curse me, saying: that i thought it was clever to bring to light and publish slanders against an entire nation. if i were to hear people saying this, or were they to ask me, i would reply that they have no reason to get upset or angry at me; for everybody reading it should realise that, that englishman being a for-eigner, and having no personal quarrel with any of the locals, wrote nothing false about the deeds and customs practised in wallachia and moldavia; nor did he pass over or ignore the excellent natural resources or the wretched-ness of the poor inhabitants of those principalities; but he wrote about the good things with sweetness and a humble heart; and like a member of a free nation, he wrote without shame and listed with his pen for ridicule those things worthy of defamation and jeering. when i read and saw these things, the quickness of shame overtook me, disgust at the wretchedness of my nation penetrated me, their shameful deeds, their slanderous things, idi-ocies, wretched habits, idlenesses, lazinesses, false expectations, sleepiness, deceit, blunder, theft, rape, punishment, torture and failure to attend to the beneficial, enlightening teachings and crafts. seeing all these things told and written and printed in all the languages of europe; and most of the libraries and most of the houses of the europeans full of such books, and the people laughing while reading them and poking fun at us, just like we romanians do for gypsies [. . .] tell me, dear reader, without feigning and with a clean heart, whether i am guilty because i translated this rather short description into the language of the fatherland?41

in other words, at this important time of reform and institutional trans-formations, local authors were no longer attempting to rebut foregin travellers’ denigratory depictions of barbarism but to concur with their evaluations, indeed using them as a tool with which to promote the cause of modernization.

Moldavian Writers Develop and Consecrate the Theme, 1837–1858

in the first half of the nineteenth century, romanian secular literature and national history developed to an unprecedented extent. in some aspects this involved emancipation from the tyranny of being known and written about from afar. some historiographers analysed or rejected the informa-tion and opinions offered by foreign (not necessarily western) writers.

41 anon, translator’s preface to thornton, Starea de acum, repr. in BRV, 3: 519–20.

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the transylvanian romanian scholar petru maior, for instance, railed angrily at foreign historians, accusing them of

pouring the vomit of their pens on the romanian people [. . .] seizing any opportunity to make things up without the slightest evidence, even telling barefaced lies about the romanians, even imagining that everybody ought to believe their delirious fantasies. furthermore, for some time now, like donkeys scratching themselves against other donkeys, they pick up slanders from one another, without bothering to search for the truth, putting them into print one more time.42

in transylvania, this discourse was bound up with rivalry between the dif-ferent nations of that province or of the habsburg monarchy more broadly: romanian scholars identified ‘enemies of the people’ among neighbour-ing nations, rather than among westerners in particular.43 one argued that it was because ‘our neighbours [vecini] blackened us first’ that ‘people of other lands [străini], who knew us only from what our neighbours had to say’, then ‘filled the world with books in which we were painted in such humiliating and disgraceful colours that they came to believe their own inventions.’44

in moldavia and wallachia, more explicit blame was placed on for-eigners, and not just any foreigners: travellers and historians in particular were singled out for critique. in 1837 for instance, the young moldavian nobleman mihail kogălniceanu, who studied in berlin and was the first romanian to publish a synthetic history of his homeland—significantly in french, in other words addressed at a foreign audience—wrote home to his father about his motives. ‘i do not write to speak ill, but well, against the lies that foreign travellers write about moldavia’.45 this tradition, in which romanian scholars continued the efforts to maintain the national dignity allegedly tarnished by the superficial observations of foreigners, was to endure in the modern period. it can often be found alive and well in the twenty-first century, as romanian academics continue to question the image of their country presented in foreign publications.46

42 maior, preface to Istoriia (1812), cited in Zub, ‘political attitudes’, 18, and mitu, National identity, 15 (i have emended the translation in conformity with the original).

43 see the comments of Şincai and budai-deleanu, cited mitu, National identity, 21.44 Cipariu, ‘notiţa literară’ [unpublished, c. 1846], cited ibid., 23.45 kogălniceanu, Letter to his father, in idem, Scrisori, ed. haneş, 126. 46 see e.g. mihăilescu, ‘orientalism după orientalism’. mihăilescu finds ‘a dose of well-

orchestrated hypocrisy’ in the way in which romania is presented in an english tourist brochure as an ‘exotic’ ‘land of contrasts’.

‘like a member of a free nation, he wrote without shame’ 129

kogălniceanu was part of a group of of younger writers, known collec-tively as the bonjurişti, on account of their french education and modern sociability (bonjour!). in the 1830s and 1840s, the bonjurişti began publish-ing travel sketches, autobiographical fragments, pastiches and novellas in a series of reviews published in iaşi, the province’s capital before moldavia was absorbed into the new state of romania after 1859. they developed a perhaps more complex approach to negotiating self-identity in the face of foreign frames, scripts and stereotypes. for instance, in an unpublished sketch from 1839, essayist and memoirist alecu russo described how reading foreign travel descriptions of his homeland actually relieved the melancholy that reflecting on his fatherland’s sad situation had induced in him:

if by chance there appeared at iaşi a brochure printed in paris or even in Czernowitz, entitled Tour en Moldavie, Voyage en Moldavie, Esquisse or any other similar title, in which the author would use grand and high-flown phrases to say more or less the following: ‘in a country ignored by europe, or at least scarcely known, i have found a people both good and naïve, poetic in their unaltered traditions and also in their savage ignorance [. . .].’ then, as though awoken from a dream, we would find even our own land bearable.47

for russo, being described as ‘good’, ‘naive’ and ‘poetic’ was somehow better than not being described at all. specifically, he used this trope to try and persuade local writers to avoid producing artificial adaptations of ‘your scenes from italy, your parisian soirées, your german fantasies’ or imitation comedies and novellas, and concentrate on the ‘suave mel-ancholy’ and the ‘primitive je ne sais quoi’ of the moldavian landscape. at the same time, there is more than a hint of irony in his portrayal of the foreign travel text, as western travellers’ recourse to ‘grand and high flown’ phraseology, and implicitly presumptious titles, is gently mocked, as is their claim to have personally achieved some unique ethnographic discovery (‘i have found’) of domestic realities that, for the inhabitants themselves, bore no hint of the exotic or unfamiliar.48

47 russo, ‘La pierre du tilleul’, in idem, Scrieri, 208. see my translation of (and brace-well’s introduction to) an extract from this work in bracewell, ed. Orientations, 130–1. see also russo’s ‘Jassy et ses habitants en 1840’, in idem, Scrieri, 237–8, for an ironic aside about the ‘fleeting and inaccurate accounts’ of foreign travellers, among whom he mentions de tott, sestini, wilkinson and wolf.

48 eliade, Histoire, 2:vii–xiii, shows how the western idea of La Roumanie inconnue became increasingly absurd as the number of published texts increased.

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a few years later, in 1848, bonjurist writer vasile alecsandri, notable author of poems, plays, essays, memoir pieces and travel accounts, pub-lished a sketch entitled ‘balta albă’ [the white Lake] in a Calendar issued by the local official newspaper.49 the sketch uses the classic figure of the foreign visitor to a domestic setting, in the form of a frenchman travelling in wallachia, in order to satirize local mores. because of the provinces’ dis-cursive position on the borderline between barbarism and civilization, the satire actually draws on two, usually separate french fictional traditions. the first is that of the fictional oriental traveller to a ‘civilized’ country, who is nevertheless able to discern certain shortcomings.50 the second is that of the westerner who travels to an exotic location to paint an idyllic, innocent scene.51 in alecsandri’s text, these two traditions are effectively merged, as the hero, a french traveller in search of the picturesque, finds both the exotic scenes he had set off to look for, and the shortcomings to which alecsandri’s domestic audience would have been all too alert.

the sketch opens with the narrator identifying himself as one of a group of friends ‘assembled, and all stretched out on divans, after the oriental custom, and armed with long chibouks [pipes], whose output of smoke produced an effect worthy of a pasha’s selamlık’. among the group is a young french painter, who, having embarked on an oriental journey, found himself diverted to wallachia, of whose existence he had no idea. ‘but’, he says,

i shouldn’t complain at all, since, like a new Columbus, i had the pleasure of discovering for myself these beautiful parts of the world and assuring myself that, far from being inhabited by cannibals, they contain a most agreeable society.

– an opinion which causes one of the group to express reservations.52 the rest of the sketch consists of the painter’s narration of his journey and arrival in wallachia. his attention had initially been drawn during his passage along the danube, by ‘the wild beauty of the banks of this river

49 alecsandri, ‘balta albă’, in Proza, 172–87.50 on the history of this literary figure, see dalnekoff, ‘a familiar stranger’; hout, View-

ing Europe from the outside; and anderson, ‘persian letters’. i thank kate marsh for drawing the first of these references to my attention.

51  this tradition is popularly represented by bernardin de saint-pierre’s La chaumière indienne (1791) which was translated into many european languages—in moldavia a ver-sion appeared in 1821.

52 alecsandri, ‘balta albă’, in idem, Proză, 172. Cf. goldsworthy’s use of the Columbus trope to describe byron’s discovery of the balkans at the outset of the nineteenth century (goldsworthy, Inventing, 3).

‘like a member of a free nation, he wrote without shame’ 131

betwen the banat and serbia’.53 this constituted the boundary between the habsburg and ottoman empires, and alecsandri’s fictional traveller’s description of it is contemporary with the classic one of a.w. kinglake in Eothen, who was likewise thrilled to have arrived at ‘the end of this wheel-going europe’ and to see ‘the splendour and havoc of the east’.54

in faux-naive fashion, alecsandri’s (unnamed) fictional french artist finds himself ‘overcome by a boundless urge to knowledge, and decided to make a detailed study of this country unknown to me, and of that—to me—completely new race of men’.55 most of the piece then centres on the comedy of such an enterprise. descending at brăila on the left bank of the lower danube, he is greeted by the french consul, who directs him towards ‘a miracle-working lake’ of recent discovery, where thousands gather in search of cures for their illnesses. hiring a carriage, our painter is astonished to find it drawn by ‘four small horses, all skin and bones, deeply marked by the whip’, wielded by ‘a wild, bearded, ragged man armed with a six-foot long flail!’. after an alarmingly noisy and bumpy journey, inter-rupted by losses of both wheel and horse, he finally abandoned the car-riage to make the final part of the journey on foot, through a pack of hungry dogs. the whole experience causes him to ‘completely lose my train of thought’ on account of the ‘diverse and contradictory sensations i underwent in the space of a few hours’.56 arriving finally at the lake, he was astonished at the european characters, equipages and toilettes.

i couldn’t believe i was not dreaming, and reckoned myself in the presence of some unfathomable phantasmagoria: one that was all the more curious for displaying so many kinds of contrasts: viennese balloons, with vehicles totally unknown to us; french hats and oriental işliks; morning coats and anteris; parisian toilettes with bizarre foreign costumes.57

despite further hazards and alarms, the sketch ends with the description of ‘a delightful ball’, which is presented as evidence of ‘a completely euro-pean society’, ‘civilized manners’ and ‘agreeable dress’. in conclusion, the

53 ibid., 173.54 alecsandri is unlikely to have read kinglake—his pastiche is modelled rather on

french authors such as Lamartine, or saint-marc girardin. on the importance of french travel literature on the orient for the development of the romanian tradition, see faifer, Semnele, 75–90.

55 alecsandri, ‘balta albă’, Proză, 173.56 ibid., 181.57 ibid., 185–86. this signalling of conflicting ‘european’ and ‘oriental’ fashions was a

classic trope of foreign descriptions of the principalities, see djuvara, Le pays roumain; also wolff, Inventing, 22.

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frenchman declares wallachia to be ‘a land of wonders’ and leaves his assembled audience of boyars to judge the question of whether they are ‘a part of the civilized world, or a barbarous province.’58 perhaps more important than the boyars’ answer to this question is the narrative frame of the sketch: for once—if only in a fictional world—the foreign traveller is made to address his question directly to the travelees, the members of the described society, instead of talking about them to his compatriots.

a third and (for the purposes of this article) final example of molda-vian reaction to, and subversion of, foreign travellers’ discourses on their domestic culture can be found in the work of moldavian essayist and travel writer dimitrie rallet, who deployed a similar tone when writing about his own oriental journey in 1858. his book Recollections and impres-sions of travel is mainly dedicated to his experiences of bulgaria, istanbul and european turkey, which he traversed on a diplomatic mission in con-nection with moldavia’s political union with wallachia after the Crimean war. but he insisted to his readers that ‘before i leave iaşi, you should know something about it’. and his remarks on the city are situated explic-itly against the deficiencies of foreign accounts:

travellers who never visited it make it a city ravaged by fires, with streets paved with planks, with oriental customs which, in malte-brun’s geography of 1839, we find them cited from wolf, who wrote in 1798, so if you were to take him as your guide, you would expect to find turbans and mehterhané [oriental percussion music], tambourines and slippers, or even mosques; despite this, nothing of the kind exists.59

in his turn, rallet responds with a list of what he considers important cultural knowledge about his home city, assuring readers that:

– the remains of the blazes and the Janissaries can no longer be seen.– that fires are rare and the firemen excellent;– that the main street is paved with stone and the people walking down

it have no recollection of it having been paved with planks of wood;– that the music is completely european, and while it might make you

dizzy, it won’t deafen you;– that the courts, despite retaining the name divan, nevertheless—just

like those in other civilized countries—offer few facilities and many formalities for their clients;

58 ibid., 187.59 dimitrie rallet, Suvenire, 4.

‘like a member of a free nation, he wrote without shame’ 133

– that light hats have replaced the heavy round işlik;– that [female] heads have been divested of the burden of those oriental

veils which, while stifling the path of thought, furnished nonetheless an air of stability and gravity;

– that the small parisian boots look wonderful in place of the oriental slippers which forced one to walk with a balanced gait for fear they might fall off;

– that french is spoken naturally, and with a rapidity that can only be compared en sens inverse with the sluggishness with which the qua-drille is danced;

– that, just as in paris, visiting cards are used, often as a way of avoiding finding us at home;

– that, as elsewhere, i might invite you to dinner, not so that you may eat, but for you to forget your hunger by waiting;

– that servants are no longer summoned by clapping one’s hands, rather, a bell is rung;

– that without opera glasses, you can’t see anyone;– that nobody can live without frequenting distant spa resorts and amass-

ing unpaid debts, or without a great number of accessories—expensive but fashionable, unnecessary, but brought from afar;

– in short, that we are civilized!60

it is notable that rallet, while adopting the traditional strategy of a ‘domestic’ writer indignant at the dated and erroneous impressions of foreign authorities, uses this counterblast mode to foreground what he—an insider—sees as the deficiencies of the elite of his own society: modishness, extravagance, social snobbery. effectively, he takes the for-eign traveller’s presumed unique right to emit judgements, and reorga-nizes both the framework of traveller-travellee/author-addressee, and the subject matter of the topography, the things to be considered noteworthy. the foreign traveller’s authority is thus somehow both domesticated and ironised, at the same time as it offers a licence to criticize. according to a much later article by alecsandri on rallet, this work—which appeared in paris in romanian—was also translated into french, so apparently its author sought to address it at least in part to a metropolitan audience, although no trace of the translation survives, and even to nineteenth- century romanians it was ‘very little known’.61

60 ibid., 4–5. 61 alecsandri, ‘dimitrie ralet’ [1882], in Proză, 464.

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Conclusions

in the space of a century and a half, the perception of the western traveller in the romanian countries grew from a state of relatively indifferent curi-osity, to one of fierce indignation, and was then transmuted through the use of irony and fiction into a bearable—not least because sometimes comical—figure, who can constitute the object of satire as well as the source of reproach. a discourse of ethical outrage or remorse at ‘foreign pens’ gave way to an approach using the classic tropes of fiction: irony, dialogue, free indirect speech, embedded narratives, and so on.62 this led partly to its ossification, into the kind of ‘classic locution’ referred to by patapievici in the essay quoted at the beginning of this chapter. further investigations could trace the later history of this image in romanian culture, through both fictional allegories and polemical essays, to under-stand how foreigners were adduced, adopted, adapted or rejected as gen-erators of ethical authority at europe’s edge. different cases will provide disparate evidence of both agency and dependency in individual authors’ moral self-postitionings vis-à-vis the imagined west[erner]. ultimately, however, it is not a discourse of (conscious or diagnosed) psychological fragmentation, and in many cases, the foreigners are rendered as baffled or distraught by their inability to interpret ‘moldo-wallachian’ realities as the natives. romanian travelees, then, ceased portraying themselves as helpless victims of a hegemonic discourse foisted on them from outside, but as re-addressers of that discourse to different audiences, for different purposes, while maintaining some commonalities of subject matter.

62 for closer identification of specific procedures: mancaş, ‘structura naraţiei’, 212–3; ionescu-ruxăndoiu, Naraţiune şi dialog.

Chapter five

DiniCu GolesCu’s Account of My trAvels (1826): eurotopia as Manifesto*

if you get off the train at Bucharest’s Gara de nord and walk out of the front entrance, you will see (across the busy traffic) a park, flanked on the right-hand side by Dinicu Golescu Boulevard. some distance down this road there is a statue of Dinicu Golescu. Dinicu owned most of the land on which the park, the statue and the boulevard are situated. in 1826, he did something none of his fellow-countrymen had ever done before: he published an account of his travels.

the structure of the book appears simple. after insisting in his preface on the popularity and utility of travel accounts in europe and bemoan-ing their absence in his home country, Golescu describes his journey and places visited in transylvania, hungary, austria, northern italy, Bavaria and switzerland. he usually writes about the things he sees in extremely positive tones. however, he also regularly breaks off at the end of a descriptive passage in order to criticize the absence or deficiency of such institutions at home. the text ends with a plea for a general reform of domestic institutions in a ‘european’ direction.

Golescu’s book is very well known in romania today. although they sometimes questioned its literary value, all major twentieth-century romanian critics stressed its significance:

– ‘the whole of the nineteenth century is in this book’.1– ‘the book had four editions in less than a century’.2– ‘the transfiguration of this boyar symbolizes our whole revival’.3– ‘the most powerful testimony to the crisis of consciousness presented

by romanian culture in its modern times’.4

* in Journeys 6 (2005), 24–53 and, revised, in Balkan Departures, ed. W. Bracewell & a. Drace-francis (oxford—new York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 47–74. reprinted by permis-sion of the publishers.

1  eliade, Histoire, 1:214.2 haneş, Histoire, 73.3 G. Călinescu, History, 91.4 popovici, la culture roumaine, 83.

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– ‘Dinicu Golescu’s itinerary symbolized our journey through the euro-pean world to re-establish the true foundations of our modern social life’.5

– ‘the most powerful expression of the critical spirit applied to romanian society in the 1820s’.6

– ‘Dinicu Golescu’s travel journal had a great influence on the romanian intelligentsia’.7

– ‘Dinicu Golescu underwent a significant crisis of consciousness on encountering the civilization of the West, being forced to acknowledge that we were ‘behind all the other nations’ and that ‘the world’s ridi-cule’ weighed heavily on our people’.8

– ‘the oscillating interpretation of Dinicu Golescu between east and West remains significant at a moment in our history at which the confronta-tion between two worlds finds its most apt symbol in Account of My travels’.9

Modern romanian travellers have cited Golescu as an antecedent;10 cul-tural commentators refer to his experiences as possible models for inter-preting ‘ours’, without the need for further explanation.11 a clear cultural meaning is attached to his personality: he was the man who realised that european culture was better, and he managed to convey this message of change, despite his relative age and the considerable difficulties he had in expressing himself.

romanians have presented Golescu’s book and ideas in french, German, and italian; the whole text has appeared in German and hungar-ian translations. to the english-speaking world he is hardly known at all, and material is much harder to come by: a subchapter of an older literary history;12 a one-page extract in a collection of texts on social conditions in the nineteenth-century Balkans;13 a slightly more extensive extract in a sourcebook on collective identity in central and southeastern europe.14

 5 Bucur, ‘prefaţa’, 11. 6 Cornea, originile, 220.  7 antohi, ‘un modèle’, 90. 8 Zub, cunoaştere de sine, 77. 9 Manolescu, Istoria, 157.10 e.g., pas, carte; Constantin, vacanţa; Marino, carnete; Blandiana, cea mai frumoasă.11  e.g., pleşu, chipuri şi măşti, 227.12 G. Călinescu, History, 91–4.13 Warriner, ed. contrasts, 144–5.14 D. Golescu, ‘account’.

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finally, Mircea anghelescu, the leading scholar of Golescu’s work, has published a short but very useful article in english,15 which summarizes the main conclusions which he presented at greater length in romanian in the introduction and notes to his critical edition of Golescu’s writings.16 My understanding of Golescu’s travel, writings, experience and ethics owes much to anghelescu’s scholarship. here, as well as offering one or two small factual additions, i try to shed further light on the more par-ticular framework of how Golescu used both publishing strategies and rhetoric about europe to further certain political interests in 1820s Wal-lachia. to do this, i begin with a short account of Golescu’s life in the general context of the social and intellectual transformations taking place in Wallachia at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. i then focus in detail on the period 1821–1826; tracing Golescu’s geographical, political and editorial steps will, i hope, enable me to convey what it meant for a Wallachian boyar to travel West at this precise time, to write about his experiences and also to try to influence contemporary opinion through publication.17 finally, i interpret the content of the book: primarily against the political background, but also in the light of certain aspects of the book’s rhetorical structure, which i seek to situate in the nineteenth-century romanian literary tradition. i want, then, not only to find out where Golescu went, and what he wrote; i also want to consider how he wrote; why he published his account; why he did so when he did; and what effect his book had on contemporaries. it’s a story as much about the uses of travel writing as about the discovery of europe.

Account of a traveller

Dinicu Golescu (‘Dinicu’ is an informal diminutive of Constantin) was born in 1777 into one of the most distinguished boyar families of Wal-lachia, which was then a tributary province on the ottoman empire’s northern frontier: it was ruled by princes appointed from the Greek or Greek-speaking orthodox elite of istanbul, but the nobility remained largely romanian. the family had been active in Wallachian politics for over a hundred years: Dinicu’s great-grandfather radu had in the early

15 anghelescu, ‘utopia as a journey’.16 idem, ‘Dinicu Golescu’.17 Critics have given little attention to these questions, some—e.g. Bucur, ‘la découverte’,

47—even affirming erroneously that Golescu’s text was published posthumously.

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eighteenth century attempted to bring the province under austrian rule, and pleaded with the emperor that should this plan fail, the porte might at least be persuaded to let Wallachia be ruled by ‘a true Wallachian’ and not a Greek.18 But by the end of the century, a relatively harmonious sym-biotic relationship had grown up between romanian and Greek elites, and Dinicu and his older brother George (‘iordache’) received a good education in Greek at the school in Bucharest. iordache in particular had links with liberal and enlightened Greek patriots in the principalities, and is mentioned in a document of 1797 as being party to a revolutionary plot alongside the famous Greek patriot rigas fereos.19 for his part, Dinicu married a Greek woman, Zoe farfara (1792–1879) renowned for her spirit and beauty, and testified in his Account that he felt more comfortable writing in that language.

the public culture of Wallachia was thus dominated by a small Greek-speaking elite who dabbled in secular literature and whose works circu-lated mainly in manuscript; the few that appeared in book form did so largely on the presses of the Greek merchant communities in vienna and venice. iordache Golescu, for instance, published an atlas at vienna in 1800.20 however, the princes did not neglect romanian and it was under their rule that romanian replaced slavonic as the language of liturgy and prayer in the country’s (overwhelmingly orthodox) churches; romanian also remained the language of administration, and, while absorbing a large number of Greek and turkish loan words, developed considerably as an instrument of bureaucratic communication in the period.

numerous contemporary Western observers referred to the changing culture of Wallachia in terms of its europeanness. the philosopher Jeremy Bentham passed through Bucharest in 1786 on his way to visit his brother in russia and noticed a couple of ‘europeanized’ boyars, although he considered the majority of the inhabitants to be ‘vegetables’;21 four years later a french count who had fled the revolution described the nobility ‘mixing european grace with that asiatic negligence which has something noble and tender about it’.22 a scotsman, William Macmichael, found ‘the combination of oriental and european manners and costume’ to be ‘irre-sistibly ludicrous. the boyar looks like a grave Mahometan; but speak to

18 abramos, Golescu and Ştirbei, ‘Memorandum’, 208.19 elian, Bizanţul, 296–7.20 Brv 2: 420–1.21  Bentham, correspondence, 3:438.22 salaberry, voyage, 115–6.

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him, and instead of the pompous and magnificent sounds of the turkish idiom, he will address you in tolerable french, and talk of novels, faro, and whist’.23 Many other British and european travellers echoed their com-ments.24 such characterizations were not especially specific to Bucharest: similar comparative terms had been used by the Comte de ségur and the prince de ligne about eighteenth-century russia.25

occasional echoes of this language can be found in Greek and roma-nian documents from the late eighteenth century onwards.26 reservations were also formulated, such as those of the monk Gregory of râmnic writ-ing in 1798:

[t]he rumanian land [. . .] is located in a select part of europe, has a healthy and fine air, and neighbours upon peoples who pride themselves on and rejoice in the philosophical sciences, all these being easy means to bring up the sons of this our own fatherland to the high standards of the other euro-peans in many sciences. But even so, the romanian inhabitants of this God-protected land did not often spend time in those [countries]. they, since receiving the light of orthodoxy, have busied themselves rather with the establishment of the faith in their own land [. . .] they have so little depen-dence upon, or need for, superficial intelligence, in order to attain the quali-ties attributed by geographers to europe; but are always supported by the undefeated arm of holy care.27

But at least a dozen writers in the decade before Golescu’s travels were published made reference to the intellectual, social and economic ben-efits of ‘enlightened europe’.28

one significant aspect of the romanian idea of europe, missing from the otherwise excellent accounts given by the romanian scholars i have just cited, is the place of russia. But it is quite clear that in this period, ‘europe’ meant as much russia (which in 1826 established a protectorate lasting until the Crimean War) as contact with Britain or france. suppos-edly the very first favourable evocation of ‘european’ civilization in mod-ern romanian culture, in Metropolitan of Moldavia Gavriil Callimachi’s 1773 preface to his translation of empress Catherine the Great’s nakaz [Instruction], only referred to the academies of europe to note their

23 Macmichael, Journey, 83; cf. also Jianu, ‘Women’, 212.24 Djuvara, le pays roumain.25 Wolff, Inventing, 22.26 examples in Camariano-Cioran, les Académies, 80–1, 222, 330, 578.27 preface to triod, in Brv 3: 406–7.28 Duţu, ‘national and european consciousness’; idem, ‘europe’s image’; Georgescu,

Political ideas, 40–3; Marino, littérature roumaine, 10–48.

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fig. 3. a Wallachian boyar, c. 1830. Watercolour by russian artist “r.G.a.i.”, romanian academy library.

dinicu golescu’s account of my travels (1826) 141

astonishment at the achievements of the russian army.29 twenty years later, the boyar historian ienăchiţă văcărescu described the next russian occupation of Wallachia as bringing europe to that province (along with the slightly disappointing news, given that he held princely ambitions, that ‘in europe they don’t make absolute princes’).30 eufrosin poteca, a monk who took some students to france and italy under the patronage of the Metropolitan of Wallachia in 1820 affirmed that: ‘peter the Great was the glory of europe, to be praised for his goodness’ whereas ‘napoleon, the scourge of europe, is to be praised for his wickedness’.31 in 1825 the poet Barbu Mumuleanu, in a fairly clear reference to russia, argued that romanians should imitate ‘not just western europeans, but also easterners’.32 and when a russian army again invaded the principalities in 1828, their Minister plenipotentiary General pavel Kiselev presented the result as bringing these provinces into ‘the great european family’.33 as we shall see, Golescu was very much party to this russian connection.

revolt

in March 1821 a rather disorganized group of insurgents under the leader-ship of alexander Ypsilantis, son and grandson of phanariot princes of Wallachia, invaded the principalities from russia, claiming that power’s support and asserting that ‘long ago the people of europe invited us to imitation’.34 the ostensible aim was the establishment of an autonomous Christian state from some or other of the european possessions of the ottoman empire. although in the medium term this movement was suc-cessful, leading to the establishment of an independent Greece by 1830, the short-term effects in Wallachia were fairly disastrous. Claims to have the support of russia were disavowed by tsar alexander i; romanian insur-gents in oltenia (western, or ‘little’ Wallachia) who had initially engaged to collaborate with the Greeks turned against the movement and, under the leadership of tudor vladimirescu, resisted Ypsilantis ‘in the name

29 Brv 2: 202. Georgescu, Political ideas, 40, called Callimachi the first romanian to admire europe as ‘the source of culture and light’. hitchins, the romanians, 140, attributes Georgescu’s words to Callimachi and backdates them to 1733. Both occlude the russian context.

30 văcărescu, opere, 261.31  Bianu, ‘Întâii bursieri’ 423.32 Mumuleanu, preface to caracteruri [Characters], in Brv 3: 466.33 hurmuzaki, Documente, supl. 1, iv: 359.34 proclamation, translated in Clogg, ed. Movement, 201.

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of the people’. tudor was killed and Ypsilantis fled to austria; an otto-man army eventually occupied both Moldavia and Wallachia. Golescu was heavily involved in these events, apparently acting as an intermedi-ary between the Greek and romanian elites and the insurgent peasantry (tudor had occupied his house in Bucharest). his band of Gypsy musi-cians, playing at the head of the Greek army, were among the few sur-vivors of the ottoman onslaught at the battle of Drăgăşani which put an end to the sorry revolt.35

Golescu fled to Kronstadt in habsburg transylvania (today’s Braşov, romania). this was the traditional place of refuge of the Wallachian elite in times of instability. here a series of political groupings formed: some under the influence of the russian consul, an excitable Greek named pinis; some inclined to seek support from austria; a few remaining inde-pendent.36 in april 1822, a group was summoned to silistra on the Danube to negotiate with the ottoman authorities; from there they proceeded to istanbul, where one of their number, Grigore Ghica, was appointed prince. this provoked outbursts of criticism from the Kronstadt group, including Dinicu and especially his brother iordache, who wrote a series of excoriat-ing satires on Ghica and his associates.37 Dinicu’s signature is to be found on a memorandum addressed to the tsar from august 1822 and on a let-ter addressed to Ghica in november of the same year, politely refusing a request to come home, pleading lack of funds.38 But he clearly remained of the ‘russian’ party, and indeed travelled to that country from Kronstadt in february 1823, according to a note by the prussian consul.39

the french consul noted in May 1825 that a boyar called Golescu went down on his knees to beg with the prince to be allowed to send his two sons to the institut lemoine in paris, and was given a passport only as far as the austrian border.40 this could be Dinicu, but could equally well refer to iordache, whose presence in Bucharest is attested in this period and whose sons did indeed receive a parisian education. Meanwhile, Dinicu says in his book that he travelled from Braşov, not Bucharest; he and the

35 Documente privind istoria româniei. răscoala din 1821, 5:318, 436.36 see the letter in Greek, august 1821 Documente, 1821 2: 327–31, with romanian transla-

tion. as it is signed ‘K.G.’, Golescu himself may well be its author.37 i. Golescu, scrieri; cf. hurmuzaki, Documente, 16: 1051–92; revoluţia 1: 466–70; and

iakovenko, Moldaviia i valakhiia, letter 27.38 vîrtosu, 1821, 141, 167–72; Documente privind istoria româniei. răscoala din 1821,

3: 130–3, and 5: 347; iakovenko, Moldaviia i valakhiia, letter 31.39 hurmuzaki, Documente, 10: 211.40 ibid., 17: 17–18.

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other exiled boyars were awaiting the accreditation of the russian consul Minciaky by the porte before returning, which had still not happened by June 1825.41 his will, from november 1825, does not give a place of com-position.42 around this time, alongside a group of known russophiles, he signed a letter of condolence to tsar nicholas i on the death of the latter’s brother and predecessor, alexander i.43 in early 1826, he announced the establishment of a school on his estate at Goleşti, and invited prospective pupils to present themselves by May. he appears to have been in pest in May, and in Braşov in august 1826.44 in June, according to a report by the russian emissary liprandi, he was involved in a plot to rouse the frontier soldiers of oltenia against Ghica.45

Dinicu’s book itself offers only sparse details about the precise timing of his travels.46 as the title states, he was on the road in 1824, 1825, and 1826. the narrative is divided into sections: the first and longest treats places in transylvania, hungary, austria and habsburg italy (17). a second, much shorter section notes three separate routes to pest, and mentions trips to Mehadia in the Banat of temesvar, and to the székely region of eastern transylvania. however, he refers to being in pressburg (today’s Bratislava, slovakia) in september 1825, and in Mehadia in 1824, which means he is not recounting his travels in the order in which he undertook them (85). the third section describes how ‘in the year 1826 i travelled again from Braşov to Bavaria and switzerland’ (103). in this last section, he mentions being on the way back home from vienna on 20th november. anghelescu suggests that Golescu undertook this last journey after having submitted his account of the first two to the censor, whose stamp of approval is dated september 1826.47 as the account of the third journey is relatively short, this is not impossible.

nor has the question of why he went West been fully answered. the standard literary histories write that he went in 1824 to place his sons in educational establishments in Geneva and Munich, but Golescu himself

41   ibid., 10: 272–3; i. Golescu, scrieri, 56; Acte şi fragmente 2: 706–13.42 D. Golescu, scrieri, 349–51.43 hurmuzaki, Documente, 10: 599.44 anghelescu, ‘Dinicu Golescu’, xxx.45 Documente privind istoria româniei. răscoala din 1821, 3: 354, and 5: 358–9; cf.

iakovenko, Moldaviia i valakhiia, letter 51; hurmuzaki, Documente, 10: 361–4; vîrtosu, 1821, 222–30; Georgescu, Din corespondenţa, 210–18.

46 references to Golescu’s Account are given in-text and are to anghelescu’s modern critical edition: D. Golescu, scrieri.

47 angelescu, ‘Dinicu Golescu’, xxx.

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ascribed only his 1826 journey to this motive.48 others are ‘certain’ that his trip to italy had a conspiratorial purpose involving links to italian secret societies.49 this possibility is not to be excluded, but cannot be documented either. in Geneva and Munich, Greek emigrés and students, and local philhellenes prepared to support young Wallachians, have been identified.50 in italy, similar groups existed in pisa, where some roma-nians were also studying,51 but Golescu did not visit this city.

this was a time of exceptional political tension in the principalities and indeed throughout the near east. in March 1826 russia presented the porte with an ultimatum to withdraw their troops from the principalities, or face war; a position which was accepted only in May. in november the treaty of akkerman confirmed russia’s mandate to act as protector of the rights of the Christian inhabitants of the principalities, and required that the prince be elected with the consent of the boyars rather than at the whim of the porte. as this was not the case for Ghica, he was reluctant to make the provisions of the treaty known.52 it was Golescu who had the treaty published, together with extracts from previous treaties upholding Wallachian rights, a fact which was remarked upon in Bucharest and else-where, as we know from a minor boyar’s diary which has been preserved.53 the russian ambassador-in-waiting to the porte finally left to take up his post in Constantinople at the end of 1826: passing through Bucharest, he was showered with complaints and protests from the boyars, which he nevertheless chose not to take further.54

reconstructing Golescu’s activity in the last three years of his life is no easier than for earlier periods. in 1827 he apparently set up a literary society, which met in his house in Bucharest, and sponsored a romanian- language newspaper which appeared for a few numbers in leipzig.55 also in 1827, Golescu published another work at Buda, his translation of the elements of Moral Philosophy of the Greek scholar neophytos vamvas, later professor of philosophy at the university of athens. in May the following year the principalities were occupied by the russian army, and a mili-tary quarantine set up: a couple of letters have survived from Golescu to

48 G. Călinescu, History, 91.49 stan, ‘Gîndirea şi activitatea’; lăsconi, ‘postfaţă’.50 pippidi, Hommes et idées, 295–314; Kotsowilis, ‘Die griechischen studenten’.51   Marcu, ‘athènes ou rome’.52 Georgescu, Din corespondenţa, 229–30.53 andronescu, Însemnările, 51; anghelescu, ‘Dinicu Golescu’, 429–31 notes other echoes.54 hurmuzaki, Documente, 10: 385–409; Georgescu, Din corespondenţa, 49–54.55 Cristea, ‘faima lipscăi’.

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professor thiersch in Munich informing the latter that ‘unforeseen circum-stances’ have prevented him from travelling to Germany that year.56 at the end of the year he managed to get russian support for the publication of a journal in romanian in Bucharest, curierul rumânesc [the romanian messenger]. the first number appeared in april 1829: the journal lasted twenty years and made a decisive contribution to the permanent estab-lishment of a public literary culture in romania. Golescu’s travel book is mentioned in the first issue.

the following year, it was noted that Golescu had compiled a statistical map of Wallachia, including:

all the counties and their demarcations, the towns, districts and ports both in the uplands and on the Danube, the quarantines, the livestock exchange markets, the paths, the sub-lieutenancies, the villages, families, priests, dea-cons, boyars, sons of boyars, company men, pandour soldiers, foreigners, gypsies, armenians, and Jews, monasteries, metochs, domestic and dedi-cated sketes, lakes, fisheries, sawmills, wine presses, rivers, streams, brooks, fairs, weekly markets, minerals and the productions of each county.57

this is probably the same as the ‘russian statistical map’ produced in 1835.58 ironically for one who had awaited the arrival of the russians with such high hopes, Golescu was killed by something unexpected they brought to the principalities: cholera. on 5th november 1830, his death was announced in the newspaper he had helped establish. his brother iordache was appointed Grand logothete [Chancellor] of Wallachia in his stead.59

A traveller’s fortunes

the idea of the whole of romania’s modernization being caused by a travel text can of course only be read symbolically. if we wanted to take it literally, we would have to propose and accept something like the fol-lowing scenario:

– Golescu travels, and is astonished by the West;– he consigns his impressions to writing;

56 anghelescu, ‘Dinicu Golescu’, 362–4.57 BAPr 1:567.58 Giurescu, Principatele romîne.59 BAPr 1:567, 1170.

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– he publishes his book;– people read it and become aware of their country’s shortcomings;– as a result, they implement modernizing policies;– then they suffer identity traumas on account of the rupture between

the old world which represented their traditional culture and the new world they are trying to join.

even if we were prepared to admit this very schematic view of the rela-tionship between travel, writing, reading and action, it would be pretty much unhistorical in Golescu’s case because of a small fact, overlooked in most histories of romanian literature and culture: few people appear to have read Golescu’s book at all in the seventy or eighty years since it was published. Between 1826 and the critical rehabilitation undertaken by pompiliu eliade in 1905, there are barely a dozen references to Golescu’s Account.60 a second edition did not appear until 1910: this was prepared by the bibliographer nerva hodoş, who had married an indirect descen-dent of Dinicu’s, and by his own account, had great difficulty persuading a publisher to accept the project.61 only one author of a nineteenth-century romanian travel text actually seems to have had a detailed knowledge of Golescu’s work.62

if this were not enough, one can draw attention to the fact that a ten-dency to consider oneself inferior in relation to neighbouring countries, and a desire to reform, were not particularly new elements in romanian culture. numerous statements from romanian chroniclers of the early eighteenth century evinced a strong consciousness of inferiority to West-ern (or at least ‘neighbouring’) countries.63 in 1818, eight years before Golescu’s book was published, the teacher George lazăr declared at the opening of the romanian school in Bucharest that the romanian language and their people had been left ‘weaker, lower down and more ridiculed than all the other languages and peoples on the face of the earth’.64 the idea that Golescu’s text substantially influenced subsequent generations

60 anghelescu, ‘Dinicu Golescu’, xl–xli, 355–7.61  hodoş, ‘Întroducere’, lx–lxi.62 the Moldavian ion ionescu, a pioneer of romanian ethnography, discusses the

Account in a letter of 1849 to the Wallachian liberal C.a. rosetti (Bodea, 1848 la români, 2:1138); i am grateful to angela Jianu for this reference, hitherto overlooked by analysts of Golescu’s book. still, what interests ionescu is Golescu’s analysis of the romanian peas-antry, not his account of europe.

63 see chapter 3 above.64 Bogdan-Duică and popa-lisseanu, viaţa şi opera, 20.

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cannot be sustained. Most scholars simply affirm it as part of the received wisdom: others actually mispresent the evidence to buttress this claim.65 Despite generations of historians insisting on the complexity of processes of change, it is always seductive to have them represented by an indi-vidual actor, with a good story to tell. the idea of a journey, a text and an œuvre of historical achievement have become inextricably interwoven.66

An Alternative route

part of the problem may lie with the assumption that a travel account—and in Golescu’s case, we have little other documentation about him from his own pen—provides sincere and unbarred access to the itinerary of its author’s life and mind. But although predicated upon the idea of an exceptional experience, its purpose is not necessarily to record and con-vey emotional states. as numerous scholars have noted, travel writing may often function as a pretext for ethical or aesthetic digression, and has affinities with the sermon, the essay and the romance as well as the log book.67 Critics have also compared Golescu’s text to the fable, and commented on the way in which its author prefers the exaltation of an exemplary ideal to the banalities of a general narration.68 another has observed that introductions to romanian books in this period ‘do not dis-cuss the content of the writings, but, at a general level, eulogize the moral consequences of reading them’.69

in his preface, then, Golescu does not tell us why he travelled, or when, but rather concentrates on why he has taken account of what he has seen, and why he is giving an account of it to his people.

europe makes her nations happy through the communication of goodness gathered through the travels made by some nations in the lands of others, and through publishing them in books.

europe is full, as of other things, so of such books. there is no corner of the earth so overlooked, no country, no city, no village unknown to a single

65 thus Berindei, ‘Die reisen’, 126 cites the historian nicolae iorga (an authoritative figure in romanian culture as saying Golescu’s book had a ‘necessary influence on the spirit of an age’. What iorga actually said in 1910, in a review of the second edition, was that he hoped the book would influence the spirit of the twentieth-century age, not having been read by previous ones.

66 Cf. Grivel, ‘travel writing’, 256–7.67 fussell, Abroad, 202–15; hall, ‘emergence’; nemoianu, ‘Displaced images’.68 iorgulescu, firescul, 20; ioncioaia, ‘viena’, 416, 427.69 hanţa, Idei şi forme, 254.

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european, so long as he knows how to read. But we, in order to know our country well, have to obtain this knowledge by reading some book written by a european. there are a great number of histories of the romanian land in europe, written in her languages, and in the romanian language, but still by foreigners; while there is no mention of one made by a native of this land [. . .] When many of the noble youth of our fatherland, after having completed a course of studies in enlightened europe, have returned to the fatherland, we can obtain from them many translations of books into the national language, as a means towards enlightenment, ornament, and the good organization of our fatherland. it is time for us to wake up, like good landlords who when they go out of their houses acquire things for themselves but also for their fellow householders; so we, gathering good things either by reading good and useful books, or by travelling, or by encounters and gatherings with men from the enlightened nations, should share them with our compatriots and plant them in our land, in the hope of a hundredfold yield, and that we too may obtain from our descendants the gratitude heard by those of our fathers and grandfathers who left to us a good thing either discovered by themselves or taken from others. (4)

the relationship between travel, social communication, and patriotic improvement is stressed; more particularly, that between travel books and the public good. travelling is, it turns out, really no different from reading: they are both mere means for the attainment of improving knowledge. But although Golescu criticizes his people for having neglected this genre of writing, he situates his own text within an already existing native tradi-tion of literary culture, which he links back in time to the fifteenth-century prince vlad the impaler and ultimately to Cyril and Methodius, ‘the cre-ators of the romanian word’ (4)—for, unlike some of his romanian con-temporaries, Golescu saw nothing unnatural in the use of the traditional Cyrillic alphabet. Moreover, despite his insistence on the european travel writing tradition, he cites no specific works that he used as a model. the first romanian travel text thereby becomes both a borrowing from europe and a continuation of an identifiable preexisting cultural tradition.70

the focus of Golescu’s text oscillates throughout between two prin-cipal objects. there are descriptions of places, ostensibly in the order in which the author has travelled through them, with not infrequent notes on routes, distances, means and conditions of travel, etc. inter-spersed with these, there are what Golescu calls ‘separate discourses’ (cuvântări deosebite), in which he praises some institution or practice encountered abroad, often going on to criticize its Wallachian equivalent.

70 as Duţu, sinteză şi originalitate, 231 showed.

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By summarizing briefly the content of these ‘discourses’ or homilies, i hope both to give an idea of the kinds of things that caught Golescu’s attention, and to enable an understanding of their rhetorical function within the economy of his text as a whole:

– the gratifying manifestations of mutual honour and love between sover-eign and people at the coronation of francis ii at pressburg (18–19);

– the sights of vienna, architectural, aesthetic, civil: their superiority to home (21);

– the city’s internal messenger service, its superiority to domestic arrange-ments: ‘how useful this intra-urban post would be in our country, so those who come awaiting replies need tremble no longer in doors and hallways, or come twenty times after a single piece of business; despatchees would no longer have to be told ‘come tomorrow at such-and-such a time’ and, on coming, find that the boyar had left long ago (reproach me not, Brother reader, where you find the truth, but hold your tongue until you find a false representation or some custom which is also followed in other parts of the enlightened world, and whose practice in our country is therefore nothing outlandish—and then, and only then, may you reproach me)’ (24–5);

– vienna’s philanthropic institutions (26–7); – its hospitals (27–8);– its schools (28);– how the above should be entrusted to the state, not the church, or at least

to a church working for the fatherland (30–33);– how the monarch nods to the people; its difference from the custom at

home (34);– how the viennese women don’t make abusive use of luxury—their dress

is relatively similar to that of lower people, unlike at home (35–6);– how a poor merchant at Baden (outside vienna), through patient and

applied hard work, made a small fortune for himself; followed by a long description of the unjust treatment of the peasantry in Wallachia, and a disquisition on the nature of patriotism and its absence at home (46–58);

– the neat clothing of the field labourers around Graz, compared to the ragged clothing at home (60);

– how at vicenza even peasants go to the theatre to improve themselves, unlike in Bucharest, which, although a much bigger town, has only one theatre and the performances are in German. how an englishman he met in vienna found this situation ridiculous. his shame (70–71);

– the romanians of the Banat of temesvar. like us but happier, because they are working in a better system (79–80);

– how good the baths at Mehadia are, built at the empress’s personal expense. ‘We haven’t yet become enlightened enough to make such things for the public good’ (81);

– the idea of wealth: wealth of the community is the best kind, rather than the wealth which creates social inequality (82–5);

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– how people dress; the equal terms on which different social classes greet each other (87–9);

– the domestic economy admired during a visit to a country cottage (97–8); – how no buildings or institutions endure in Wallachia compared to swit-

zerland (100);– how a peasant in altstätten knows to distinguish Kronstadt in transyl-

vania from Kronstadt in russia. Golescu compares this to a letter he received in 1824 from the logothete’s Chancery in Bucharest addressed to Mehadia, transylvania (inaccurately, for Mehadia is not in transylvania but in the Banat of temesvar) (103);

– the excellence of the inns in europe (105–6); – the university of Geneva, the superiority of their system of education to

ours (108–11);– the benefits of factories and the disadvantages of exporting raw materials

(111–12);– end: ‘and from here, going back straight to vienna, and having noth-

ing more to write about the journey, i imagine that i ought to consider myself guilty for not finishing by praising a second time the agreeable and peaceable life of the viennese, the beauty of the many walks around vienna and the continuous lighting, from evening until day, in the whole of the park surrounding the fortress of vienna.

and as hope remains with every man who finds himself still upon this earth, i too had hoped, and entertain the idea that the time will surely come when my fatherland, i do not say in a few years, will exactly resemble the great cities that i have seen, but at least the first step will have been taken to bring all peoples towards happiness, which step is only union for the common good, as i have said many times.’ (116)

cuvântări (from cuvânt, ‘word’) means discourses in the sense of speeches, and they have the quality of spoken harangues, a kind of orality influ-enced both by the almost universal fact of illiteracy in Wallachian society, and by the study of ancient rhetoric so integral to elite education in the period.71

Golescu also appeals a great deal to exclamation, to the authority of per-sonal experience, to the testimony of emotion, and to general principles of behaviour or social harmony. he is aware that his habit of breaking off his description in order to speak about his home country may sometimes irritate the reader, or that his strictures may appear excessive: he excuses or justifies himself several times. But he insists on them: ‘i have digressed greatly from my description of vienna, but my soul was also greatly embit-tered on seeing the happiness of other nations’ (21). the description

71 Duţu, les livres, 70–83; Diaconescu, ‘l’œuvre littéraire’; anghelescu, ‘utopia’, posits Xenophon and fénelon as potential models.

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itself thereby becomes somewhat demoted, a mechanical succession of observed facts, a kind of russian roulette of annotations which may or may not trigger long moral disquisitions: if it doesn’t, it descends into vir-tual meaninglessness. Barthes has written about the orientalist writing of pierre loti in terms of its approach to incident, as a technique for sug-gesting the languidity of the eventless east: ‘what may barely be noted: a kind of degree zero of notation, no more than it takes to write merely something’;72 Golescu’s writing, in contrast, is full of noted somethings, but only some of them turn into incident and ‘cause’ discourses. his ‘travels’ from descriptive to discursive mode are remarkably abrupt:

returning from Geneva, i didn’t follow the same road, but in order to see more things in switzerland, as well as those famous rhine falls and to go further into the Duchy of Baden and the Kingdom of Würtemberg, i took a different route from the Morat station going through aarberg, where the river aar passes, and where the boundary runs between the Cantons of Bern and solothurn, which latter has a population of 47,800 souls; solothurn, a large town, through the middle of which the river aar runs, with bridges for the communication of the townsfolk; Wiedlisbach, a fortified town; Der Mühle, a fort; olten, a town on the side of the river aar, which passes on a standing bridge [an aqueduct]; aarau, a town in which cloth factories are up and running; Wildegg, where there is a factory for printed textiles.

separate Discoursethis multitude of factories can be found in all european provinces, for with these factories each government benefits its people, for that reason they give a variety of incentives to those who establish factories, rather than the reverse, for the princes to take their money because they have factories. (111)

and at the end of a ‘discourse’, he switches equally abruptly from sermon-izing mode to the most minutious materialities of transportation:

May the merciful lord turn his eyes towards these people, turning wicked hearts into merciful ones, money-hungry ones into generous ones, and those overcome by bad habits into virtue.

from vienna to trieste there are the following stops, which i couldn’t take much notice of, for both when i went and when i returned i travelled by Ailwagen, which runs without stopping day and night, pausing only at preestablished places for lunch and dinner. (58)

the word ‘ailwagen’ (German eilwagen, express coach) is then glossed in very great detail in a footnote two pages long.

72 Barthes, le degré zéro, 173.

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as for the idea of europe, it is not in fact the principal object of Goles-cu’s attention. he does not define it specifically. nevertheless, it is worth reconstructing his usage of the term, if only to understand where travel books come from—for, as already noted, ‘europe is full, as of other things, so of such books’ (4). What are those ‘other things’ europe contains? the references are in fact rather incidental, for instance to ‘a course of stud-ies in enlightened europe’ (4); to ‘the noble orders, distributed in all of europe’ (50); to the need ‘to serve the fatherland, as it is served in all europe [. . .] and then each and every one of us will attain true honour and happiness, and the people will in a few years not fail to reach the same level as the other nations of europe’ (52); ‘thiersch, that professor famous in all europe’ (95).73 one might be tempted to conclude that Golescu’s europe is not so much a place as a series of abstracted ideas: order, civili-zation, and particularly social harmony. it is clear, however, that he builds this idea on his conception of place. Despite his relatively positive assess-ment of hungary and transylvania—the social virtues he mentions are, apparently, already present in the saxon villages around Kronstadt—he does not describe anything as ‘european’ until at least halfway through his description of vienna.74 i have already pointed out that Golescu’s man-ner of composition involves placing all his data concerning a given town in a given section, irrespective of the order of travel in which he came by it (fassel distinguishes between travel texts which describe routes in ‘longitudinal sections’ and those more particularly dedicated to describing places in ‘cross sections’).75 and although he makes conscientious notes on his route, and the conditions of his journey, Golescu is principally con-cerned with cross-sections of towns, which form the basis of his chapter structures: they become objectified and distinct, like the reigns of kings in an old chronicle.

Compared to this, Golescu’s fatherland, the ostensible object of his love and the comparative referent for his accumulation of knowledge, has no concrete specificity: he refers to it in terms of its poor condition, not its topography. at one stage he even asks ‘Where is that corner called the fatherland?’ (57) he attributes the question to ‘that noted father Kone’, whom anghelescu has identified with the German educationalist

73 thiersch, friedrich Wilhelm 1784–1860, German classical scholar and philhellene, professor of ancient literature at the university of Munich.

74 Georgescu the romanians, 108, citing page 65 of the 1915 edition, says Golescu speaks of ‘that other europe’. i could not trace this.

75 fassel, ‘Die enzyklopädische Donaubeschreibung’.

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J.h. Campe, but who must surely be the patriotic poet Carl theodor Körner, author of the very popular song ‘Mein vaterland’ (1813), which begins, ‘Wo ist des sängers vaterland?’ But whereas Körner had given a rousing answer,76 Golescu says that when he asked the citizens of Walla-chia this question, then, ‘the man of the people burst into tears; the boyar judge knitted his eyebrows and kept a dark silence; the soldier cursed me; the courtesan whistled at me; and the government tax farmer asked me “this word patrie, is it a kind of rent, or what?” ’ (57). it is as if another element of Wallachia’s frequently attested inferiority were its failure to coagulate into a real place. for instance, Golescu gives a description of Kronstadt at the beginning of his book ostensibly as if it were the first city he arrived at, although he later reveals Kronstadt as having been his point of departure. he was describing the city for a Wallachian audience, but he had not come to it from Wallachia as part of his journey: it is describ-able because ‘other’ and exemplary, not because travelled to. the point of writing about abroad, then, becomes to create models for the fatherland, which, Golescu hopes, ‘i do not say in a few years, will exactly resemble the great cities that i have seen’ (116). his problem, then, is not to topo-graphize Wallachia—others in this period were engaged in that task, and Golescu would later continue their work77—but to create the terms on which it could exist.

it is a political question, more than an ontological one. for Golescu, the question asked of Montesquieu’s imaginary oriental travellers in france, ‘how can one be persian?’ would not have been especially meaningful: he is not particularly prone to doubting the integrity of his own psychic iden-tity.78 Golescu has been identified with the anonymous boyar mentioned by a french observer in 1821 as saying ‘We are never ourselves’, and ‘Do we always have to be looked upon as not belonging at all to the great european

76 ‘Wo edler Geister funken sprühten,/ Wo Kränzer für das schöne blühten,/ Wo starke herzen freundig glühten,/ für alles heilige entbrannt,/ Dar war mein vaterland!’ Körner, Werke, 16. Cf. anghelescu, ‘Dinicu Golescu’, xxiv.

77 notably the Greek-language works by Dimitris philippidis, Geographia tis roumou-nias (1816) and Konstantinos Karakas, topographia tis vlahias (1830).

78 the analogy with Montesquieu was made by M. Călinescu, ‘ “how can one be a romanian?” ’, who argued that the fascination with the West causes a crisis in self-identity in modern romanian culture; cf. idem, ‘ “how can one be what one is?” ’; alexandrescu, Identitate în ruptură; roman, fragmented identities. a historian of Greece has referred to ‘cultural schizophrenia’ (Clogg, ‘the Greek mercantile bourgeoisie’, 90); ottomanists to ‘cultural dualism’ (fortna, ‘education’, discusses the fortunes of this concept). the term ‘ambivalence’ popularized by Bhabha, ‘of mimicry and man’, is as Young, White mytholo-gies has shown, really a rather static and indiscriminately applied concept.

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family?’ although this is not impossible, the idea of personal inauthentic-ity or fragmented identity does not emerge clearly anywhere in Golescu’s Account.79 now that scholars of romanticism no longer consider the idea of profundity as obligatory when describing the Western self—‘the notion of internal depth served as only one of many models of subjectivity dur-ing the romantic period’80—then perhaps writers from marginal cultures could be let off from being described as ‘fragmented’ if the description doesn’t fit the personality. in fact i am not sure we should speak about Golescu’s personality so much as about his persona, for the represented self is ‘always already oriented towards an audience’.81 he describes his ‘great shame’ on discussing the Bucharest theatre with an englishman in vienna, and admits to having personally committed ‘a great error’ in mal-treating the peasantry, but these are precisely conditions which require an integral self to assume them. rather than positing a ‘split consciousness’, then, perhaps it is better to compare Golescu’s literary and political strata-gems to the ‘double consciousness’ of persian occidentalist writers of the same period, ‘whereby persianate ethical standards were used to evaluate european cultural practices and european perspectives were deployed for the censuring of indian and iranian societies’.82

Golescu is considerably more veiled in his direct references to the pres-ent state of Wallachia. he has good words for the prince: ‘now that the princedom has been entrusted to the hands of a native ruler, his Majesty Gregory Ghica voevod, and the national schools have been established [. . .] the time has come for us to awaken’ (18). however, an apparently apolitical collection of proverbs which Golescu published at Buda at the same time contained very pointed criticisms which could easily be read as addressed to Ghica’s government.83 Golescu also may well have sponsored the translation of parts of the British traveller thomas thornton’s Pres-ent state of turkey (1807), which offered a damning critique of the system

79 pippidi, ‘identitate’, 1191.80 henderson, romantic identities, 163.81  Jürgen habermas, in Chakrabarty, Provincializing europe, 35; cf. elliott, the literary

persona.82 see tavakoli-targhi, refashioning Iran, xii. in a much older usage, the black social

theorist W.e.B. Du Bois saw that the term need not imply fragmentation or loss: he wrote that ‘the negro longs to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a bet-ter and truer self. in this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost’. Du Bois, the souls of Black folk, 4. on the origin and destiny of this concept in african-american and latin-american cultural theory see respectively reed, W.e.B. DuBois, 97–125 and Mignolo, local histories/Global designs.

83 Duţu, livres de sagesse, 70–83.

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under which Wallachia was ruled: the anonymous author of the preface emphasised the shame of the Wallachians that their country appeared to european travellers to be so badly governed, but justified the publication of his work by arguing that the european evaluation was correct.84 in his Account Golescu makes exactly the same criticisms of Wallachia as the anonymous translator of thornton’s Present state:

[o]n account of this [luxury], we have been hit by poverty and the extinc-tion of families, we have come to be ridiculed in the world’s opinion, and foreign pens have painted us accordingly. But what good will it do us if we want to keep such things hidden amongst ourselves, and we make believe that they are not known, when all nations read them, as they are written by people who wish us ill? it is better for us to know them, to acknowl-edge them, and make a determined decision to rectify ourselves, protecting our fatherland from these fires and conflagrations, for luxury and unlawful appropriation have wiped us off the face of the earth, depriving everybody of any of the slightest honesty that might belong to a nation. (29)

these can be read in terms of a wider impatience with Ghica’s rule which opposition boyars sought to contest by referring to a european model. for instance, iordache Golescu used the idea of ‘the europeans’ reproach’ when chastising Ghica for not supporting education in the national language in 1823: ‘foreigners founded these schools and established their revenues, and, now that a native reigns over our nation, we are trying to keep the place in the ignorance, darkness and barbarism for which the europeans rightly reproach us!’.85 Dinicu’s Account is full of such protests, directed less explicitly but still clearly enough against the status quo: ‘the schools which, under the pretext of improvement, have been ruined in recent years, for which i would have taken up my pen against the foreigners, did i not know that they had plenty of assistance from the natives’ (31). this is in fact a quite specific reference which would have been understood at the time to refer to the widespread scapegoating of foreigners, particularly Greeks, that the Ghica regime had more or less systematically undertaken. in a supplication presented in turkish to the Grand vizier in 1822, Ghica and his boyars promised to ‘abolish and ruin’ the ‘Greek schools’ in order to ‘stop the disorder at its root’.86 the idea of expelling ‘all the Greek boyars and the ones of albanian and Bulgarian race’ from ‘rumelia’ ‘since

84 anon, preface to thornton, starea de acum [1827], repr. in Brv 3: 519–20. see above, ch. 4 for more detail on this section.

85 Cited in hurmuzaki, Documente, 10: 248.86 Mehmet, ‘acţiuni’, 76.

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those of Greek race had occasioned so many betrayals, that it is not right that princes should be named again from among them’ was proposed in a telhis (report) by the Grand vizier and approved by the sultan.87 the latter’s ferman (edict), nominating Ghica, cast the exiles of Kronstadt as the ‘Greek party’ in contrast to the ‘native boyars’,88 although in fact each group contained both Greeks and Wallachians. this official xenophobia was then echoed by a number of lesser writers in Wallachia in 1822 and 1823.89 Many of Golescu’s critiques implicitly or explicitly unmask this cheap nationalist rhetoric and make it clear that the exploitation of the principalities was the fault of ‘both natives and foreigners’ (20). elsewhere he states that ‘luxury and idleness’, not ‘foreigners’, are the enemy of the fatherland (57).

passages like the following also suggest a more urgent impatience with the present state of affairs, than a merely general interest in ‘awaken-ing’ can explain. he asserts that, now that there is a native prince, ‘there should be no more hanging around but an immediate embrace of enlight-enment’ (53), and later:

oh, most powerful father of all nations! Will this dark cloud, full of trials and wickedness, never lift from above the romanian nation? Will we not be absolved once and for all of all our wants? Will we not be worthy to see a ray of light pointing us towards general happiness? But what am i saying? a ray? see, the whole light has shown itself, sent by the most merciful God, through the most powerful protector and defender of our fatherland who awaits from us but a small and simple act—i mean union—for public hap-piness, for, with this, all satisfactions will come. (112)

in other words, he was not some unworldly middle-aged oriental gentle-man who suddenly took it upon himself to have a look at life in the West, but an astute and active political strategist pursuing a clear oppositional line to a hesitant and fragile regime. the idea of a travel text having politi-cal stakes was very widespread in european culture: swift had satirized the crude functionalism of such a conception in Gulliver’s travels. in Ger-many and russia, the genre of travel had been exploited by ambitious young men not only to convey models for ‘correct’ appreciation of senti-mental and literary experience of the West but also as a stick with which

87 ibid., 66–7.88 Documente privind istoria româniei. răscoala din 1821, 5:144–5.89 naum râmniceanu, ‘izbucnirea şi urmările zaverei’; Zilot românul, ‘Jalnică cîntare’;

lazăr, speech on Ghica’s arrival, in Bogdan-Duică and popa-lisseanu, viaţa, 29–45; memo-randa in vîrtosu, 1821, 117–40, 158–61, 178–222; Mumuleanu, Plângerea.

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to beat the present regime and advance one’s own ambitions.90 it would soon spread further eastwards: in the same year as Golescu published his book, an arab travelled from north africa to france and subsequently composed an account which was considered to be ‘a veritable repertoire of reforms’.91

But did publication raise consciousness? as already noted, echoes of Golescu’s Account in nineteenth-century romanian culture are remark-able by their absence. Books and essays on ‘europe’ appeared in turk-ish, arabic and even Georgian in the 1830s and 1840s, advocating reform and justifying travel accounts by reference to their utility for the father-land.92 But subsequent romanian travel publications in book form are few before 1860, and do not particularly deal with western europe: there is an account of a journey to Moscow on official business in the early 1830s,93 and another to Constantinople in 1844.94 Most of the travel sketches in romanian periodicals in the 1830s and 1840s treat domestic scenes: they are busier constructing the fatherland than describing abroad.95 some pri-vate letters and diaries from the 1820s and 1830s described the West, but in nothing like the tones used by Golescu: although favourable overall, they were also sometimes quite critical, and also made full use of the rela-tively free intimacy of the epistolary mode, not always seeking to come to global judgments about ‘europe’.96 this provides further evidence that romanian encounters with the West at the beginning of the nineteenth century need not necessarily be interpreted in terms of a psychological crisis. Golescu’s account is not representative: his publication of it might be, but rather in terms of political strategy than naive acceptance of euro-pean models.

90 stewart, Die reisebeschreibung; Knopper, le regard du voyageur; on russia, roboli, ‘the literature of travel’; Jones, ‘opposition’.

91  at-tahtâwî, l’or de Paris, 16.92 e.g., sadik rifat’s ‘essay Concerning european affairs’ from 1837, the product of an

embassy to vienna; and Mustafa sami’s Avrupa risâlesi (1840), both discussed by Berkes, Development, 128–32. an earlier ottoman instance is ebu Bekir ratib’s vienna embassy narrative of 1790, discussed by findley, ‘ebu Bekir ratib’s vienna embassy narrative’.

93 asachi, ‘Jurnalul’.94 Codrescu, o călătorie.95 later romanian travel accounts are listed in BAPr 1: 1089–91 and 2, 1217–8; and in

BIr 2, i: 62–70, 449–60. Mihai, ‘orizonturi spaţiale’, has published some hitherto unknown letters.

96 see e.g., soutsos, Mémoires, 45–6; Brăiloiu, in hurmuzaki, Documente, 10: 628–9; filipescu, in eliade, Histoire, 1:265–83; poteca, in Bianu, ‘Întâii bursieri’; and poenaru, in potra, Petrache Poenaru, for a range of contemporary Wallachian approaches to the West in the 1820s.

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Golescu, then, turned his experience into a public text—what Dipesh Chakrabarty, discussing the various modes and uses of patriotic indian autobiographies, has called a ‘transition narrative’.97 however, despite his fervently-proclaimed europhilia and his clear proclamation of his ‘shame’ and ‘error’, there is no reason to see Golescu’s writing self as ‘colonized’ by european imperialist frameworks. to give just one further example, although he proclaims the exemplarity of european travel accounts, he does not seem to have followed any particular european model. Just as scholars have begun to appreciate that not all non-Western forms of auto-biography are derivative of Western types of self-expression,98 so we can see Golescu as using a variety of both domestic and foreign rhetorical devices in the service both of cosmopolitan patriotism and of personal ambition. to conclude, his text tells us less than we might wish to know about romanian identity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We may or may not wish to read the literary criticism as symptomatic of twentieth-century dilemmas (as Kiossev has done for the interpretation of the Bulgarian fictional traveller figure Bai Ganyo).99 i have focused here instead on the way that rhetorical manoeuvres and the use of the particu-lar persona of the traveller intertwined with publishing plans and political ambitions to produce a cultural construct even more complicated per-haps than that of the romanian subject: i mean the travel book.

97 Chakrabarty, Provincializing europe, 30–34.98 reynolds, Interpreting the self.99 Kiossev, ‘the debate’.

part three

Myths and discourses of the nation

chapter six

national ideology between lyrics and Metaphysics: the political writings of Mihai eMinescu

in english-language studies of romanian nationalist ideology, the name of Mihai eminescu, ‘romania’s national poet’, crops up regularly, and he is almost invariably cited as one of the precursors of the extremist national-ism of the twentieth century.1 actual analyses of what he wrote are harder to find.2 in this chapter i shall attempt a detailed review of eminescu’s political journalism and some of his literary compositions with a view to clarifying his conception of the romanian nation. i shall look first at the origins of his thought both in earlier romanian writings and in ger-man philosophy (particularly schopenhauer); and then go on to place his writings in the particular social and political context in which they were written, distinguishing between aspects of eminescu’s nationalism which are common to many romanian writers, and not just to him, and particular aspects which he alone stressed, which are unique to his work and thought and which subsequently became central tenets of romanian nationalist ideology.

My intention is not to come up with any new theory of nationalism; nor would a study of eminescu be the best way to do so, if one believes ernest gellner’s assertion that ‘we shall not learn too much about nationalism from the study of its own prophets’.3 nor do i wish to treat eminescu as a pure ideologue. in the context of this thesis, the interest lies largely in attempting to show how certain socio-political ideas and literary forms served to work together to reinforce each other status and prestige within

1  e.g. weber, ‘romania’; fischer-galaţi, ‘Myths’; shafir, ‘from eminescu to goga’; ioanid, The sword; Verdery, National ideology, 157–64; almond, Rise and fall; gallagher, Romania. eminescu exegesis ranks as a heavy industry in romania (see the massive bib-liography in Opere 17) but discussion of his political ideology was a taboo subject under communism. an older laudatory study—Murăraşu, Naţionalismul—is well-documented but intellectualy uninteresting.

2 the only documented examination of eminescu’s political writings i know of in english is oldson, A providential anti-semitism, 115–22, which concentrates exclusively on eminescu’s anti-semitism, which, as this chapter will show, was not the only dimension of his xenophobia. butaru’s interesting study ‘’ reached me just after the manuscript had been finalized.

3 gellner, Nations and nationalism, 135.

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the romanian cultural field described in previous chapters. an analysis of eminescu’s writings in the context of literary production of his own time is useful not only because it avoids the kind of interpretive foreshort-ening which makes eminescu either the prophet of romania’s future, or the root of all subsequent intolerance in romanian history. written texts by their nature can and will be re-read in contexts totally different from those in which they were composed: admirers of eminescu have included the feminist sylvia pankhurst and the dramatist eugène ionesco as well as the extremist iron guard leader corneliu Zelea codreanu and dicta-tor nicolae ceauşescu. but this does not render the particular world in which his writings were produced irrecoverable; indeed, it is necessary to examine this context in order to establish why eminescu’s ideas took the form they did.

Early Life and Education

born in 1850 in northern Moldavia, the son of an estate administrator and lesser boyar, Mihai eminescu was sent at the age of eight to the german National-Hauptschule in cernăuţi [czernowitz], the capital of the austrian province of the bukovina, and subsequently lodged there at the house of aron pumnul, professor of romanian language and literature, for whom he worked as librarian.4 pumnul, a transylvanian who had played an active role in the romanian cultural movement up to and during the year 1848, had fled to the bukovina following the suppression of the national uprising in that year: the province was something of a place of exile, being far removed from centres of agitation, but also a meeting place for roma-nian paşoptişti or ‘forty-eighters’ from different provinces.

the concerns of the transylvanians constituted a continuation of the work of their eighteenth-century predecessors, who had established the roman origins of the romanian language and begun to produce grammars and dictionaries enabling romanian to be taught in schools and seminar-ies. the group were influenced not only by this native tradition and by leaders of the orthodox and uniate churches, but also by western political

4 the best biography is călinescu, Viaţa, also available in french. in english there is a chapter on eminescu in idem, History, 371–403; or the more recent presentation by Mihăilescu, ‘eminescu’. eminescu’s journalism and political writings are collected in Opere 9–13. a representative and more convenient one-volume selection is eminescu, Scrieri politice, ed. Murăraşu. (hereafter SP).

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and philosophical ideas. they were familiar with the metaphysics of Kant, and interpreted him in progressive, nationalist terms: using his ideas to criticise organised religion and create for themselves a secular tradition of political action and public education—partly as a weapon in a struggle against the clergy, who up until then had dominated intellectual life and were seen by the imperial government as the only romanian representa-tives worth dealing with; but also as an instrument for social change and as the basis for ideas of progress and claims for freedom ‘for man to exer-cise his reason’ as one of the group, gheorghe bariţiu, put it.5

aron pumnul’s contribution to this movement included a work entitled ‘the independence of the romanian language’, which eminescu knew, and which provided a succinct definition of the term nation (naţiunea):

the nation is comprised of a people of the same blood, the same customs and which speaks the same language. the people is the body of the nation, while the language is its soul. therefore, just as a body without soul is dead, so is the nation dead without language. nationality is the god-given, eter-nal, innate and inalienable right [of a people] to make use of her language in all the necessities of life: in the house, in church, in school and in administration.6

the influence of pumnul, and the use by eminescu of ideas of individual autonomy in defence of national improvement and civil rights is evident in the earliest of eminescu’s writings. his first published poem was ‘on the death of aron pumnul’ and represents romanian youth gathering in unison around their master’s grave. Moreover, eminescu’s definition of nation derived fairly directly from that of pumnul, with the addition of claims for a territorial basis for a nation: the romanian people is, he says, ‘a nation of men, tied, through tradition, customs and language to a patch of land which we can, with undeniable title, call our country.’7 his definition stayed more or less the same throughout his writing life, and he insisted that all the relevant conditions be fulfilled: it was not pos-sible to be part of the romanian nation only by dint of language, or birth, for these characteristics could apply to sinister greeks or to unpatriotic francophile students.8

5 hitchins, Studies, 71–89. on the influence of the 1848 generation on eminescu’s early thought: Zub, Eminescu, 13–19.

6 pumnul, ‘neatîrnarea limbei românesci’ [1850], 192.7 apud Jucan, ‘Mihai eminescu’, 25.8 eminescu, ‘echilibrul’ [22 apr/4 mai and 29 apr/11 mai 1870], SP, 88; cf. idem, ‘pătura

suprapusă’ [29 Jul 1881], SP, 354.

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From Liberal Nationalism to Conservatism

the early belief in progress and enlightenment, as justified by reference to Kant, is demonstrated in the polemical articles with which eminescu began his journalistic career in the budapest paper Federaţiunea. in ‘să facem un congres’ [let’s hold a congress], he called for the democratic wishes of the romanians of the habsburg Monarchy to be respected, for their equal federal rights to be considered alongside those of other national groups, and for an elected representative of the romanian nation to communicate the people’s will to the emperor. in ‘echilibrul’ [balance], published in the same year, he argues that the sciences ‘ought to present works belonging to the nation, whereby she can contribute to the enlight-enment and advancement of mankind’ and that legislation should be ‘the application of the most advanced idea of right in relation to the require-ments of the people’. he uses the philosopher’s terminology to reject the ‘transcendental’ right of kings to rule, and says that

the rights and laws which are to govern over us, are immanent to us, that is immanent to our requirements, our life—we have only to request them from ourselves. that we are being stopped from exercising them, does not change their essence at all.9

eminescu had by this time begun to study in Vienna, and was beginning to engage in first-hand study of Kant and german idealists—indeed his article shows signs that he is keen to parade his knowledge of the (to him) new philosophy: the conclusions he draws, however, and the gen-eral emphases, are in tune with the liberal nationalism of the generation of 1848. inalienable human rights, constitutional liberties, the progress of mankind, practical demands: eminescu’s beliefs do not yet bear the hallmarks of his later (and highly conservative) interpretation of the ger-man metaphysics. they also indicate a favourable disposition towards french ideas—not only are his appeals couched in the language of french- revolutionary idealism, but he also explicitly mentions the influ-ence of france on romania, and considers it to be based on ‘recognizable superiority and individuality.’ there are, admittedly, traces of romantic language-theory to be found at this early stage: he writes that ‘the mea-sure of civilization of a people today is; a sonorous language, suitable for

9 eminescu, ‘echilibrul’, SP, 85; 86; 92.

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expressing notions through sound, thoughts through order and logical emphasis, and sentiments through ethical emphasis.’10

such views, then, would by no means make eminescu unique or even very innovative within the romanian context. these types of statement are worth noting nevertheless in order to show a certain current of civic thought which he flirted with and then rejected. indeed, early proposals of eminescu’s, for instance the universalist notion that ‘a people’s civi-lization consists especially in the development of those general human tendencies, which are unquestionably those of all men, be they large or small, rich or poor’,11 were even sometimes attacked as being not national-ist enough.

eminescu’s career as political writer and journalist was interrupted after 1871 as he pursued his university career in Vienna and berlin, with the financial support of the iaşi literary society ‘Junimea’. although he failed to obtain the doctorate expected of him, his Junimist patrons found him a series of posts, first as a schools inspector in iaşi and Vaslui counties, then as librarian at iaşi university. titu Maiorescu also found him a research grant to track down documents relating to romanian history in prussian and galician archives, but eminescu wasted the money on a philosophical pilgrimage to Königsberg. this little-known biographical episode tells us a lot both about his disdain for documentary approaches to history and his discomfort at being dependent on Maiorescu for work.12 it was only in 1876—when the conservative government fell and he was sacked on (probably trumped-up) charges of having misappropriated books—that eminescu returned to journalism. he was then entrusted with the editor-ship first of Curierul de Iaşi (from 1876 to 1877) and then, in bucharest, of the party’s main propaganda organ Timpul (until 1883).

eminescu’s political writings inevitably bear the influence of his Juni-mist patrons,13 notably that of Maiorescu, whose attacks on the superfi-ciality of existing romanian cultural models constituted the keystone of the group’s ideological position. Maiorescu had called for romanian asser-tions of nationality to be tempered ‘within the limits of truthfulness’ and eminescu gave support to this apparently radical position; he also, how-ever, defended Maiorescu against charges of ‘cosmopolitanism’—on the grounds that a non-national viewpoint is ‘impossible’: ‘the individual who

10 ibid., 84.11  ibid., 88.12 cernovodeanu, ‘eminescu traducător’.13 see the detailed discussion in ornea, Junimea, 528–65.

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truly desires to work for society cannot do so in the name of a humankind which does not exist other than in its concrete parts—in nationalities.’14 in private, however, he was prepared to admit to a friend that ‘the roma-nian people does not exist—there exists only the possibility to form it.’15

other aspects of Maiorescu’s writings were taken up wholesale by eminescu: for instance the former’s assertion that ‘our only real class is the romanian peasant, whose reality is suffering’16 found its echo in emi-nescu’s statement that ‘there remains to us but a single positive class, off whose back all of us live—the romanian peasant.’17 this position, com-bined with the belief that the peasant represented the true nature of the romanian essence, was to form the basis of eminescu’s political thought, which he was to sustain throughout his life.

this was not the only conservative, Junimist position which was open to eminescu, as can be seen from a brief examination of another mem-ber of the Junimea group, petre carp. carp, although an aristocrat and initially a defender of landed interests, did not approve of such a stance, and accepted the consequences of the constitutional changes romania had undergone:

all serious conservatives should have given their consent to the completed deed; they should have admitted the social revolution, the democratisa-tion of society, as an irrevocable given . . . it was merely a misfortune that democratisation here took place from the top down, and not the other way round.

he argued that there were other ‘positive classes’ besides the peasant, citing the artisan class and the class of leaders, to be selected on merit rather than lineage.18 eminescu, however, rejected both carp’s attitude to democracy, and his analysis of class structures: he refuted the con-tinuing independence of the artisan and the răzeş [free peasant], blam-ing their demise on democratic nationalism: ‘the history of the past 50 years, which many call a national regeneration, could with better reason be called the history of the annihilation of the free peasants and artisans.’19 these classes did not go on to form a stable bourgeoisie, but have aspired to nobility and become lesser gentry; or worse, have sought jobs from

14 eminescu, ‘naţionalii şi cosmopoliţii’ [ms., 1871] in torouţiu, SDL, 4, 85–91.15 reported by ion slavici, Amintiri, 43.16 Maiorescu, ‘În contra direcţiei de astăzi’ [1868], in Critice, 1:151.17 eminescu, ‘influenţa austriacă’ [1876], SP, 136.18 lovinescu, Istoria civilizaţiei, 2:111–9.19 eminescu, ‘influenţa austriacă’, SP, 128.

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the state, and formed a plebs scribax or ‘proletariat of the pen-nib.’ here we see eminescu explicitly rejecting the modernising aspects of carp’s conservatism, and adding a distinctly pessimistic reading of Maiorescu’s theory of culture and of the peasant class.

From Kant to Schopenhauer

Metaphysical philosophy as a basic for romanian conservative thought was not new, as we have seen, and certainly Maiorescu’s theory of ‘form without essence’ is partially derived from Kantian distinctions between the essential and the merely sensational categories. however, eminescu made particular use of post-Kantian ideas which, although not unknown to the Junimea circle, constituted a distinct development and advance on Maiorescu’s theories. the main german influence on eminescu’s thought was schopenhauer. this may seem a strange choice for an east european nationalist: after all, schopenhauer rejected any possibility that his meta-physical system should be used to promote nationalism:

it should be remarked in passing, that patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors. for what could be more impertinent than, where the pure and universally human is the only concern, and where truth, clarity and beauty should alone be of any account, to put into the scales one’s preference for the country to which one’s own valued person happens to belong, and then, with that in view, do violence to truth and commit injustice against the great minds of other nations in order to puff up the lesser minds of one’s own?20

however, such statements did not impede the adaptation of schopenhauer’s thought by nationalists all over europe.21 this was particularly characteristic of the ‘disillusioned’ generation of post-1848 europe, for whom the earlier idealists held less and less allure, and who were acutely attracted by a phi-losopher whose system seemed to have partially anticipated both the new psychology of nicholas hartmann and the developing discourse revolving around evolutionary theory and ‘the struggle for existence’. eminescu was no exception to this.

20 schopenhauer, Essays and aphorisms, 229.21  see e.g. Kelly, ‘herzen vs. schopenhauer’. perhaps the most notorious of nationalists

who have taken inspiration from schopenhauer was benito Mussolini. see nolte, Three faces, 616 n. 221.

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as bryan Magee has noted, however, the difference in philosophical method between the ‘idealist’ fichte and the ‘pessimist’ schopenhauer is not as great as their political differences. fichte’s ‘completion’ of Kant’s work depended on the union of the ‘real’ (noumenal) and ‘apparent’ (phenomenal) worlds in the ‘i’. this is not in fact irreconcilably different from schopenhauer’s solution to the same problem, which also saw the ‘phenomenal’ and the ‘noumenal’ as products of the ego, but in the form of will and intellect. fichte used this union of the self and the other to develop an ideology of the sovereign state uniting the individual and the ethnic community. in the individual’s mind ‘dwells a love for the whole, of which he is a member, for the state and the fatherland, and he will destroy any other selfish emotion’. schopenhauer, on the other hand, saw the will as unwholesome and destructive, unable to be mastered by man; he pes-simistically advocated the repression of the will’s desire, and, as we have seen, believed that the counterpart of the ego was a pure universalism and not at all, as fichte had proposed, a closed political unit.22

in fact eminescu takes ideas from both philosophers. the influence of fichte and the idealists entered his work precisely where schopenhauer fails to be of use to him, mainly when dealing with questions of the nation, of political economy, or of history. thus eminescu presents ‘the interior history of peoples’ as ‘a struggle between the state and individualism’. he sees the struggle as coming to a conclusion in the harmonization of sepa-rate interests: ‘the state however, as a higher form of the same principle [i.e. individual interest], does not see in classes distinct individuals, but a complex of social organisms, an individual: the nation.’23 the reconcilia-tion of state and individual in an organic, integrated national community seems, in this early work, to be pure fichte. yet eminescu would have denied his influence, and in fact advised his younger Junimea colleague, ioan slavici, ‘to forget fichte and hegel and start from schopenhauer.’24

what was it about schopenhauer’s philosophy that particularly attracted eminescu? firstly, of all the post-Kantian metaphysicians, scho-penhauer’s was the most reactionary. schopenhauer vigorously opposed the actions of the 1848 constitutionalists in frankfurt, and defended the idea of property: both these were causes dear to the heart of romanian conservatives. eminescu realised that he could use schopenhauer’s ideas

22 Magee, Schopenhauer, 247–54.23 eminescu, ‘influenţa austriacă’, SP, 118–9.24 g. călinescu, Opera lui Eminescu, 340.

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to present Maiorescu’s ‘forms without essence’ attack on foreign culture, in such a light that the metaphysical argument could not be interpreted as liberal. he wrote excitedly to Maiorescu:

the philosophy of right, of the state, and of history are appropriate only in schopenhauer, and moreover, the key to a true exposition of these ideas is to be found in his metaphysics . . . i believe i have found that which unlocks the problems of these matters, by grouping the opinions and systems of proof which accompany each phase of development in opposites surrounding the atemporal in history, law and politics; but not in the evolutionary sense of hegel’s ideas. for in hegel thought and existence are identical. here, not so. the practical interest for our nation, would consist, i believe, in sweeping aside all the theoretical justifications for importing foreign institutions.25

by adapting schopenhauer’s conception of the will, eminescu was able to reject developmental ideas of ‘the force of history’. he could use this to attack those who believed that romania’s alignment with western insti-tutions was not a superficial and inappropriate borrowing of forms, but part of an inexorable historical process; he could also counter with the proposal of an anti-republican, anti-constitutional, aristocratic state. after all, the problem with organic communitarian models, from a conservative agrarian viewpoint such as that of the 19th century romanian conserva-tives, is that they leave no justification for the hierarchical orders of soci-ety: fichte’s ideas, it is true, were unpalatably republican. schopenhauer, on the other hand, looked much more appealing:

a constitution embodying abstract justice would be a wonderful thing, but it would not be suited to beings such as men.

. . . the monarchical form of government is the form most natural to man . . . republics are anti-natural, artificial and derive from reflection.

. . . the only solution to the problem is the despotism of the wise and noble members of a genuine aristocracy, a genuine nobility, achieved by mating the most magnanimous of men with the cleverest and most gifted women. this proposal constituted my Utopia and my platonic republic.26

eminescu took these ideas and put them fairly directly into his own writings:

nobody, apart perhaps from ignorant gazetteers, can sustain any more that freedom to vote, assembly and parliament are the foundation of a state. whether they are or not, the state has to exist and is subjected to certain

25 letter to Maiorescu, 5 feb 1874, in SDL 4:100–1.26 schopenhauer, Essays, 152, 153, 154.

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natural laws, fixed, stubborn, and consequently undefeated. the distinc-tion is, that in constitutional life the struggle for existence of the social groups who have little book-learning, gains resonance; whereas in the abso-lutist state that struggle is regulated by a much higher power, that of the monarch. . . . while in neighbouring states a beneficent absolutism held sway . . . here the Voevod’s hands were tied . . .27

schopenhauer’s influence shows through not only in the advocation of absolute monarchy. it is apparent too in eminescu’s belief that the struggle for existence (schopenhauer’s concept of ‘the will to live’ foreshadowed the darwinian idea) provides no justification for optimistic laissez-faire positivism, but corresponds rather to an unfathomable and maleficent force. thus, discussing the evolutionary idea, eminescu rejects spencerian interpretations of the theory, and criticizes darwin’s optimism:

against the scepticism that could result from the struggle-for-existence theory, he aligns the assertion that in the end superiority will be victori-ous . . . for a long time we have considered modifying the theory of the strug-gle for existence in view of the cases in which decrepitude and parasites come to exploit and master the healthy, powerful elements.28

this pessimistic view of evolutionary theory derives fairly clearly from schopenhauer, who wrote of ‘nature’s unambiguous declaration that all the striving of this will is essentially in vain. if it were something pos-sessing value in itself, something which ought unconditionally to exist, it would not have non-being as its goal.’29

Much has been made of eminescu’s pessimism, both by his detractors (some of whom assume that because of it he cannot have been a wor-thy nationalist);30 and by his admirers, who frequently quote one passage where he bemoans that fact that schopenhauer ‘revealed to us the neces-sity of living amidst institutions which seem to us untruthful, and made pessimists of us. in this conflict we frequently lose the joy of living and the desire for struggle.’31 this passage may not necessarily act as proof that

27 eminescu, ‘icoane vechi şi icoane nouă—i’ [Timpul, 11 dec 1877]’; SP, 165; ‘influenţa austriacă’, SP, 127.

28 eminescu, ‘teoria păturii suprapuse’ [Timpul 6 aug 1881]; SP, 363.29 schopenhauer, op. cit., 54.30 e.g. ghica, Convorbiri economice, in idem, Opere, 2:324; hasdeu, ‘noi în 1892’, in

idem, Scrieri, 2:132–3. Maiorescu was attacked in parliament for his alleged pessimism and schopenhauerianism, and eminescu defended him. Timpul, 8 feb & 9, 11 apr 1878 (Opere, 10:43–6, 75–7); for the context, Vatamaniuc, Eminescu, 255–64.

31  cited by călinescu, Opera lui Mihai Eminescu, 2:109. rusu, ‘perspective’, has argued that eminescu’s appropriation of schopenhauerian pessimism was at the superficial, ‘intellectual’ level, and that the poet’s profoundest, most authentic trait was an ‘optimistic

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eminescu rejected schopenhauer’s pessimism—in the same article he attacks comte’s positivism, the ‘empty and barren phraseology of hegel’ and the pretence of fichte and schleiermacher to resolve the problems of the universe with meaningless abstractions.32

Moreover, although pessimism would seem at first to be an inappropri-ate quality for an officially-sanctioned national prophet—after all, what use is a prophet who brings no good news?—eminescu managed to com-bine the role of doom-monger with that of emblem of his people in cer-tain remarkable ways. after all, the role of national ideology is not always simply to eulogize the nation, but also to mobilize it at specified moments; and this is often achieved by conjuring up images of the endangered, vic-timized and even martyred nation. not only well-known poetic examples from the nineteenth-century, like the serbian propagation of the Kosovo legend, or the image of poland as the suffering ‘christ of nations’ serve to illustrate this: for example, a perceived threat of annihilation could be seen as crucial for mobilizing both american and soviet national senti-ment during the cold war. eminescu saw his role as pointing out the deficiencies of the romanians as much as enumerating their special vir-tues. this is perhaps particularly true of his political writings, where there was less stylistic room for the compensating virtues of lyrical expression or wry hurmour, such as may be found in his literary writings. thus, in his short fable ‘Kant’ he was able to make gentle fun out of the pretention that high-flown philosophy might have relevance to the immediate needs of the average peasant, as the tale’s protagonist expounds the metaphysi-cal doctrine to bemused locals in a village tavern. but in his journalism, as we have seen, the lyrical framework falls away, and the pessimism is no longer poetic, but accompanies explosive warnings of what will hap-pen to the fatherland should his words go unheeded. lying behind the apparently apolitical statement about the meaning of his most celebrated poem, ‘luceafărul’ [the evening star, 1883] that ‘he is immortal, but lacks good fortune’,33 is the same vision, this time ethnically politicized, applied to the romanian people:

enthusiasm’. but in his Juvenalesque satire Scrisoarea a doua [The second letter, 1881], emi-nescu declared emphatically that his ‘disgust’ was a quality of his inner soul, which could not by reconciled by the superficial action of his intellect [Şi dezgustul meu din suflet să-l împac prin a mea minte./ Dragul meu, cărarea asta s-a bătut de mai nainte.]

32 heitmann, ‘eminescu’, identifies hegel as a principal source for eminescu’s thought. but the latter’s repeated attacks on hegel render this rather questionable.

33 cited by walker and popescu, ‘introduction’, xxxvi.

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our peasant is the same as fifty years ago, but the burden he bears is tenfold. he carries on his back: several thousand landowners (at the start of the cen-tury a few tens), thousands of waged employees (at the start of the century a few tens), hundreds of thousands of Jews (at the start of the century a few thousand), tens of thousands of other foreign subjects (at the start of the century a few hundred).34

Death and Rebirth

nevertheless eminescu was fascinated by death, and took much sol-ace from the ideas, derived by schopenhauer from oriental religion, of metempsychosis, namely the transference of the soul into another body, and palingenesis, ‘the decomposition of the individual in which the will alone persists and, assuming the shape of a new being, receives a new intellect.’35 schopenhauer saw only the conscious intellect as mortal, whereas for him ‘the metaphysical will’ was essentially indestructible; eminescu took this idea of immortality of the will, and used it to develop a nationalist theory of history positing continuity with romania’s glori-ous past. his poem ‘doina’ [1883] describes stephen the great, fifteenth-century ruler of Moldavia, rising from the grave and coming to the aid of his people, who have been overrun by strangers; likewise ‘the third letter’ [1881] ends with an invocation to Vlad the impaler to return and round up the frivolous youth, who with their foreign habits, claim to rule the nation. the novella ‘poor dionis’ [1872] describes a poor peasant child, lost in the streets of iaşi, who, finding himself magically attracted to a book filled with geometry and metaphysics, is transported back into an earlier incar-nation as a monk in the time of prince alexander the good. this fantastic narrative was just one of the forms in which eminescu displayed his abil-ity to weld the magical logic of the traditional fairy tale with a remarkably modern historical logic of national destiny, through the figure of the hero with (scientific) supernatural gifts whose adventures take place in histori-cal time, not in mythical lands. such fictions were a substantive advance in the imagining of continuity, placed on a new psychological plane.36

this trope of România rediviva derives, then, not from christian sources, but from markedly modernist european currents of thought. admittedly,

34 eminescu, ‘influenţa austriacă’; SP: 144.35 schopenhauer, Essays, 73.36 eminescu, ‘poor dionis’; for an interpretation see close, ‘from the familiar to the

unfamiliar’.

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eminescu did not explicitly militate against christian theology—although he did write a poem entitled ‘eu nu cred nici în iehova’ [i don’t believe in Jehovah, 1876], and extensively explored eastern religious thought. but the originality of schopenhauer’s metaphysics, and its usefulness for emi-nescu, lies partly in the fact that he can claim the immortality of the will to belong to himself as an intellectual genius, rather than to a christian saviour. he can also substitute romanian national figures—or, as in the poem ‘rugăciunea unui dac’ [a dacian’s prayer, 1879]—a localized pagan-ism—for the saints of the orthodox church.

Moreover, eminescu was able to make use of a small loophole in scho-penhauer’s system to argue that his own genius was immortal. schopen-hauer was generally extremely careful to point out that the noumenal will which directed the course of the world could not be apprehended by man’s intellect: ‘the intellect is physical, not metaphysical.’ intellect is generally apportioned according to purpose; thus men have a much greater intellect than do animals, because

the endless augmentability of his needs has made necessary a much greater degree of intellect. only when this is exceeded through an abnormality does there appear a superfluity of intellect exempt from service: when this superflu-ity becomes considerable, it is called genius. such an intellect will first of all become objective, but it can even go on to become to a certain degree metaphysical.37

this was a favourite passage of eminescu’s, and he used its strictures about the limited ‘apportioning’ of intellect to argue against the creation of a modern industrial state:

nature gave man limited power, sufficient only to sustain himself and his family . . . and ‘a little more’. from this tiny surplus of the producer’s home-stead, the whole of the nation’s civilization must live. if we use this surplus to feed foreign ideas, institutions, and forms without essence . . .38

to himself, however, he awarded himself the god-given role of genius: ‘the god of genius drew me from the people, just as the sun draws up a golden sun from the sea of bitterness.’39 this allows eminescu to sus-tain a belief in the immortality of his intellect and his poetry, as well as his will: it permitted him to argue the indestructibility of anti-democratic

37 ibid., 59–60.38 eminescu, ‘icoane vechi şi icoane nouă (V)’ [Timpul, 21 dec 1877]; SP, 205.39 see lovinescu, Istoria civilizaţiei, 2:39–51.

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conservatism, as well as the continuity of blind will which we cannot apprehend or master:

i have said in more than one sentence that whoever desires the healing of the evils which plague our country, will become, to a greater or lesser degree, conservative, and any reform that is to be introduced into our laws, for it to be good, it will have to be conservative . . . even the few laws of value in the present parliaments and in those past, are conservative, with all the power of the word, and have nothing to do with the social contract of Jean-Jacques rousseau. from the liberal point of view, this law is a heresy . . .40

it would have been possible for eminescu to have come to such conclu-sions independently of a reading of schopenhauer: nor is it necessary to make schopenhauer responsible for eminescu’s nationalism: the latter’s statement that ‘feeling for the fatherland is so great in [schopenhauer’s] eyes, that on the scale of human virtues sacrifice for the fatherland comes close to full sanctity’ constitutes a demonstrable falsehood. however, the fact that his conservatism is so often metaphysically expressed, the fact that it was so explicitly anti-constitutional, and anti-contractual, and the fact that he backed up this view with a pantheistic belief in ‘continuity’ and ‘avatars of the will’—all point to schopenhauer as eminescu’s natural antecedent in political philosophy.41

Medievalism and Folk Metaphysics

there were other historical models available to eminescu from roma-nian history, but he did not select them. for instance, eminescu’s con-temporary, a.d. xenopol (1848–1920) who likewise studied in berlin under Junimea’s auspices, also produced a critique of contemporary romanian society based broadly on the ‘forms without substance’ argument, and attacked many facets of romania’s development, from the inadequate legal framework to the anomalies of the education system. but he did not propose a wholesale rejection of modernity: rather, he argued that ‘we should direct our efforts towards attacking the misapplication of these principles, and not against the principles themselves.’42

40 eminescu, ‘triumful principiilor conservatoare’ [Timpul 14 oct 1879]; SP, 256–7.41  the subsequent evolution of ideologies of rebirth in romanian right-wing thought

has been the object of studies by turda, ‘conservative palingenesis’, and iordachi, ‘god’s chosen warriors’.

42 xenopol, ‘studii’, 211.

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eminescu had no such words for constitutionalism: he quoted proudly the fact that ‘up until the phanariots we had no code of law—a sign, that it wasn’t necessary.’ stephen the great, on the other hand,

knew how to smash to pieces the turks, tartars, poles and hungarians, knew a little slavonic, had several rounds of wives, drank deep of the old wine of cotnar, and once in a while chopped off the head of a boyar or the nose of a tartar prince . . . what did he bother his head with ideas, the way our gazetteers do, what did he know about the intellectual finessings of our days?43

eminescu’s own mediaevalism, then, was not communal-democratic but essentially authoritarian in temper. it can justifiably be said that he was innovative in the romanian political context, in pointing out some of the key problematic issues of modern democratic consent—that the intimate assembly of the ancients is no longer possible in a mass society; that the governed and the governors may become mutually alienated; that mod-ern institutions are at best a pale imitation of ancient symbolic forms. but however incisively he asked the questions, he could not offer realistic solutions: even in his retrospective idealisation of mediaeval Moldavia, the people disappear from view and only the forceful power of the auto-crat is stressed.

‘Just as there is folk-poetry’ says a character in one of schopenhauer’s dialogues, ‘and in the proverbs, folk-wisdom, so there has to be folk metaphysics.’44 eminescu was a folk-metaphysician par excellence: but his treatment of death in poetry can be said to be metaphysical in a way that departs significantly from the folksy. the theme of passivity in the face of death is generally considered to be a staple of romanian folklore, especially as exemplified in the ballad Mioriţa [the ewe-lamb], in which a shepherd faces death calmly in spite of the fact that the ewe-lamb he tends warns him that his companions are to betray him. yet, as g. călinescu has pointed out, the shepherd ‘does not sing of death in its proper sense, his representation of it is not in the slightest ecclesiastical; he has, in a word, not a shadow of a notion of the metaphysical process.’45 in a most lucid analysis, călinescu goes on to demonstrate how eminescu is able to work his philosophical concerns into poems that, in their rhythm and

43 eminescu, ‘din abecedarul economic’ [Timpul, 21 dec 1877]; SP, 201.44 schopenhauer, Essays, 96.45 călinescu, Opera lui Eminescu, 2:403.

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subject-matter appear folkloric and naturalistic. when eminescu writes lines like

only man is changeable,upon the earth a wandering racebut we can keep our place,as we were so we remain:the sea and rivers’ coursethe world and its dusty plains,the moon and the sun we remainthe wood and the water-source.46

– it is clear that he is not just identifying ventriloquially with the forms of nature, but with the stylised romantic symbols of his nation. ‘the woods are brother to the romanian’, he said in another poem in a folkloric metre and tone. as călinescu further remarked, ‘there is in eminescu’s poetry a fine conjunction of popular mythology and philosophy of annihilation, in a form which appears linear, but which nevertheless is a sophisticated admixture.’47

the themes of death and rebirth, aligned with folkloric themes, appear again in songs sung by members of the right-wing nationalist legionary movement in inter-war romania:

legionaries do not fearthat you will die youngfor you die to be rebornand reborn to diedeath, only the legionary deathis a joyful wedding for us.48

the link between eminescu’s folclor savant (as călinescu termed it) and the lines quoted above, is unmistakable.

while i do not wish tediously to repeat what is already well-known— that codreanu, the legionary movement founder, admired eminescu fanatically, and took inspiration from him—a couple of points are worth noting in this connection. first of all, that the legionaries’ cult of sacrifice in the name of the nation came not only from orthodox theology, nor yet from concepts of fatality in romanian folk literature, but also, and

46 eminescu, ‘revedere’, cited ibid., 404.47 ibid., 407. 48 weber, ‘romania’, 514–5. My theory would seek to modify weber’s description of

codreanu’s mystique as ‘akin to a cargo cult’, and put the emphasis back on local roots (but not strictly folkloric or popular-religious ones).

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possibly predominantly, from eminescu himself. secondly, the nihilist intellectuals who supported the movement, did not need to go abroad to find ideas to justify an anti-democratic, conservative, antisemitic national-ist movement with a cult of death and an ideology rebirth; in the writings and personality of eminescu, it had been part of the romanian tradition for nearly fifty years before the foundation of the legion of the archangel Michael in 1927.

Antisemitism

as for eminescu’s antisemitic pronouncements they too are well-known; but, unlike many other aspects of his nationalism hitherto covered, they are neither unique to him nor are they particularly egregious when com-pared to the opinions of many of his contemporaries. he saw them as ‘in general incapable of industrial work. however many Jews there might be in a town, we won’t find them working either in factories or in workshops.’49 he also described them as ‘a parasite element of middlemen, whose activ-ity does not reduce the cost of exchange of products, but increases it. . . .  they, as a commercial element, are absolutely damaging in all countries.’50 his solutions to the Jewish question ranged from creating conditions for assimilation to encouraging emigration: ‘but’, he added in one article,

with the lax organisation we suffer today, with the corruption instituted mainly by the administration, even the best and most nationalist solution would be nothing but a palliative against an acute symptom, rather than the particular medicine to cure the organic disease we suffer from.51

in other words, although unquestionably antisemitic, he did not instigate violence against the Jews, nor advocate enforced expulsion: his articles fairly consistently argue for the problem to be treated by the reorganiza-tion of the general economic system, rather than by direct interventionist

49 eminescu, ‘teoria compensaţiei muncei’ [Timpul, 20 oct 1881]; SP, 368. on the sources for eminescu’s socio-demographic analysis of the Jewish question, and their ques-tionable character, see cernovodeanu, ‘probleme de demografie’.

50 ibid.51  eminescu, ‘soluţia problemei sociale’ [Timpul, 17 Jul 1879]; SP, 250. this line of argu-

ment is again borrowed from Maiorescu, who criticized liberal economic policy, and accused the liberals of trying to manipulate anti-semitism to cover up for their political shortcomings. see Maiorescu, ‘contra şcoalei bărnuţiu’, in idem, Critice, 2:204–5. but emi-nescu did not follow Maiorescu in advocating ‘the fundamental ideas of humanity and liberalism’ against the excesses of the day.

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policies against Jews. the period in which eminescu wrote saw frequent ravaging of synagogues, burning of Jewish houses, arrests, forcible expul-sions from romania, and several murders caused by racial incitement. the motivation for this seems to lie at least partly in medieval notions of Jews as killers of christ, rather than scientific theories of race: the 1868 sacking of a galaţi synagogue apparently started following a rumour that christian blood was being used in Jewish rituals. eminescu did not gener-ally use language of this kind. nevertheless, he did advocate on occasion the withdrawal of Jews’ licences to sell spirits which policy was frequently implemented, and often led to Jews being arrested as vagrants and then forcibly deported.52

eminescu, then, despite his tendency to home in on the ethnic dimensions of many other issues, saw the question mainly as a political- economic one. the large number of his pronouncements on the subject is partially, but not exclusively, explicable by the fact that he was editing a political weekly at a time when the western powers assembled at the congress of berlin made recognition of romanian independence condi-tional upon the admission of Jews to romanian citizenship. this charac-teristic of eminescu’s writings on the Jews has led some commentators to rebut the charge that his attitude towards the Jews is primarily ethnic in content.53 it is, however, a common feature of antisemitic discourse that it claims a basis in some extra-racial quality—in this case, economics—in order to appear to provide ‘autonomous’ proof of the veracity of the eth-nic characteristics under discussion, and thus to bolster the plausibility of the racial argument. it is true that eminescu’s writings on Jews are by no means exceptional in the context of the age. but he himself protested vig-orously on at least one occasion when he was accused of philosemitism.54

yet another critic, william oldson, has constructed an interesting the-sis around romanian anti-semitism, arguing that romanian politicians and writers of the nineteenth century were not racists of a fanatic nature, but that they developed a peculiar variation on the antisemitic discourse, ‘neither humanitarian nor doctrinaire’. this discourse was primarily elab-orated for the purposes of countermanding the western powers’ resented insistence that Jews enjoy citizenship rights as a condition of the indepen-dence granted at the congress of berlin (1878): its principal component

52 a detailed account of the Jewish question surrounding the recognition of the roma-nian state in Kellogg, Road, 39–61.

53 ciorănescu, ‘la pensée politique’, 7; in more nuanced form, heitmann, ‘eminescu’.54 eminescu, ‘reflectare’ [Curierul de Iaşi, 7 Jul 1876], in Opere, 9:149–50.

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was an argument that the ‘eastern’ Jews to be found in romania were not of the same grade of civilization as urban Jewry settled in the west. this was not, oldson maintains, an argument from race but from cultural char-acteristics and lifestyle: it involved rationalizing the arguments against the Jews in a style less impeachable by the west. he concludes that romanian anti-semitism, though brutal and intellectually shallow, was providential for the Jews in that its vagaries and divergence from the modern norm allowed them to survive. he points eminescu up as an ‘apostle of eth-nic nationalism’, but concludes that he was ‘more of a xenophobe than a physically violent fanatic’.55

this is not an unreasonable assessment, but it is important, i think, to note that eminescu did make very emphatic use of such concepts of race such as were current in the 1880s. if the word ‘racist’ to describe a pseudo-scientifically legitimated course of political action had not yet been invented, the idea of race was common currency throughout europe.56 Moreover, it is not hard to find instances of eminescu specifi-cally using the concept of race to attack the ‘rationalist’ line of argument. nevertheless, he inverts the points of reference by making racism a Jewish weakness:

whenever the israelite question is discussed, the romanian writer is ter-rified lest he be seen to interpret it as race hatred, as national or religious prejudice.[. . .]

we are accustomed to look at matters in a more natural manner. [. . .].they came into our country not as friends, nor as men seeking their daily

bread, but as enemies; as a foreign race they declared war upon us, to the death, using instead of knives and pistols, drink falsified with poison. [origi-nal emphasis].57

it is clear, then, that eminescu’s writings did much to validate the use of the argument from race when discussing the Jewish question, and that he was keen to adapt relatively new european scientific writings in this direction. if one is to distinguish between race as a generalized concept within nineteenth-century anthropology, and racism as a later, pseudo-scientific legitimation of segregation and antipathy, one could say that eminescu took the former as his starting point, but led the argument a long way towards the latter position.

55 oldson, A providential antisemitism, 163; 121.56 hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism, 107–9, locates the 1880s and 1890s as the key

period in which ‘scientific’ groundwork of racism gained ground.57 eminescu, untitled article, [Timpul, 1 nov 1881], in Opere, 12:389.

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eminescu’s anti-foreigner rhetoric emphatically does attain violent pathological degrees when it comes to greek liberals. he developed what he called ‘the theory of the superimposed layer’ to attack ‘these parvenus who, through their similarity in religion, managed to intermingle with romanians, to deceive them and become their masters: and, for their plan to succeed better, they bought up all our national instincts.’58 he came to blame them, and only them, for the foreign domination of romania, for the perceived ‘false forms of culture’ that he had previously accused french-educated romanians of instituting, and for the conditions of the romanian peasant:

the reins of true mastery have escaped from the hand of the autochtho-nous element and fallen into foreign hands . . . our own people, exploited wickedly, impoverished, diminishing numerically and without a clear con-sciousness of what should be done . . . we have, then, a layer superimposed upon this people, a kind of sediment of pick-pockets and coquettes, risen from the admixture of oriental and occidental scum, incapable of truth and patriotism.59

eminescu goes on to apply ‘scientific’ ethnological theories of race:

comparative cranioscopic studies would be of use, and the youth of the medical faculty would do some good, comparing the cubic capacity of a true, daco-romanic skull with the confines of those sunken hollows in which resides the intellectual sterility of the red party.60

‘everything must be dacianized from now on’, he insists, and ends on an apocalyptic note: ‘for the presently dominant generation (i.e. the liberal ‘foreigners’), the genius of the romanian people is a book bearing seven seals.’61

what to conclude after this? eminescu’s outburst is all the more pecu-liar considering that there is virtually no evidence of an influx of greeks into romania at this stage of its history: the community was, rather, on the decline. one could explain it in terms of the immediate political cir-cumstances, as a way of returning journalistic fire against the liberals who, being essentially bucharest-based and lacking support in Molda-via, had adopted a vigorously antisemitic line to attract support there. in exchange to this insult to his native Moldavia, eminescu tried to paint

58 eminescu, ‘pătura suprapusă’ [Timpul, 29 Jul 1881]; SP, 351.59 ibid., 353–4.60 eminescu, ‘teoria păturii suprapuse’ [Timpul, 6 aug 1881]; SP, 358.61  eminescu, ‘pătura suprapusă’ [Timpul, 29 Jul 1881]; SP, 352, 356.

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the southern province of the romanian kingdom as awash with its own foreign element, the greeks. the liberals had successfully attacked the Junimist politician petre carp for his philosemitism, and eminescu was trying to attack the ‘red party’, as he called it, by associating them in the same way with a foreign element.62

at least part of the explanation lies in a symptomatic exasperation with the entire mechanisms of constitutional government, which, after five years of supporting the out-of-office conservatives, had reached breaking point. while a fixed philosophical vision gave great force to his lyric cre-ations, it could be said to have soured his political outlook irremediably. the world of political action was merely phenomenal; it had no meta-physical basis and could be rejected at will. this led him to the paradoxi-cal position of denying the reality of romania’s hard-won independence. eminescu frequently attacked sovereignty together with liberty, equality and fraternity: the failure of the newly-created national state to conform to his organic vision of what it should be led him, in heated moments like these, to reject the romanian state absolutely.63

a related factor was the contradiction contained in eminescu’s concep-tualization of the peasant, presented as the carrier of the undying roma-nian essence. Metaphysically the peasant was (and often still is) seen as some kind of symbol of transcendent wisdom, the thing in itself, the id; this belief was held not because the peasant was (like outer space), unknow-able, or because (like god) he knew everything; but because nobody did happen to want to know about him, and nobody would give him anything much to know.64 Moreover, eminescu’s strong sense of history—of past offences against the romanian nation living on in the present—required him to defend the peasant not just against real threats but also against the injustices that the phanariot greeks had allegedly perpetrated against the autochthonous population. this anti-phanariotism had been a staple of the 1848 generation, and showed itself to be a remarkably deep-seated element of romania’s historical mentality.65 eminescu never reconciled the contradictions of a high authoritarian politics with an often deeply felt identification with the class who suffered most in 19th century romania.

62 ornea, Junimea, 253–9.63 e.g. eminescu, ‘icoane vechi şi icoane nouă, ii’ [Timpul, 13 dec 1877]; SP, 182: ‘see

what a wretched state we have reached as a result of sovereignty, liberty, fraternity, equal-ity and the rest!’

64 see chapter 1 above.65 see lemny, ‘la critique’.

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a final point worth bringing in is that eminescu’s sense of threat to his ethnic nation, and the perceived absence of any political mechanism to defend himself, makes him argue as though he were part of a minor-ity himself, whereas in fact he belonged to an ethnic group forming a 90 percent majority in his particular state. george schöpflin’s comments in an article on the east european situation over 100 years later are remark-ably relevant:

this history of having been deprived of power has contributed to majority national behaviour under post-communism, in that majorities behave as if they were in mortal danger of extinction . . . where a community has lived with the sense of threat, it will go on looking for external dangers, whether they exist or not: indeed, they will create them and sometimes end up vic-tims of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that the feared threat actually becomes a real one.66

the difference between the nineteenth-century situation and the contem-porary one described by schöpflin is that the party in power in eminescu’s time was as vigorous and xenophobic, as ethnically nationalist, as emi-nescu himself; unlike the communist governments of post-1945 eastern europe, the ‘red’ (liberal) party of the romanian 1870s and 1880s did not ostensibly suppress the national ideal. but the outcome, ‘a set of public identities marked by deep fissures and contradictions’, was essentially the same.

perhaps the most enduring romanian symbol of the kind of national-ism eminescu advocated, is his own life. titu Maiorescu’s mythologization of him in a posthumous edition of his poems makes eminescu sound like his own view of the romanian nation:

his ostensible life-story is easily told, and we don’t believe that in its entire course any external incident would have had a very significant influence on him. what eminescu was, and what he became, is a result of his inborn genius . . . his pessimism was not the limited complaints of an egoist unsatis-fied with his own fate, rather it was etherealized under the calmer from of a melancholy for the fate of mankind in general.67

eminescu’s own dramatization of himself as a poet can be seen in his account of the symbolic meaning, as he saw it, of ‘the evening star’, his greatest poetic achievement: ‘the allegorical meaning i gave [the eve-ning star] is that, although genius knows no death, and its name escapes

66 schöpflin, ‘the communist experience’, 197.67 Maiorescu, ‘poetul eminescu’.

national ideology between lyrics and metaphysics 183

from simple forgetting, on the other hand, on earth he can neither make anybody happy, nor be happy himself. he is immortal but lacks good fortune.’68 part of the symbolic image of eminescu as poet and national symbol consists in presenting him as some kind of goethean polymath:

friendless in his lifetime and made fun of, eminescu becomes after his death, through an equally violent exaggeration of [his] cult, the prototype of all the human characteristics and virtues.

history? eminescu.political economy? eminescu.pedagogy? eminescu. . . .eminescu too has become, in the absence of a true criticism, the begin-

ning and end of each and every disciple, the supreme authority, the ‘all-knowing one’.69

this sense of eminescu as somehow prototypical, a poetic incarnation of the indestructible will of his people, derives at least partly from his own work. even if it is not the only possible interpretation, it cannot easily be dismissed as a wilful manipulation of his legacy to promote whatever national ideology happens to suit the moment. Moreover, i would sug-gest that it is this very process of metaphysical systematizing—involving aspects of reincarnation; an attempt at ‘timeless’ rather than developmen-tal interpretations of historical forms; together with a reading of traditional fatalism in terms of sacrifice and rebirth—that constitute the essence of eminescu’s contribution to ideological forms of nationalism in romania.

the ‘content’ of his work, as opposed to the ‘form’, is not something whose importance i would wish to disparage, still less explain away; but i would argue that most of the subjects he dealt with were on the political and literary agenda prior to his arrival on the scene. the image of the peas-ant as ‘the only positive class’ and the carrier of the material and spiritual burden of the nation, comes to eminescu’s work from Maiorescu. anti-semitism was not eminescu’s private property but something he shared with ion brătianu, ion ghica, Vasile alecsandri, Mihai Kogălniceanu, dimitrie bolintineanu, ion creangă, ioan slavici and most other literary and political figures of his time. authoritarian anti-liberal sentiment is as

68 călinescu, Opera, 1:263.69 ibid., 335. elsewhere călinescu spoke out against exaggerated symbolic readings of

his life: see his Mihai Eminescu, 1:335–6. but as ioana pârvulescu has shown, neither he nor other critics have successfully evaded the temptation to interpret eminescu in terms of his own symbolic system. pârvulescu, ‘ “luceafărul poeziei româneşti” ’; see also hitchins, Mit şi realitate, 286–95; both, ‘Mihai eminescu’; Mihăilescu, ‘eminescu’, 86.

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old as the hills, while its revival and articulation in the late nineteenth century coincided with eminescu’s entry into public life owes something to him, it should be stressed that he was the servant of this movement rather than its master. but the establishment of the image of eminescu as a poetic emanation of the profound will of the romanian people was irre-sistible, especially to a generation whose infatuation with the significance of literature was such that a liberal spirit could declare, typically, that lit-erature was ‘the only form of life in which we have produced something by ourselves.’70 it became natural, then, to interpret eminescu’s writings in terms of his own poetic mythology, and the same aura was more or less critically extended to all his writings, which could become a kind of ‘true gospel of romanian nationalism’.71

it could be argued that, since schopenhauer’s thought had been known in Junimea circles prior to eminescu’s interpretation of it, then this aspect of his work was not original either. Maiorescu himself seems to have been aware of schopenhauer at least since 1861, and other Junimists, Vasile pogor for instance, got to know the philosopher’s writings well. but nobody except eminescu among the Junimea group seems to have grasped the potentiality of the mystical, palingenetic nature of the inde-structibility of the will. pogor’s own memoirs describe the consternation which the introduction of these ideas caused when eminescu read his story ‘poor dionis’ to Junimea in 1872.72 nobody then could have imagined that the story of a poor peasant boy in a fleece hat who imagines himself reincarnated in the court of a Moldavian prince, could possibly become a prototypical romanian story: but then they were not to know of another peasant boy in a fleece cap who would imagine himself as ‘the practi-cal reincarnation of all ancestral bravery and wisdom from the dacian kings onwards to romania’s feudal princes and the more recent fighters for national independence’,73 and who happened to be the leader of their country.

eminescu’s nationalism, then, was conservative, authoritarian, ethni-cally motivated, and based, as one astute critic has recently pointed out, on ‘the awareness of the irreversibility of the break with “the fundamental

70 xenopol, ‘studii’, 182.71  or so the 1941 editor of eminescu’s political writings, ion creţu, described them (old-

son, A providential antisemitism, 116).72 on the introduction of schopenhauer’s thought into romania, ornea, Junimea, 158ff.

pogor’s account of this reading is reprinted in eminescu, Proza literară, 337–40.73 gallagher, Romania after Ceauşescu, 58.

national ideology between lyrics and metaphysics 185

class”, which constantly nourished a mauvaise conscience patriotism from which they attempted to escape by inventing a theory of returning in illo tempore.’74 in many respects this was quite typical of many european nationalisms of the period in which eminescu was writing. the unique appeal of his interpretation of schopenhauer, however, and the very art-istry of the poems in which these ideas took form, has ensured that emi-nescu became one of the most deeply-embedded lodestones of romanian nationalist ideology.

74 patapievici, Cerul, 101.

Chapter seven

Ion LuCa CaragIaLe: the taLL taLe of the romanIan natIon*

In a lecture delivered in paris in 1948, mircea eliade offered a theory of national literary traditions whereby each nation’s literature is defined in terms of two polar opposites: ‘any genuine culture is polar; that is, it appears in antonymic and complementary spiritual traditions.’ thus, a national literature depends not on a monolithic linear inherited canon, but on a play between two opposites within it: Dionysus and apollo in greek culture, Dante and petrarch in Italy, rabelais or montaigne versus pascal in france, meister eckhardt or goethe as against Wagner or nietz-sche in germany, and so on.1

for romanian literature, eliade acknowledges eminescu’s unique-ness, but cautions that ‘his work cannot represent the romanian spiritual phenomenon in its entirety. alongside eminescu, we have to mention Caragiale.’2 very broadly speaking, the ‘eminescians’ embody conserva-tism, a romantic view of history, an emphasis on rural indigenous tra-ditions, emphatic lyricism in their attitude towards nature, women and love. ‘Caragialians’, on the other hand, stand for a critical cosmopolitan-ism, an inferiority complex versus the Western society, an ironic view of nature, the ridiculing of patriarchal customs, and so forth.

this is interesting not only in the way it relativizes the idea of striving to create a unified national canon of literature—an ongoing enterprise today even in the developed Western nations—but also because it is a useful, and as far as I am aware, largely unnoticed, starting point for a discussion of the role of language in the development of nationalism. most theo-rists either point to the importance of a unified national literature if they want to argue in favour of linguistic nationalism; or will describe a state of polyglot chaos artificially unified by non-linguistic factors, often politi-cal and economic. examples of the former abound, particularly among literary critics and writers who see themselves as working for the nation’s good by dint of the fact that they ‘guard’ or protect its language. the latter

* unpublished: developed from a paper given to ‘narrating the nation’ conference, school of oriental and african studies, London, october 2001.

1  eliade, ‘two romanian spiritual traditions’, 162–9.2 Ibid.

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position might be illustrated by the ‘instrumentalist’ approaches of theo-rists like John Breuilly or eric hobsbawm, who argue that planned lan-guage construction is merely an instrument of power politicians who have their own, and not their people’s interests, at heart: ‘how else, except by state power, could romanian nationalism insist in 1863 on its Latin ori-gins . . . by writing and printing the language in roman letters instead of the hitherto usual Cyrillic?’3

Both schools make the mistake of assuming that the invention of a lit-erary tradition either succeeds or fails, that there is no halfway stage; and that linguistic nationalism is only in evidence where there is an attempt to construct a pure, monoglot language and literature. an exception is hobsbawm’s suggestion that

the heritage of sections, regions and localities of what had become ‘the nation’ could be combined into an all national heritage, so that even ancient conflicts came to symbolise their reconciliation on a higher, more comprehensive plane. Walter scott thus built a single scotland on the terri-tory soaked in the blood of warring highlanders and Lowlanders, Kings and Covenanters, and he did so by emphasising their ancient traditions.4

Which is all very well except that—as hobsbawm points out elsewhere, but not here—scott failed to unify the scottish nation either politically or culturally. hobsbawm might have been nearer the mark had he posited a model of scottish literary culture with, say, robert Burns, as a vernacu-lar nativist opposite pole to scott’s national epic; or, if that sounds too much like socialist realism (the view of scott as an unhealthy bourgeois and Burns as a proletarian prophet coloured soviet images of scottish literature for a long time), one could propose the ‘quadrilateral’ descrip-tion of scottish culture as put forward by alistair gray.5 perhaps theorists of nationalism, in attempting to treat the subject on a world-wide scale, don’t have time to treat the problematics of national identity within a lan-guage, and concentrate only on the validity or otherwise of the debating positions of those engaged in conflict between languages.

to return to the romanian instance: in the period leading up to and immediately after the creation of an independent state in 1878, the roma-nian language was still far from codified. not only were there many gram-matical and orthographic irregularities, but also arguments continued as

3 Breuilly, Nationalism and the state; hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism, 112–3.4 Ibid., 90.5 gray, ‘the scottish archipelago’.

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to the degree of Latinity which romanian did or ought to contain. Diction-aries and etymological works published in the period show the tortuous and difficult nature of this process: I. massim and a.t. Laurian’s Glosariu Roman published in Bucharest in 1871 goes as far as placing words of non-Latin origin in a separate, appended volume from the main body of his dictionary.6 the traditional wisdom (and the best-known to students of nationalism) justified romanian social and psychological unity by the fact that, as eminescu put it:

there is perhaps no other nation numbering twelve million people whose constituent parts are as little differentiated as the romanian one. the lan-guage is possibly unique in knowing hardly any dialects; popular customs are the same.7

Yet claims of this sort do not represent the only tendency of the period. attempts to prove a Latin origin for the language not only differentiated romanian from her slavic and hungarian neighbours, but provided a cultural link with the West. this link, however, created problems of its own: with the dominance of french as a secondary language of education, arguments arose among the Latinists as to what extent words could be borrowed from french, which was a Latin language but, problematically, a foreign one. thus it can be seen even from a brief and incomplete sum-mary that the difficulties for romanian literary nationalists did not end simply with the issuing of an edict changing the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin.

the contribution of the playwright and storyteller Ion Luca Caragiale (1852–1912) to the political linguistic debate was, in explicit terms, short.8 But he represents the opposite pole from eminescu in that he praised the romanian language not only for its unity but for its variety:

the romanians today are a people of over ten million souls in all, with one and the same language, which (boasting aside) is extraordinarily beautiful . . .—a possession all the more original for being a medley of ancient

6 Laurianu & massimu, Glosariu.7 Cited by Jucan, ‘mihai eminescu’, 23. It should be noted, however, that eminescu

did not advocate a Latinist linguistic purism. While asserting the romanian language’s superiority and the solidarity of its dialects, he would have opposed ‘scientific’ attempts at cleansing it of its vernacular elements. french and greek neologisms upset him more than anything.

8 I have used Caragiale, Opere. In english there is a short informative monograph by tappe, Ion Luca Caragiale. tappe also translated some of Caragiale’s stories in a bilingual edition: Schiţe şi povestiri / Sketches and stories. some of his plays are translated in Cara-giale, Lost letter.

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inheritances and acquisitions—greek, slavonic, oriental and other—all stamped with its undeniable seal of nobility, a romance, Latin seal, which proves it their true and indisputable owner.9

this represents an unusual appreciation of the heterogeneity and com-plexity of a language, in contrast to the prevailing monolinguistic propa-ganda of the day; yet, as the above quotation shows, Caragiale’s argument need not represent either an unpatriotic stance or a sense of inferiority towards Western cultures.

his fiction, too, although it frequently parodies and ridicules linguis-tic forms, does not simply attack the shortcoming of the romanian lan-guage; just as his satires on minor officialdom and provincial high-lifers, on what hobsbawm calls ‘the lesser examination-passing classes’ often draw one’s attention to the serious problems of communication, social life and administrative government in the new state rather than indulging in purely negative caricature. ‘telegrame’ is a short narrative presented exclusively in the form of telegraphic correspondence between a small town lawyer trying to expose a scandal in the local prefecture, and the prime minister and King, who delegate replies via the newly-founded ministries. the lawyer and the other provincial correspondents write in a bastardized moldavian telegraphese; the Bucharest officials respond in the frenchified romanian which was then the high fashion. two points can be made. firstly, the political object of the satire can be read not only to be the absurd pettiness of the local scandal itself—corruption, nepo-tism, absenteeism, drunkenness and sexual infidelity are all targeted—but also the weakness and arbitrariness of the young structure of government, which demands that redress of such wrongs can be dealt with only by petition to the King or prime minister. Likewise in the linguistic satire, where both the vernacular of the provincials and the cosmopolitan idiom of the capital are satirized equally: no distinction is drawn between them in point of silliness. Yet because of the dual nature of language in story-telling—because, in Bakhtin’s formulation, language is both represented (here, as an object of laughter) and representing (the means by which lan-guage is ridiculed)10—Caragiale can demonstrate the vigorous potential of the language at the same time as he mocks the various deformations of it.

9 Caragiale, ‘morală şi educaţie’ [1889], cited by tappe, Ion Luca Caragiale, 95.10 Bakhtin, ‘from the prehistory of novelistic discourse’.

ion luca caragiale 191

Caragiale’s imitation of both regional dialects and official forms of dis-course is remarkable for its comprehensively wide range of targets. ‘proces verbal’ [procedural report] represents the procedural memoranda of police authorities dealing with a housing dispute; ‘un pedagog de şcoală nouă’ [an educationalist of the new school] targets professors and lin-guists, and similarly appropriates their discourse; ‘five o’clock’ mimics the conversations of would-be high society at a Bucharest tea-party (eng-lish customs, french language, romanian petty jealousies); ‘high Life’ tells the story of a provincial journalist who writes glowingly of the prefect’s wife when she appears at a charity ball, but is let down by a typographi-cal error when the article is published, causing his flattery to be debased into insult; ‘urgent . . .’ again uses official correspondence to illustrate the failure of a local authority to provide winter fuel in a girl’s school. regional dialects of romanian are similarly given full representation: ‘o făclie de paşte’ [an easter torch] has a moldavian setting, while ‘La hanul lui mân-joală’ [at mânjoală’s Inn] uses muntenian forms to full effect; ‘un peda-gog de şcoală nouă’ parodies transylvanian philologists, while, as we have seen, the unique linguistic oddities to be found in Bucharest are not left untouched. In this way, Caragiale was able to build up a complete pano-rama of the multifarious languages, and political modes of discourse, pre-vailing in the newly independent state. to put it more succinctly one could say, paraphrasing Dickens, ‘he do the romanians in different voices’.

Curiously, however, although he has of course been recognized by his compatriots as a comic genius and as the founding father of a certain satir-ical tradition, this is almost never seen explicitly as contributing explicitly to an idea of the romanian nation. though the concept of ‘caragialism’ became a familiar trope to describe an absurd romanian situation, and Caragiale himself is a celebrated figure in literary history, he does not appear in discussion of the romanian national idea with anything like the frequency of eminescu or nicolae Iorga, or other figures at the tradi-tionalist, peasantist pole of eliade’s dichotomy. Indeed, eliade himself, in the lecture alluded to above, does not even properly discuss the cosmo-politan element of the romanian tradition, but merely reduces his treat-ment of it to a discussion of the romanian expatriate community which he links back to the nomadic pastoral traditions of romanian shepherds, who need to ‘become aware of the mission history asks of them.’11

11 eliade, ‘two romanian spiritual traditions’.

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however, one could just as well argue that Caragiale was vital to the establishment of the romanian literary language as a tool of nation-builders to the extent that he recognised and reconciled the diversity of the romanian language, and saw the way that heterogeneity can produce uniqueness in a language. Bakhtin comments on the way that nations can objectivize their linguistic consciousness only through consciousness of another’s tongue; that the roman literary language—the ancient ‘pure’ source that contemporary romanian scholars were trying to obtain—achieved its stylised uniqueness only through the pervasive relationship it maintained with earlier, seemingly definitive greek forms.12

similarly, Caragiale’s formal borrowings in the realm of storytelling—‘hanul lui mânjoalã’ shows the influence of poe, while ‘Curiosul pedepsit’ [the Curious man punished] is a paraphrase of one of Cervantes’ contes, and ‘Kir Ianulea’ takes its theme and plot from machiavelli—set up zones in which the diverse romanian dialects could ‘interanimate’ each other (to use Bakhtin’s word), as well as spaces for the vernacular narrative tra-ditions could play out their differences from, and similarities to, Western models.

In this sense Caragiale set up frameworks and spaces for dialogical debate, without which the romanian literary language, and indeed its identity, would not have matured in the way it did. Walter Benjamin writ-ing of the russian storyteller nikolai Leskov, aphorizes that ‘the story-teller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.’13 for romania, Caragiale was the figure in which the young national language encountered itself for the first time.

The Profundity of the Superficial

the encounters described in Caragiale’s sketches and tales often remain simply that: incidental contacts, rather than discoveries or revelations. his characters frequently fail to grasp themselves, or find themselves confused or even deranged by the unfamiliarity of their surroundings: far from learning from experience and emerging better and wiser, these newly enfranchised people seem to discover only that they are unable to comprehend the world they inhabit. In ‘Cum devine cineva revoluţionar şi om politic’ [how somebody becomes a revolutionary and a politician],

12 Ibid.13 Benjamin, ‘the storyteller’, 107.

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the tale is told of a country boy who comes to town to study for the priest-hood; sent one evening by his landlord to fetch coal, he becomes en route embroiled in a political demonstration, and is arrested for hurling the said coal at a cordon of mounted policemen. the narrator ends by link-ing the sacred catechism the boy set out to learn, with the new secular faith he meets with, by accident as if by holy destiny, in an alley behind the national theatre:

Can one really compare the modest career and humble activity of a poor dear village priest, with the career and activity of a citizen of the capital, who is called once a year, as by clockwork, every spring, to determine the political course of the romanian kingdom?14

the same path of descent from high expectations to the depths of failure is described at greater length and psychological detail in ‘Două loturi’ [two lottery tickets]. mr. Lefter popescu and his wife have lost two winning lot-tery tickets: mr. popescu must pay ten percent of the winnings to an army captain who lent him the money to buy them. he and his wife undergo tri-als and torments of greed; cause to be harassed an old-clothes woman said to have purloined them; fail to show at work; eventually mr. popescu loses his job. on clearing his desk before leaving, he finds the tickets—but the numbers are inverted, each winning in the other lottery. then, as now, the lotteries are proclaimed in the name of the nation and the advancement of civilization: the beneficiaries are ‘the Company for founding a roma-nian university in Dobrogea, at Constanţa’ and ‘the association for the foundation and endowment of an astronomical observatory at Bucha-rest’. But no such enlightenment dawns upon popescu (whose Christian name is eleutheriu, ‘liberation’, but shortened to Lefter, ‘penniless’) and his wife. nor yet upon the reader. Caragiale first stages a ‘respectable’ end-ing with mrs. popescu taking the holy orders, and her husband wandering the streets of the capital, muttering ‘vice versa! a word

vague as the vagaries of the vast sea which beneath its unfrowning surface conceals in its mysterious rocky depths innumerable ships, shattered before they could reach harbour, lost for ever!

But . . . as I am not one of those [‘respectable and self-respecting’] authors, I prefer to tell you straight: after the row at the bank I don’t know what hap-pened to my hero and mrs. popescu.15

14 Caragiale, Opere, 1:240.15 Ibid.

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eric tappe rightly defends this ending against charges of artistic irrel-evancy: ‘there is a good deal to be said for the gently frivolous conclu-sion to a story which was otherwise on the point of getting itself taken too seriously.’16 But there is more to it than that. the apparently offhand closing remark masks a disturbing observation about what actually hap-pens to people who are shipwrecked on the rock of lottery greed: they become unknown and forgotten. Just as the popescus are unable to find true happiness owing to their material lust and sloth; just as romania will not attain enlightenment through endowing hasty institutions with the income of greed (on the last page we glimpse a fire service observatory, a possible social inferno in place of the proposed astronomical heaven); so Caragiale offers us not even catharsis or expiation as an ending, but unknowingness of a bitterly trivial nature. this obliquity in conclusion is characteristic of many of the best modern short stories—James’s ‘the turn of the screw’, Joyce’s ‘an encounter’, herman melville’s ‘Bartleby’. But whereas these last examples invariably invest their endings with a certain cosmic resound, pleading with the universal—‘ah, Bartleby! ah humanity!’—Caragiale simply shrugs off his ignorance; insouciance as the true horror.

The Limits of Epiphany

even when Caragiale does treat more substantially religious types of knowledge, there is no sense of the characters ‘discovering’ themselves or arriving at wisdom. one of his greatest tales, ‘o făclie de paşte’ (an easter torch), gives a highly atmospheric and gruesome rendering of an attack on a traumatized Jewish innkeeper in a marshy moldavian village. Leiba Zibal has moved from Iaşi, where he lost his job as a tavern-keeper’s servant because he fainted at the sight of blood, and moved to podeni. In his turn he also has to lay off his servant, an idle, dishon-est worker who threatens him back: ‘Wait for me on easter eve, mister: we’ll crack our painted eggs . . . I’ll be closing your account too, let me tell you.’17

Leiba goes at once to tip the ominously cheerful subprefect, who scorns the Jew’s fears but warns him to guard against the wicked poor of the village. easter night comes around: the mail-coach brings word that the

16 tappe, Introduction to Caragiale, Sketches and stories, 15.17 Caragiale, Opere, 1: 55.

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inn-keeper at the post before has been mauled by a hooligan. two medi-cal students aboard the coach are discussing the incident in the light of the modish scientific theories of the day:

atavism . . . alcoholism and its pathological consequences . . . Congenital vice . . . Deformation . . . paludism . . . and neurosis! so many conquests of modern science . . . and the case of reversion!Darwin . . . haeckel . . . Lombroso . . . at the case of reversion, the coachman’s eyes bulged; and in them shone a profound admiration for the conquests of modern science.18

Later that night, Leiba hears his tormentors drilling through his door; in his delirium he ensnares the arm which comes through the hole, fixing it to a post. But horror strikes, to the chime of the easter sunday church bells, as he is moved to revenge by cruelly burning, with ‘an easter torch’, the murderous arm. a crowd gathers.

‘Leiba Zibal,’ said the innkeeper in a lofty tone and a broad gesture, ‘is off to Iaşi to tell the rabbi that Leiba Zibal is not a Jew . . . Leiba is a goy . . . for Leiba Zibal has lit a torch for Christ.’19

While the ostensible content of this grotesque tale is, as one critic has suggested, ‘the ingenious cruelty of the man deranged by fear’20; its true subject is knowledge and what one does or does not learn from it. the knowledge of Christ’s resurrection revealed in church that night is trav-estied into the passion suffered by a non-believer, persecuted into aware-ness but unlikely to survive his ‘conversion’. Leiba’s own recourse is to the letter of the law, as he pays protection to the subprefect; but the law offers him no redemption for his tribute, merely bidding him be silent, ‘lest he awaken a desire to transgress in bad and poor men.’ Let down by his usual observance—he lives by the maxim ‘he who pays well is well guarded’—Leiba is overtaken by his irrational imaginings, until he is transformed at the end into ‘a scientist who seeks by mixing elements to catch one of nature’s subtle secrets, which has long eluded him.’ the medical stu-dents, blinded by the light of modernist scholarship and theories of racial stereotypes, are oblivious to the bloody violence of the attack they have witnessed. Yet none of these systems of belief can halt the onset of yet another sacrifice in the night of traditional religious festival. Caragiale may have gone some way to unifying the romanian language; but he can

18 Ibid., 60.19 Ibid., 68.20  Ibid., editor’s introduction, xxii.

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only describe, not reconcile, differences in belief. all we are left with at the tale’s end is a morsel of old advice:

and the man set off slowly eastwards, up the hill, like a sensible traveller, who knows that on a long journey one does not set out at a hurried pace.21

reflected in the closing proverb is a further remarkable aspect of this tale, also found in much of Caragiale’s work, namely the great attention paid to the effects of travel on perceptions of time, and on the spread of information. many of the types of knowledge that are juxtaposed in ‘o făclie de paşte’—and the news of the savagery in the neighbouring village—come to podeni by mail coach. Leiba himself marks time by its arrival and departure: he is in fact obsessed by it, and treats it almost religiously. his wife’s remark: ‘Leiba, here comes the coach; I can hear the bells’, sets it against the bells of the church, which the rest of the villag-ers obey. In Leiba’s obsession with transport-time, one is reminded of the Lilliputians attempting to ascertain the purpose of their captive gulliver’s pocket-watch:

and we conjecture that it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships: But we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us . . . that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his Life.22

at another point, Leiba sees that podeni is a bad place for an inn, ‘since the building of the railway, which makes a wide detour of the marshes.’ he yearns for the railway which would bring trade; in others of Caragi-ale’s tales, such as ‘C.f.r.’ [romanian railways] and ‘accelerat nr. 17’ [fast train no. 17], trains form the setting for tales of danger and attack, and themes of mistaken identity. they also bring about disturbing changes to one’s perception of time and space: in the latter story, two men enter a compartment and sit out ‘two-three kilometres in silence’. time is described by a unit of linear distance, while conversation stops. here, as throughout Caragiale’s œuvre, we get a sense of something strange and distorting about railways: here one has to bear in mind not only their effect on time-space perception, but also the fact that, in the romania of the 1870s and 1880s, they operated as a kind of symbol for foreign domina-tion of commerce, as well as for fear of invasion.23 elsewhere the modern invention is represented as a kind of debased national religion: in ‘o zi

21  Ibid., 68.22 swift, Gulliver’s travels, Book one, Ch. 4.23 Kellogg, Road, 68–74.

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solemnă’ [a solemn Day] the mayor of a provincial town becomes obsessed with getting his town’s name, in red letters like a saint’s day, on the timetable plate of the Bucharest-Berlin express. railways and mail-coaches bring connections, news and trade, and in ‘o făclie de paşte’, unspeakable fears: they will not, however, bring wisdom. to achieve that, Leiba Zibal has to set out on foot at the end of the tale.

Conclusion: The Tale as Symbol

the fleeting, apparently repetitive nature of Caragiale’s work might be summed up by this image of mechanized movement. he himself was criticized for excessive foreshortening, foreignness and dependence on stereotype. to g. Călinescu, romania’s foremost literary historian, he was ‘a thracian who does not represent us totally; he only exaggerates one of our meridional notes.’24 But he knew what he was doing with his types; they are utterly unlike the ‘reversion to type’ of the racial theorists. Lying behind the many repetitions and reappearances of stock characters, there is always an acknowledgement of their provisionality, their irreconciliabil-ity, and, supremely in ‘o făclie de paşte’, of their dangerous consequences. titu maiorescu quite missed the point when he asserted that Leiba Zibal is the archetype of the Jew.25 It is the tale itself which is the type; and its genius lies in its ability, as Benjamin also wrote, ‘to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’.26 It is hard to say whether Caragiale realised whether, in the figure of the Jew, he was grasping one of the key tragic subjects of the century to come; but the unhappy failure to understand what such an encounter meant in the modern world, the impossibility of gleaning any wisdom from it, is only true to the internal logic of this most luminous romanian tale. he may have reconciled the romanian language, but he could not do the same for the culture’s image of gentile and Jew, peasant and cosmopolite.27 his work is the portrayal of those misunderstandings and the measure of those distances between people.

24 Călinescu, History, 842.25 maiorescu, ‘Contraziceri?’, Critice, 2:309. maiorescu probably made this comment as

a cheap shot against his rival and Caragiale’s friend, the Jewish social theorist and literary critic Constantin Dobrogeanu-gherea, to whose criticisms this article was a response, and whom maiorescu and his circle nicknamed ‘Leiba’.

26 Benjamin, Illuminations, 247.27 on stereotypes of Jews in romanian popular culture, see oişteanu, Inventing the Jew.

part four

at the verbal frontiers of identity

Chapter eight

eugen ionesCu’s selves, 1934–1960*

The Critical Heritage

among students of modern theatre and literature, interest in ionescu’s work has, almost inevitably, declined in recent years. this is partly a common pattern in critical reputations of writers, which often suffer in the few years following their death but may be revived either by publi-cation of new writings or documents, or reevaluations in the light of a new cultural context. We could also invoke a general reevaluation of quite of lot of the canon of modernism in recent years—much more critical approaches to both the politics and the poetics of writers as diverse as ts eliot, samuel beckett, the surrealists, in fact more or less the modern-ist project as a whole. in ionescu’s case in particular, we perhaps ought to see this as a continuation of various critical reservations about his work, first formulated in fact in the late 50s and early 60s. paradoxically, this was precisely the time when his popular reputation was at his highest and he was establishing himself as a clear contender for classic status in post-war theatre. i will elaborate on these details later on.1

interest in ionescu’s life, on the other hand, has increased consider-ably. in some ways the major story of 1990s writing on ionescu was not so much critical revaluation but bringing to light of biographical material concerning his early years and also republication of some of his romanian works. since 1989 there have been three monographs on the subject of

* unpublished, developed from a talk given at the Centre for study of Central europe, uCl, January 2002 at the kind invitation of dr. tim beasley-Murray. the widely-publicized work of alexandra laignel-lavastine, L’oubli du fascisme, published shortly afterwards, has a title almost certainly less appropriate to ionescu than to her other two subjects, eliade and Cioran. laignel-lavastine’s work was subject to severe criticism by petreu, ‘Metoda franceză’, while ionesco’s daughter questioned both their work in a 2003 memoir (ionesco, Portrait). Writing in 2007, Quinney, ‘excess and identity’ seems unaware of the recent con-troversies; bejan, Criterion Association, 283–5 and 319–21 offers brief but useful treatment of some aspects.

1 for earlier criticism see laubreaux, ed. Les critiques; hughes and bury, Eugene Ionesco; leiner et al., Bibliographie 1980; subsequent criticism can be surveyed in the series Con-temporary literary criticism, vols. 1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 15, 41, 86.

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ionescu’s early years.2 ionescu’s first full length book Nu (bucharest 1934) had already been translated into french as Non and published by galli-mard in 1986. the romanian original came out in a new edition in 1992 in the new political conditions; and a fairly extensive collection of ionescu’s journalistic and critical writing from the 1930s was published in the same year under the title Război cu toată lumea [at war with everybody].3

in contrast, the three monographs published in english since 1989 on ionescu’s theatre pay remarkably little attention to the romanian aspects of his career; don’t particularly regard what happened to ionescu in roma-nia or what he did there as being a major motor for most of his creative production; and when they do, they tend to interpret romanian inspira-tion for his work in schematic and already established ways.4 the same goes for the only biography of ionescu yet to have been written, which contains numerous inaccuracies and indeed internal contradictions as to both the chronology and the general context of ionescu’s life in romania.5

those with some familiarity with ionescu’s life and work and/or some familiarity with the general state of research on cultural and political his-tory of 1930s romania will know that, in the latter context, ionescu’s name is very frequently invoked in terms of the judgements he is said to have made on the ludicrous conformism and imitativeness of romanian intel-lectuals, through the allegorical medium of drama in his play Rhinocéros, which was first performed in october 1959.6 Rhinocéros is set in a small provincial town in which all the main actors turn into rhinoceros with one exception, bérenger, who is seen as the solitary individual resisting a mass process of conversion to an ideology as ridiculous as it is contagious. ionescu himself said that

the purpose of the play was specifically that of describing the process of a country’s nazification, as well as the confusion of the individual who, natu-rally allergic to contagion, has to watch the mental metamorphosis of his collectivity. in the beginning, ‘rhinoceritis’ was a kind of nazism. nazism was, in large measure, in the period between the two wars, an inven-

2 ionescu [no relation to eugen], Les débuts littéraires; Cleynen-serghiev, La jeunesse lit-téraire, and hamdan, Ionescu avant Ionesco. an earlier, article length study was tudorică, ‘les débuts’. see also teodorescu-regier, From Bucharest to Paris.

3 ionescu, Război cu toată lumea.4 lamont, Ionesco’s imperatives; lane, Understanding Ionescu; gaensbauer, Ionescu

revisited.5 plazy, Eugène Ionesco.6 an earlier version was published as a short story in Lettres nouvelles (sep 1957) and

reprinted in ionesco, La photo du colonel.

eugen ionescu’s selves, 1934–1960 203

tion of the intellectuals, fashionable ideologues and semi-ideologues who propagated it.7

and both romanian and Western critics, as they become gradually more familiar with the situation in romania in the 1930s, where substantial por-tions of the intelligentsia acted in the name of that peculiar local variant of fascism, the iron guard, and have also known that one of the few distin-guished and talented romanian intellectuals not to sell out in this period was ionescu himself, have had no trouble in giving Rhinocéros an auto-biographical interpretation.8 one which not only has come to override other possible interpretations of the play, but also became a key reference point, almost a shorthand term for denoting the dynamics of romanian cultural politics not just in the 1930s but also in the 1990s.9

this interpretive narrative, it is clear, makes the author of Rhinocéros the sole lucid representative of a nation gone mad, the only rationalist in an irrational milieu which he eventually transcended, left and judged from the outside and from posterity. in other words, from being a fully paid-up insider in what has been called the romanian generation of angst and adventure, ionescu took a formal and rational decision, when he saw the moral framework of this world collapsing around him, got a bursary to paris in 1938, stayed there, became a leading light in the theatre of the absurd in the 1950s, and then at the end of that decade Rhinocéros was first performed in germany in 1959, providing the definitive and damning judgement on the society that he had left twenty years earlier, to which he no longer felt he had any formal ties.

What i propose to do here is to use some little-known biographical details about ionescu’s career to show not only that this is not the only possible reading of Rhinocéros, but also that Rhinocéros is not the only one of ionescu’s works in which his romanian experiences played a signifi-cant role. to some extent i want to explore the possibility that ionescu’s romanianness, and something that is even less known, namely his Jewish-ness, was a constant preoccupation of his and played a central role in his treatment of major human themes such as identity, the absurd, stigma, trauma. i hope at the same time to avoid falling into that other trap

7 ionesco, ‘notes on Rhinoceros’, in Notes et contre-notes, 183; in the preface to american school edition of Rhinocéros (ibid., 176), ionescu claimed to have been inspired by writer denis de rougemont’s description of hitler in 1938; but he also denied that the play was about any one ideology but about the way ideological systems in general destroy humanity.

8 Knowles, ‘eugène ionesco’s Rhinoceroses’; Călinescu, ‘ionescu and Rhinoceros’.9 shafir, ‘rinocerizarea romaniei; genaru, ‘o nouă rinocerizare?’

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familiar to anybody who has studied major european artists of the twen-tieth century who have an east european origin, namely attributing their success, their profundity and their global significance etc., to that particu-lar origin.10

i will concentrate on the period from 1934 to 1960, in other words from the date of publication of ionescu’s first book through his experiences in romania in the second half of the 1930s, departure for france, the writing and staging of what are still his most famous plays, The Bald Primadonna, The Chairs and The Lesson in the early 1950s, through the first production of Rhinocéros and its initial critical reception in 1960.

Romanian Naysayings

the authorised standard version—i.e. that prepared in close collaboration with ionescu himself and presented in 1991 by emmanuel Jacquart in the preface to the pléiades edition of ionescu’s Théâtre complet—has it that ionescu was born on the 26th of november 1909 in slatina, a small town in southern romania and named for his father, also called eugen ionescu, a lawyer by training and subprefect of slatina. his mother, thérèse ipcar, was the daughter of a french railway engineer, originally apparently from the pyrenees and working in romania.11 When ionescu was about one or two years old, the family moved to paris and his father enrolled for a doctorate in law at the sorbonne. five years later, eugen ionescu senior returned to romania, broke off relations with his family, collabo-rated with the german occupying regime and married another woman, while his first wife apparently believed that he had been killed in the war. the young eugen therefore grew up in france, partly looked after by his mother, partly living in children’s homes and refuges for war orphans in the french countryside, a period of alternately idyllic and traumatic mem-ory evoked numerous times in ionescu’s later autobiographical writings. it was not until the early 1920s—some time between 1922 or 1924—that his

10 students of romanian culture would be familiar with the cases of Constantin bran-cusi, tristan tzara, paul Celan, emil Cioran and Mircea eliade, to mention only the best known.

11  More recent evidence, published by the genealogist rădulescu in Adevărul literar şi artistic 485 (14 sep 1999; reprinted in rădulescu, Genealogii, and summarized in petreu, Ionescu în ţara tatălui) shows that both ionescu’s parents had romanian citizenship and his ‘frenchness’ depended on a great grandfather, emile Marin, for whom a french origin remains uncertain. ionesco’s daughter adds more detail in ionesco, Portretul, 29–32.

eugen ionescu’s selves, 1934–1960 205

father reappeared on the scene, successfully claimed custody over his chil-dren and eugen, his sister and his mother returned to romania. eugen’s relationship with his father was stormy and hateful: by the age of seven-teen he had moved out of his father’s home and was living with a sister of his mother. his mother by this stage was working as a secretary for the national bank of romania.

an immediate consequence was ionescu’s immersion in literature as a form both of rebellion and of escape from his oppressive father who has determined that he should become ‘a bourgeois, a magistrate, a soldier, a chemical engineer.’ from 1927 until 1938, ionescu published extensively in a variety of romanian modernist reviews and established himself, to use the clichéd language that he was so fond of demolishing, as the iconoclastic enfant terrible of romanian avant-garde criticism, while at the same time graduating in french literature from bucharest university and earning his living as a high school teacher. his first book, Nu (No), was published in 1934, when he was 24, and attempted a radical dem-onstration of the pointlessness and arbitrariness of literary criticism by giving alternately eulogistic and damning readings of the most prestigious romanian writers of the time: the poets tudor arghezi and ion barbu and the novelists Camil petrescu and Mircea eliade. on Mircea eliade’s first novel, Maitreyi, set in india, ionescu first wrote that

do you realise that Maitreyi is following the architecture of greek tragedy? the unreal is ceaselessly brought to life and with innumerable methods in each phrase, in each scene, in each episode . . .. . . a wealth of details, pure, ingenuous, miraculous, accompanied by atten-tion which transfigures them. . . . Maitreyi is a tragedy in the classic sense of the word. (128–30)

only five pages later, ionescu changes tack and gives a totally derisory account of eliade’s careerist posturing:

Mircea eliade has attempted to create literature and has not succeeded. he wanted to be a great leader and he was taken at his word, although all he does is stand on the spot and waves his arms around in the wind or, at most, he is an indicator of the wrong roads. the proof that they are the wrong roads? he has found people to follow him.

not managing to be anything, he wanted at least to go to india. eliade went as far as Constanţa, he returned secretly to bucharest and spent three months shut up in his attic. he constructed an alibi for himself and he wrote the novel Maitreyi, which however for the careful reader, is the clearest proof that he has never been to india.

Maitreyi is indeed an imitation of pre-romantic and exotic french fiction of a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago . . . (133)

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ionescu’s conclusion was that

you can like any book if you want to; you can dislike any book if you want to. i am convinced of the uselessness of literary criticism, just as i am convinced of the metaphysical insignificance of literature. (115)

the critic is a stupid animal . . . the stupid man is the one for whom reali-ties are opaque. the literary critic is obliged to be stupid. (141)

if god exists, there is no point in paying attention to literature. if god does not exist, there is still no point in paying attention to literature. (200)12

having demonstrated textually the idiocies and inconsistencies of most critics, ionescu then gratuitously and for good measure insulted them personally: ‘Mircea vulcănescu eats seven cakes. petru Comarnescu plays sport. tudor vianu is fat. nichifor Crainic enjoys a drink’—in a kind of reductio ad absurdum of literary analysis’s failure to offer philosophically rigorous distinctions between text and context. at the end of this exercise in deconstruction—which in many ways went further than the french surrealists who had merely declared in January 1925 that ‘we have noth-ing to do with literature but when necessary we are capable as anyone else of making use of it’, whereas ionescu took the death of literature for granted and seems to be trying to hasten the death of criticism too—what is perhaps surprising is that this demonstration does not provide a spring-board for the denunciation of metaphysics or the search for meaning in life, but on the contrary, a reassertion of their fundamental importance in contrast to the stupidity, inutility and insignificance of either reading, writing or speaking. long passages of logical argument are interspersed with fragmentary diary notes:

i am going to die. i am going to di-ie. i am going to di-i-ie. i am going to di-i-i-i-ie. emposibel! (140)

or

o lord god! My part of paradise! My part of paradise! have i lost forever my part of paradise? o lord god, i don’t want to be melodramatic and i don’t want you to believe that i am seeking, through contrast, a roman-tic stylistic effect (of the Venus and Madonna kind). but i love you from

12 such an attitude to literature may have stood behind ionescu’s later statement that ‘i don’t make literature. i make something completely different: i make theatre’ (‘Con-cerning Rhinoceros in the united states’, Notes et contre notes, 185). Cf. Cioran’s remark to ionesco that ‘history is just bad theatre’ (recorded by the latter in Présent passé, passé présent, 78).

eugen ionescu’s selves, 1934–1960 207

somewhere, sometime. the memory of which lights is torturing me? . . . Can’t you see how i am rolling around? how i hold my hands out in ignorance? how i walk on muddy roads, on roads which forever turn back on them-selves? how i don’t have the power to take any road at all? (159)

thus, the unmasking of most literature as deceptive, petty and pointless does not lead to a dismissal from a materialist point of view of human spirituality as mere superstructure, but on the contrary, underlined the importance of what ionescu calls, here and later, our hunger or our search for the absolute.

ionescu’s approach to romanian identity in Nu is in some ways similar to that adopted vis-à-vis literature. not that a romanian spirituality might not exist, but that it is basically minor, inadequate, irrelevant to larger questions at hand.

i know that a nation can’t be thrown away as one might throw away a shirt or a sock. but it can be got over. to get over it does not in the least mean to give up—but to include / to manage. to be only autochthonous, only national, means in effect to be putting your shirt on top of your jacket.

it is only because we are so obsessive about our authenticity and our specificity that we are so completely inauthentic and unspecific. but we can only rediscover ourselves by abandoning ourselves. (149–150)

in the final analysis we aren’t even particularly aware of what abstract romanianism, with no relation to any cultural reality whatsoever, we might be betraying. (161)

ionescu’s disdain for romanianness was partly related to considerations of the geography of cultural capital:

in the extremely fortunate instance that i would become the greatest roma-nian critic, aldous huxley will still seat me among the artists of lapland and latvia. to be the greatest romanian critic!—this still means being a poor cousin of the european intellectual world (57; cf.197)

he took a ridiculing approach to this problem too—‘i am to die with-out having played a role on the european stage, which will be destroyed without my help!’—but on the other hand recommended the direct and continued apprenticeship of romanians to french culture:

with our romanian way of being we can’t exist culturally, because culture is ante-romanian [i.e. predates romania as an idea]. We should follow in the footsteps of the cultured Western countries, for it is not Western culture that will move after us, but rather we will be subordinated to it: it cannot renounce itself. (150)

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the discovery that literature cannot answer spiritual or metaphysical questions was to ionescu not liberating but terrifying. but on the other hand he warned,

don’t get caught up in the game of taking your seriousness too seriously. i myself have been tempted to do so from time to time. but when, 28 years and 2 months from now, i will take up criticism again, a sentiment of the ridiculous which inspires and has inspired me will prevent me from com-mitting such humoristic acts. (167)13

Snapshot of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Frenchman

twenty-eight years and two months later, ionescu published his first work of critical prose in french, Notes et contre-notes. his prediction in Nu, that ‘if i were a frenchman i would be a genius’ seemed to have come true. since 1950, his plays The Bald Primadonna, The Chairs, and The Lesson had gradually overcome the initial mystification and sometimes outright hostility of the french critics and public, and were generating similar controversy in london and new york.

one of the most interesting of these controversies unfolded in the col-umns of The Observer in 1958 when the english critic Kenneth tynan, who had been one of the critics to have fought hardest to establish ionescu’s reputation in britain, began to express reservations. in an article entitled ‘ionescu, a man of destiny?’, tynan continued to praise ionescu for ‘his entirely legitimate personal vision, presented with much imaginative dar-ing and verbal ingeniosity.’ however, he found ionescu’s refusal of the real and the social ‘dangerous’ and accused him of claiming a role as some kind of Messiah of meaninglessness, thereby neglecting the moral respon-sibility of the artist to society. he posited the examples of brecht, sartre, and arthur Miller in contrast.14

ionescu replied vehemently by denying that he had any Messianic pre-tentions, even in the realm of the absurd; and surprised the public by in fact rejecting any social mission for the theatre or for literature or art of any kind.

as for the concept of reality, it seems to me that Mr tynan only recognises a single mode of reality, that called ‘social’, the most exterior one, as i see

13 further analysis of Nu in teodorescu, ‘nu, nu and nu’.14 tynan, ‘ionesco—a man of destiny?’ (Observer, 22 June 1958), trans. J.-l. Curtis in

ionesco, Notes, 69–71.

eugen ionescu’s selves, 1934–1960 209

things, and ultimately the least objective, insofar as it is, in fact, subject to impassioned interpretations. precisely for that reason i believe that certain writers such as sartre (author of political melodramas), osborne, Miller etc., are the new ‘boulevard dramatists’, representing a conformism of the left, which is just as lamentable as that of the right. these writers offer us nothing which might not already be known through political works and speeches.15

When distinguished members of the theatrical world and intelligentsia (orson Welles, philip toynbee) rushed to support tynan—defending par-ticularly the social function of theatre and the nonconformism of Miller—ionescu had recourse to a ridiculising device already familiar to readers of Nu:

i withdraw all the bad things i had to say about arthur Miller. Mr toynbee judges the latter’s dramatic work according to the ideas held by Mr arthur Miller himself about dramatic creation. i thought this was merely a favour-able prejudice. i was wrong, doubtless. i will therefore judge the work favourably . . . according to the photograph of arthur Miller, published in The Observer. indeed, Mr Miller looks like a fine lad. therefore, i admire his work.16

these were the kinds of arguments which animated the reception of iones-cu’s work in the late ‘50s and could be seen as a background to the writing and staging of Rhinocéros: the attempt to draw distinction between art and ideology, the conformism of the right and the left; the ludicrousness of judging individuals’ morality according to their personal appearance.

Biography and the Penury of Identity

i propose to conclude this paper by examining ionesco from a different angle, namely using some biographical information about his activity in romania in the ‘30s and ‘40s and then staying true to the ionescian spirit by denying that any of these readings are neccesary, while maintaining all are possible.

in 1938 ionesco got a scholarship to paris to do a doctorate on ‘the themes of sin and death in the poetry of baudelaire’.17 also in this period

15 ionesco, ‘the role of the dramatist’ [1958] in idem, Notes, 72–3.16 ionesco, ‘le cœur n’est pas sur la main’, Notes, 88.17 in one of the last interviews before his death accorded to Figaro magazine in 1993,

ionesco mentioned that he owed this post to the help of historian and Institut français official alphonse dupront (see the italian translation in ionesco, L’assurdo e la speranza, 102). however, romanian critic petru Comarnescu mentions ionescu’s presence together

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he contributed some memorable travel reportage to the romanian press—‘many of us would like to die with france. the end of france will be the end of europe’18—but was forced to return to romania in June 1940. he left again in June 1942, never to return.19

some details on this final period in romania can be gathered from the journal of the romanian Jewish writer Mihail sebastian, recently pub-lished in romania and now available in translation:

15 June 1940: e.i., returned from paris, is saying alarming things.8 January 1941: e.i. is struggling to leave the country as soon as possible,

to flee.10 february 1941: e.i., easily drunk after a few cocktails [saturday morning]

suddenly sets off talking to me about his mother. that she was Jewish, i had known for a long time, from rumours—but it was a closed subject between us two. dizzy from drink, the guy starts ‘to tell everything’ as if with a certain sigh of relief, as if it had weighed on him, as if it had been suppressed. yes, she was a Jew, she was from Craiova, her husband abandoned her with two small children in france, she remained a Jew until her death, when he—eugen—baptised her with his own hand. . . . poor e.i.! What a torment, what a torture, what hidden corners, for such a simple thing. i would like to have told him how dear he has become to me—but he was too drunk for me to start getting sentimental with him.

26 March 1941: e.i. came round again yesterday morning, desperate, hounded, obsessed, unable to bear the thought that maybe they will throw him out of the educational system. a healthy man, who suddenly discovers that he has leprosy can go mad. e.i. has discovered that neither the name ionescu, nor an incontestably romanian father, nor the circumstance of having been born Christian—nothing, nothing, nothing can cover up the curse of having Jewish blood in his veins. We, with this dear leprosy, got used to it long ago. to the point of resignation and sometimes to the point of a certain sad, discouraged pride.

22 June 1942: e.i. left yesterday. a miraculous occurrence.20

with his wife in paris as early as august 1937; Comarnescu was able to borrow money from ionescu which suggests the latter’s circumstances were less than disastruous. Comarnescu, Jurnal 1931–1937, 165, 168–9, 172. further memories of ionescu in paris, this time from 1939, in Şora, O viaţă-n bucăţi, 72–85, 393–401.

18 ionescu, ‘scrisori din paris, i’, 13 nov 1938, repr. in Război cu toată lumea, 2:215; later ionesco acknowledged that ‘during that time, we were living off the myth of france.’ Présent passé, passé présent, 164.

19 on ionesco’s activity in the romanian consulate in vichy france, see the contrasting analyses of laignel-lavastine, L’oubli, 349–62; and stan, ‘survie’, as well as the commentary of ionesco, Portrait, 86–97. none cites the fascinating dossier published by Cioculescu, ‘eugen ionescu’, showcasing a polemical exchange between ionesco and Magyar philolo-gist lászló gáldi.

20 sebastian, Jurnal, 283, 287, 303–4, 317, 457.

eugen ionescu’s selves, 1934–1960 211

What this remarkable evidence shows us is not only something of ionescu’s inner torments and obsessions, but also a bizarre reversal of the hitherto accepted ideas about ionescu’s relationship with romanian society. not that he did not resist fascism and attempt to avoid getting involved with it at all costs—sebastian’s journal provides ample evidence of that—but that inability either to integrate into romanian society or to come to terms with his (or his mother’s) Jewish identity constituted an equally severe trauma in ionescu’s life.21 in the play, the rhinoceros are distinguished by their rough skin and their huge horns. both sebastian and the rabid anti-semitic literature published in romania in the period referred to Jews as ‘lepers’; antisemites also spread the idea that Jews may be recognised by their distinctive noses.22 indeed, it would be possible to re-read not only this play but a number of other works by ionescu in the light of the atti-tudes he adopted towards both his romanian and his Jewish heritage. he stayed closely in touch with the former, but made only the most oblique references to the latter in the whole of his french-language writings and public statements.23 in the late 1970s, he told his friend sanda stolojan:

i wonder where i am from . . . i was born in slatina, but i am not sure that i come from slatina . . . maybe i am from iaşi . . . or rather . . . perhaps i am bulgarian . . . i think i am bulgarian . . .24

ten years later emmanuel Jacquart was told by ionescu that ‘i was born guilty, predestined to culpability.’25

however, as ionescu’s own daughter observed in response to a number of interpretations that attempted to valorize these piece of evidence, such

21 in Passé présent and other memoiristic writings, there are muted and ambiguous references to ionesco’s ethnic identity, but a much greater emphasis falls on ‘intellectual values’.

22 oişteanu, Imaginea evreului, 37–45. oişteanu reproduces a german caricature from the end of the nineteenth century representing the Jew as a type half-way between man and animal, surrounded by neighing horses.

23 in an interview given in 1989 ionesco said of Jewish traditions in romania that ‘they played a very important role in my personal history, insofar as they were religious, but in a religion related to other religions, to Christianity for example.’ but also that ‘it was very late when i became aware of them, and as a reaction against the antisemitism which reigned in romania.’ in hubert, Eugène Ionesco, 234, 235. studies on religious aspects of ionesco’s thought (the best ones are heitmann, ‘ein religiöser denker’; and egerding, ‘eine religiöse Wende ionescos’) pay no particular attention to ionesco’s Jewishness, of which neither appears to have been aware. indeed it seems to have been little discussed in any work before the publication of sebastian’s diary.

24 stolojan, Au balcon, 94.25 interview with Jacquart, 30 sep 1985, introduction to ionesco, Théâtre complet, xxiii.

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a critical approach risks partaking of a reductionist, ethnicist logic.26 the fact that he was aware of and took an interest in his personal origins is not reason to attribute to them a pivotal interpretive role. ultimately the relationship between an artist’s work and his personal history might be as significant or as trivial as that which ionesco ironically adduced between arthur Miller’s dramaturgy and the impression created by his photograph. but the impulse to investigate and seek meaning in literature or biogra-phy, while always liable to charges of triviality or arbitrariness, can testify to—if not satisfy—deep personal needs, an attempt to seize hold of a ‘part of paradise’ in the face of an overwhelming fear of death.27

26 ionesco, Portrait, 26. 27 Mircea vulcănescu considered the hankering after ‘a part of paradise’ (cit. supra)

to be the most important aspect of Nu. ionescu later described vulcănesu’s reaction to be ‘remarkable’ [formidabil], a sign that ‘he sensed the book’s tragic element’. ionescu, interview, May 1986, in lovinescu, Întrevederi, 132.

Chapter nine

Beyond the Land of Green pLums: romanian CuLture and LanGuaGe in herta müLLer’s work*

when herta müller won the nobel prize for Literature in 2009, the swed-ish judges’ citation summed up her achievement as having succeeded in depicting, ‘with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, the landscape of the dispossessed’.1 a landscape can be either a men-tal, interior state or a real place, and might be further understood as the depiction of a complex relation between these two observable but often hard to reconcile realities. perhaps part of the intensity of müller’s writing derives from this expression of people’s identification with, but also their need to demarcate themselves from, the places they inhabit.

a second ambivalence confronted critics and pundits who sought to interpret and categorize müller’s work: that of her national identity. again according to the nobel judges—who presumably went by her ethnic ori-gin and the language of composition of most of her works, müller was a German writer.2 however, going by the citizenship she bore until she emigrated to Berlin at the age of thirty-four, and also by the setting and subject matter of most of her works, müller was linked to romania: in fact one of the earliest volumes of criticism introduced her as a ‘German-language romanian intellectual’;3 while another described her as ‘the romanian-born writer.’4 as Valentina Glajar has shown, intellectuals in that country have variously appropriated müller for the romanian cul-tural pantheon, or take a more reserved, sometimes even hostile position vis-a-vis her claim to represent romanian realities.5

more broadly müller’s quite complex relationship to romanian culture and language has been frequently remarked upon by both journalists and

* in Herta Müller, ed. B. haines & L. marven (oxford: oxford university press, 2013). reprinted by permission of the publishers. thanks especially to the editors for their encouragements and generous sharing of references.

1   olsson, ‘presentation speech’. 2 ibid.3 eke, ‘einleitung’, 8.4 stock, ‘nachwort’, 123.5 Glajar, ‘presence’.

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scholars, but more analytical approaches are harder to find.6 analysis of this problem could take a number of directions, and to be comprehensive, would have to treat many facets of what is already a very extensive body of fictional and autobiographical work, as well as innumerable essays and interviews. the present chapter confines itself to three major aspects. firstly, i will sketch out the socio-historical context of the German com-munity in the Banat region of romania, in order to enable a more precise understanding both of the world müller’s work describes, and the milieu in which she began her literary career. secondly, i will analyse the question of müller’s attitude to the romanian language and its influence on her—both as manifested in her work, and as explicitly discussed in interviews and statements she has made on this question. thirdly, i comment on müller’s 2005 romanian-language work Este sau nu este Ion, paying atten-tion to various stylistic and linguistic aspects which can be considered sig-nificant in terms of a broader attitude to romanian culture. if i leave aside other important areas, such as the reception of müller’s work in romania, and the cultural representation of romanian characters in her fiction, it is with the knowledge that other scholars have already made important inroads in surveying these topics.7 as with the case of ionesco, so with müller: it is perhaps advisable to stress that romanian culture, language and politics may not be the most central topics of her œuvre: indeed, her critical attitude to the environment in which she grew up focuses as much on the local, German village milieu as on the Ceauşescu dictatorship.8

The Land of Green Plums

müller’s work is sometimes promoted abroad, for instance in english, as being ‘about’ romania. for example, the english translation of müller’s Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt was given the subtitle A sur-real tale of life in Romania today.9 also perhaps significant is the title used for the english translation of Herztier, namely The land of green plums.

6 Glajar, ‘Banat-swabian, romanian and German’; eadem, The German legacy, 116–20; Cooper, ‘herta müller’. one of the few critics to deal analytically with linguistic aspects is predoiu, Faszination und Provokation, 183–7.

7 for the former, see Glajar, ‘the presence’; for the latter, a start has been made by krause, ‘das Bild’.

8 as haines, marven and moyrer have all observed (haines, ‘the unforgettable forgot-ten’; marven, ‘in allem ist der riß’; moyrer, ‘die widerspenstige signifikant’).

9 müller, The Passport.

beyond the land of green plums 215

this, while less geopolitically explicit, suggests a reading of müller’s fic-tion in a topographical key, especially as the dustjacket blurb wastes no time in telling the reader that the book is ‘set in romania’.10 similarly, the english translation of the work Ausreiseantrag by müller’s former hus-band richard wagner, was given the subtitle A Romanian story.11

it is important to note that these labels ‘romanian’ or ‘in romania’ are not those of müller herself, and form a striking contrast to her own referen-tial practices. in fact she uses the term Rumänien extremely rarely; indeed, it seems that she goes to some lengths to avoid it, referring instead to an unspecified Land. for instance, in Herztier the character Lola is described as coming ‘from the south of the country’ [aus dem süden des Landes].12 in Reisende auf einem Bein the opening scene depicts ‘the border of the other country’ [die Grenze des anderen Landes].13 in Der Fremde Blick müller describes the fact that ‘i came to Germany from another country’ [weil ich aus einem anderen Land nach deutschland gekommen bin] as a fundamental motivation (Begründung) conditioning her world view, without mentioning the name of the country in question.14

this might have various implications; in the first instance, it perhaps enables the reader to view the narrative from the perspective of an insider, for whom mention of the country’s name would be superfluous. in the second, it might suggest that the specificity of the particular country from which she came is irrelevant to what müller wants us to think of as a universal experience. a third possibility is that müller, while conscious of her outsider status, became irritated at the assumptions native Germans made when she told them her country of origin.15 whichever might be the case, it is worth trying to resume some key aspects of the history of ‘the country’. and since in German ‘Land’, like the english ‘country’, can refer either to a national state or a province, the historical context i seek to pro-vide is not an overall history of romania, but makes close reference to the Banat region where müller grew up and where much of her prose is set.

10 müller, Land of green plums.11  wagner, Exit.12 müller, Herztier, 9.13 müller, Reisende, 7.14 müller, Der fremde, 5. this differs from earlier statements, e.g. müller, Der Teufel sitzt

im Spiegel, 122, where she writes more explicitly ‘als ich aus rumänien wegging’ [when i left romania].

15 müller talks explicitly about this experience in Der König, 176–9.

216 chapter nine

Modern Romania and the Banat Germans

romania is, according to its 1923, 1948 and 1991 constitutions, ‘a unitary national state’, but a relatively young one on the european map. indepen-dent in a first, smaller variant in 1878, the present country is largely a cre-ation of the post-world war i treaties (Versailles, trianon, st. Germain) of 1919–1920, and consists of a series of territories conglomerated from the dissolved and dismembered habsburg, ottoman and russian empires. the description once given it by a french writer, as ‘the crossroads of dead empires’, is not inapt; and the tension between former regional or imperial identities and the efforts of a centralizing state constitutes a basic factor of its history, albeit one which has impacted differently on different regions and groups.16

German influence on, and settlement in, territories now forming part of romania, are processes with a long history. the oldest communities were those established in transylvania in the early middle ages.17 the territory of the Banat, from which müller comes and where much of her work is set, had a somewhat different history of settlement. it was under ottoman rule through the early modern period to 1716, when it was con-quered by the habsburgs; only after this date did German settlement and colonization take place. the establishment of German communities in the Banat in some ways resembled a colonial enterprise, involving establish-ment of German habitation structures and administrative programmes in a land previously viewed as alien but which had been brought into the fold of habsburg possessions in the wake of the second siege of Vienna in 1683.18 the Banat was also important as a military frontier facing ottoman territory—the south of the province had a special military status until the 1850s—and as a source of economic extraction, being rich in metals and minerals. it was for these reasons that historian Jean Bérenger described the Banat as the habsburgs’ ‘true colonial adventure’.19 it should be noted that the colonization process was not exclusively an ‘ethnic’ German

16 romier, Le carrefour des empires morts.17 for recent overviews in english see evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs, 209–

27: koranyi, Between East and West, 12–21. 18 Jordan, Die kaiserliche Wirtschaftspolitik; roider, ‘nationalism and Colonization’;

thomas, ‘anatomy’. 19 Bérenger, History, 88. the habsburg experience has been largely overlooked in the by

now extensive literature on German colonialism, e.g. ames et al., eds., Gemany’s colonial pasts or perraudin & Zimmerer, eds. German colonialism. But see ruthner, ‘Central europe Goes postcolonial’; and wolff, The idea of Galicia, as well as my Chapter 2 above.

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project. for instance, the colonist who established müller’s native village of nitzkydorf in the 1780s, Count krisztóf niczky, was of mixed slavic and hungarian background (albeit educated in Vienna and pressburg). other colonists were of slavic, italian or other ethnic origin. German was therefore possibly less important as an ethnic identity than as a gener-alized language of education and culture alongside, and gradually sup-planting, Latin. demographically, Germans were always outnumbered by serbian and romanian populations—as well as a large number of other ethnicities—and after the collapse of the austro-hungarian empire in 1918 the territory was divided on ethnic principles, the majority going to romania, a smaller, more westerly part to yugoslavia.

in contrast to the transylvanian Germans, who were largely Lutheran and called themselves Sachsen (saxons), the Germans of the Banat (in fact of the wider middle danube region), were largely Catholic and called Schwaben.20 the majority of the population was of relatively modest means and cultural outlook, living in villages dispersed across the prov-ince, with a greater or lesser connection to the urban centres. the pre-1918 capitals of Vienna and Budapest had been several hundred miles to the northwest; the post-1918 one, Bucharest, was even further away to the east. and although the first ever newspaper to have been published on romanian territory had appeared in the Banat, and in German,21 the local literary traditions, whether in German, romanian, or the province’s other languages (serbian, yiddish, magyar, romanes), were not extensive, char-acterized more by heterogeneity than by sophistication. however, the ter-ritory featured notably in German-language writings as a somewhat exotic frontier zone, and the local populations of serbs, romanians and roma were depicted as benighted, uncultured savages.22

the post-1918 period therefore constituted something of a shock to the Donauschwaben, as they found themselves ruled by the romanians who hitherto had been largely regarded as a Bauernvolk. moreover, the position of the Donauschwaben as a distinct group was diminished as their territory and population was divided between romania, serbia and hungary. many still lived in villages and neither needed nor wanted to learn the official

20 in broader German-language discourse the terms are prefixed with a location, Siebenbürgen-Sachsen and Donauschwaben respectively. the terms Sachsen and Schwaben are to be understood conventionally and do not imply a literal designation of saxony or swabia as places of origin.

21  neumann, ‘Cultura din Banat’.22 see ch. 2 above.

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language of the new state(s). in romania, they formed a constituent part of what were now labelled Rumäniendeutschen, although this label argu-ably remained an artificial construct right up until the gradual dissolution of these communities in the period from the 1940s to the 1990s.23 the severest blow to the Donauschwaben communities was occasioned by the forced deportations of many, first to siberia immediately after the war, and later to the Bărăgan plain region in the east of romania for periods of up to twenty years. this was justified by the soviet and romanian authori-ties as a reprisal for the collaboration of some romanian Germans with the nazis during the wartime period (a real phenomenon, but one later generalized to all Germans, and dominating the attitude of the romanian authorities to the German population during the Communist period). it was only in the relative thaw of the 1960s that German-language literary culture in the Banat was revived to an extent in local publications affili-ated to the official structures of literary production, closely controlled by the Communist state. most of the literary works produced conformed to the moulds either of traditional German Heimatdorf literature, or of the teleological optimism characteristic of socialist-realist literature.

herta müller’s generation, born in the early 1950s and schooled in the late 1960s, had not experienced the trauma of war and deportation except indirectly. they were also perhaps the first to accept the existence of the romanian state for the foreseeable future, and therefore to engage with it in a more sustained way, particularly as the late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a general liberalization of cultural production and increased dialogue between groups. higher educational institutions were among the most important vehicles of this engagement, and thus it was that she and many other Germans attended the university of timişoara (established in 1962), where she graduated in German and romanian literature in 1976. for their part, the romanian authorities, while continuing to maintain an implicit equation between Germans and ‘nazis’, also had an interest in pursuing a more generous policy towards minorities, especially ones who, unlike the hungarian minority of transylvania, aroused no irreden-tist fears but were also monitored from abroad.24 müller’s literary genera-tion can be seen as part of a thaw which subsisted from roughly between the return of the deportees in the early sixties, and the acceleration of

23 predoiu, Faszination und Provokation, 13–19, gives a good overview of the debates surrounding this concept.

24 on the more favourable attitude toward German than toward hungarian in official romanian culture: Cooper, ‘towards a multinational concept’, 231–2.

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emigration in the 1980s and 1990s.25 they also situated themselves in opposition to conventional ideas of Rumäniendeutsche Literatur, even sometimes claiming explicitly to be anti-rumäniendeutsch.26 attacks such as these were directed at traditional Heimat literature, and in some cases implicitly at aspects of the system, but not at romanian language and culture per se, which play a significant role in müller’s work.

Müller and the Romanian Language

the evidence for a ‘dominant’ romanian-language literary influence on müller’s work is somewhat diffuse. there is no single writer or school that can be said to have left a decisive imprint on her style or themes. instead, there are a number of writers or artists whose work is either used or alluded to, sometimes in somewhat oblique ways. But before treating these writers, it may be useful to consider müller’s own statements con-cerning the romanian language. this is not only a matter of access to certain cultural influences, but also of important ways in which learning romanian made her think about language in general, and what most crit-ics consider to be a key aspect of her poetics, namely the relation between words and things.

an important early statement on this topic was made by müller in a 1998 interview with Brigid haines and margaret Littler. asked to expand on various earlier and somewhat elliptical statements about the possibili-ties afforded her by bilingualism, müller replied:

the difference is really that German is my mother tongue, whereas i acquired romanian much later. By the time i started to really speak romanian and have my everyday life unfolding in it, i was already fifteen and living in the city. up till then i had only learnt romanian three hours a week as a for-eign language in a German-language school. it was neither a second mother tongue, nor a foreign language, as one lived in it. a kind of familiarity estab-lished itself, which had something in common with a mother tongue, was very similar to it, but all the same, i never learnt, for instance, to write in romanian, and it didn’t occur to me to try.27

25 predoiu, Faszination und Provokation, 19–40, gives a detailed periodisation of Banat German literary production since 1945. for an insider’s view of some of the generational contexts, see wagner, ‘die aktionsgruppe Banat’.

26 this term is used by sohns, 13.27 müller, ‘Gespräch’, 15. predoiu, Faszination, 183, already drew attention to a similar

statement in müller, Hunger und Seide, 36–37: ‘diese muttersprache und diese Landes-sprache, es waren zwei, und so ganz verschieden. und einander so fremd’ [this mother

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müller goes on to discuss the ways in which, in bilingual regions, a writer composing in one language will often have the other in their mind. she emphasizes in particular the contrastive relationship between German and romanian:

had the languages been closely related, for instance like German and eng-lish, there would not be such a contrast as in the case of a romance-slavic language and German. this romanian is, in its sensuousness, and in its way of looking at the world, utterly distinct; and i was thus able to appropriate this mode of perceiving the world.

müller describes this as an ‘incredibly profitable’ experience for a writer (als schriftstellerin profitiert man unglaublich davon).28

it should be first noted that the category ‘romance-slavic language’ is not a generally used one, and would be contested by many romanian scholars. although it has significant slavic vocabulary, romanian is usu-ally classified as a romance language.29 this is sometimes seen as a matter of ‘a superimposed layer’ (like, for instance, arabic vocabulary in Castil-lian, or Latin in english); in other aspects the slavic component may be structural.30

But while romanian is of course not a Germanic language, there is little in its intrinsic structure which places it in absolute opposition to German. on the contrary, romanian and German have features in common—for instance, the inflection and gendering of nouns—which english lacks. müller refers frequently not to grammatical features but rather to idioms, particularly metaphor and its function in describing or grasping reality.31

müller expanded on the theme of differing linguistic contexts and their effect in framing our relation to the world and our perception of it, in her 2003 essay ‘in jeder sprache sitzen andere augen’ [every language contains a different pair of eyes], one of her most extensive meditations

tongue, and the national language, were two different things, and so completely distinct. so alien to each other too].

28 müller, ‘Gespräch’.29 the usually very critical Lucian Boia claims, somewhat exaggeratedly, that ‘no linguist

will contest the fact that the romanian language is of Latin origin’ (Boia, Romania, 29).30 for a discussion see petrucci, Slavic features; for some statistical analysis of roma-

nian lexicon by language group, see kellogg, ‘the structure of romanian nationalism’. on the politicization of this issue at various stages of romania’s history, see e.g. drace-francis, Making, 181–2; deletant, ‘rewriting the past’.

31 specifically, she refers to ‘die sprachbilder, die metaphorik, die redewendungen’ (müller, ‘Gespräch’, 15).

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on language.32 in this chapter the same concept of linguistic difference remains, only it is applied more frequently to the differences between the German dialect of the Banat and formal literary German, than to those between German and romanian. for instance, müller draws attention to the dialect term for an undomesticated grape vine, Tintentrauben, the ‘ink vine’, so called because the colouring of the grape easily stains the hand that touches it.33 again, the assumption is that the ‘eastern’ word has both an increased vividness or sensuousness, and a greater pregnancy of mean-ing. this fits in with a broader set of ideas about the east and the west, as well as the city and the village: ‘in the language of the village—or at least so it seemed to me as a child—everybody around me saw words as lying directly upon the things they were supposed to describe’.34 the idea that words might be distinct from things, and in fact a tool to organize the world from outside it, is cast as a western heresy:

to this day i think a lot without using words, i have found none, not in village German, nor in city German, nor in romanian, nor in east or west German [. . .]. only in the west did i come across the notion that language could be used to bring order to confusion.35

what is initially advanced here on the basis of contrasts between dialect German and urban, ‘western’ German is then considered in a triple com-parison between the former two and romanian:

in the village dialect you say: the wind Goes. in high German, as spoken in schools, you say: the wind BLows. and for me as a seven-year-old, that felt as if the wind got hurt. and in romanian you say, the wind hits, vîntul bate.36

the roots of the distinctions, then, appear to be geocultural rather than linguistic. however, later in the same text müller returns to the idea that it is grammatical aspects of German and romanian that distinguish the two languages, giving the example of the different genders used for the

32 müller, Der König, 7–39. for an interpretation of this work see moyrer, ‘die wider-spenstige signifikant’.

33 müller, ‘in jeder sprache’, 9.34 ‘in der dorfsprache—so schien es mir als kind—lagen bei allen Leuten um mich

herum die worte direckt auf den dingen, die sie bezeichneten’. ibid., 7.35 müller, ‘in jeder sprache’, 14.36 müller, ‘in jeder sprache’, 24. nB also that müller, although publishing in 2003, gives

the pre-1990 spelling of romanian vîntul, which is now spelt vântul following orthographic reforms.

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word for lily (in German, die Lilie is feminine, as opposed to masculine romanian crin):

in German it’s a matter of a Lilly-lady, in romanian you’re up against mister Crin.37

although müller has given several examples from different semantic areas, this is not actually a constant feature differentiating the two lan-guages. for instance, rosemary is masculine in both (G. rosmarin, r. Roz-marin, actually a direct loan from German); while marigolds are feminine in both languages (G. Ringelblume, r. gălbenea), as are the generic words for flower (G. Blume, r. floare). Likewise, in an earlier text where müller drew attention to the fact that the German word for fear [Angst] has one syllable, whereas romanian frică has two, she might have noted that they are both feminine.38

moreover, while müller’s considerations on language partake of an essentially modernist poetics, they also perhaps draw on some older received ideas about the nature of the romanian language. these can be found both among outsiders, and among even quite traditional romanian writers. for instance, a theory of the ‘sensuousness’ and ‘expressivity’ of the romanian language was advanced by folklorist and dramatist Vasile alecsandri, in the preface to his Folk Poems of the Romanians, published in 1852:

the romanian is a born poet!endowed by nature with a sparkling imagination and a sensuous spirit, he

discharges the secrets of his soul in the form of harmonious melodies and improvized poems.39

or:

who has not, upon striking up a brotherly conversation with the plain dweller, been struck by his notions and judgements, and taken great plea-sure in listening to his speech, adorned as it is with original tropes? for instance:

does he wish to speak of a good fellow? he says: he is as good as his mother’s breast.

37 ibid., 25.38 müller, Der Teufel, 37. nB also that frică is not peculiar to romanian, being originally

Greek (φρικη) and present also in albanian ( frikë).39 alecsandri, Poezii populare ale românilor, 11. heitmann, Imaginea românilor, 293–8,

suggests this romanian self-image might have been influenced by a longer tradition of German ascriptions of a poetic sensibility to romanians.

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of a tall, handsome man? he is as tall as a spruce and handsome as the month of may.of a wicked man? he has crossbred guts.of an ugly man? what an ugly father he had.of a stupid man? he thinks that all birds that fly, are for eating.of a smart one? he can pull the devil out of the ground.of a beautiful woman? she’s a piece of the sun.of a petty official? a man with a thousand lei on his chest but only three-pence in his pocket.of a young man with white hair? he caught an early snowfall.40

such demonstrations became a relatively common trope in romanian literary ideology, as critics propounded the view that the language was endowed with an exceptional degree of expressivity.41 these occasion-ally involved contrasts with German language and culture, sometimes seen as more rational, less figurative: alecsandri, for instance, notes romanian peasants making fun of Germans who spent a freezing win-ter in moldavia complaining inexplicably that they were hot (based on a confusion of German kalt, cold, with romanian cald, hot).42 in some ways müller’s affirmations appear to show the influence of this kind of thinking about language (specifically about a particular language); in oth-ers, of course, they may be considered part of a wider current of thinking about language’s power, especially through metaphor, to suggest images or sensations—what in German is known as Bildlichkeit, and in roma-nian as plasticitate.43 another factor is the more striking effect submerged metaphorical phrases can have on non-native speakers of a language. for instance, while the literal sense of bate as ‘beating’ in a phrase like vântul bate might appear striking to someone acquiring the language, a native romanian-speaker would unlikely to be strongly conscious of it.

Literary Influences

romanian literature has a tradition of somewhat saccharine descriptions of rural life, in approximate consonance with German Heimatdorf liter-ature. this kind of writing has customarily been accorded space in the

40 alecsandri, ‘românii şi poeziile lor’, 100–1.41 see esp. Caracostea, Die Ausdruckswerte; the romanian version, Expresivitatea limbii

române, went through several editions.42 alecsandri, ‘românii’, 100. for more on romanian popular and literary stereotypes of

Germans, see dumistrăcel, ‘Germanul în mentalul rural românesc’; Zub, ‘einleitung’.43 on Bildlichkeit as a defining attribute of literary texts, markiewicz, ‘Limits’, 6.

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literary canon as taught in schools and universities. notions of ‘appro-priate’ literature often involved the assumption that a relatively positive depiction of national life (more specifically, rural life, posited as repre-sentative of the nation) would emerge from it. it is notable that in the securitate reports compiled about müller’s literary production, she was castigated for negativism: ‘nothing positive appears in it’, wrote ‘Voicu’ about her debut collection Niederungen, in march 1983.44

on the other hand, there were modernist and avant-garde movements in early twentieth-century romania. the best-known exponents—including figures such as tristan tzara, founder of the dadaist movement; surreal-ist poet Benjamin fondane; and absurdist playwright eugène ionesco—sought and in some cases found their fortune abroad, most commonly in french culture. perhaps the most notable example from romania was paul Celan, who grew up in Czernowitz in romanian Bukovina and emigrated to the west. But before he did so, he also carried out some translations of prose and verse into romanian. a version of his celebrated work Todesfuge, was entitled in romanian Tangoul morţii, ‘death tango’ as opposed to death fugue.45

müller almost certainly had knowledge of all these writers’ works, as well as their life trajectories. for instance, the latter title might have influ-enced that of müller’s Drückender Tango [oppressive tango], just as the title of ionesco’s well-known play Le roi se meurt [the king dies] forms the starting point for müller’s Der König verneigt sich und tötet [the king takes a bow and kills]. in both these cases, however, müller’s direct engage-ment with her predecessors seems to be on the level of playing with titles, rather than composing a full-blown intertext or commentary.

müller’s work also shows the imprint of writers lesser known outside romanian literary circles. notable among these was Gellu naum (1915–2001), who had helped establish a surrealist poetry circle in 1940s roma-nia, and also published fiction and a number of translations.46 an extract from naum’s 1941 poem ‘Lacrima’ [the tear] constitutes the epigraph to müller’s Herztier:

i had a friend in each little piece of cloudin fact that’s how friends are when there’s so much fear in the world

44 Voicu, ‘nota’ (16 march 1983) for more details see Glajar, ‘presence’.45 for a subtle analysis see felstiner, Paul Celan, 28–9, 42–50.46 in english there are naum, Poems; My tired father; Zenobia; and Vasco da Gama and

other pohems.

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mother too said it’s normal and that she wouldn’t have me become a friend i should think rather of something serious47

in the front matter of Herztier it is specified that the translation of naum’s poem used for the epigraph is by transylvanian German poet oskar pas-tior (müller’s lifelong friend whose experiences form the basis of the plot of her most recent novel, Atemschaukel).48 the status of the poem is ques-tioned in a tense scene where the securitate agent, Captain pjele, forces the narrator to read the passage out loud. pjele asks ‘who wrote that?’ the narrator replied ‘nobody. it’s a popular song.’ ‘then it is the property of the people’.49

the interplay between the avant-garde and folk music is reiterated in an interview müller gave in 2007:

somebody asked me today what it was that i have learnt from the avant-garde and i answered i learned a lot more from folk songs. when i first heard maria tănase she sounded incredible to me, it was for the first time that i really felt what folklore meant. romanian folk music is connected to existence in a very meaningful way. however, German folklore was not at all inspiring for me.50

the work of singer maria tănase (1913–1963) also features in Herztier and elsewhere in müller’s work, and can be considered a significant romanian intertext, if not influence, upon it.51 Like naum’s poetry, tănase’s work appears in connection with tereza, the friend of the narrator who turns

47 ‘aveam câte un prieten în fiecare bucăţică de nor / de fapt aşa sunt prietenii când e atâta spaima pe lume / mama spunea şi ea că e normal şi că nu acceptă să mă fac prieten / mai bine m’aş gândi la ceva serios’; naum, ‘Lacrima’, 51–2. Cf. müller, Herztier, colophon page.

48 pastior’s translations were published as Rede auf dem Bahndamm; Oskar Pastior ent-deckt Gellu Naum; and naum, Pohesie. as these all postdate Herztier, it seems müller may have had access to them in a manuscript version. predoiu, Faszination, 183–4, suggests that pastior was a significant influence on müller’s more general ludic engagement with romanian vocabulary, citing the former’s volume Das Hören des Genitivs.

49 müller, Herztier, 104; cf. Land of green plums, 94–5. nB piele means ‘skin’ or ‘leather’ in romanian, possibly referring to the characteristic leather jacket of the securitate officer; in the German the orthography was modified to Pjele to aid pronunciation.

50 müller, interview with radio romania international, 18 July 2007, at http://www.rri .ro/arh-art.shtml?lang=1&sec=13&art=4641 [accessed 18 march 2011].

51  for müller’s own account of her engagement with tănase’s work, see herta müller, ‘welt, welt, schwester welt’. in october 2010 she presented tănase’s work at a concert at the Literaturhaus, stuttgart: for details see http://www.literaturhaus-stuttgart.de/event/ 1961-1-es-gibt-vieles-was-man-nicht-sagen-aber-nichts-was-man-nicht-singen-kann/ [accessed 1 august 2011].

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out to be a Securitate informant. tereza’s clothes, bought on numerous foreign trips, arouse the envy of her work colleagues; ‘they thought: for everything tereza wears, it would be worth fleeing’.52 following which, they begin to sing the words of a tănase song, in fact a traditional curse on a fleeing lover:

who loves and leavesmay the Lord punish him may the Lord punish himwith the step of the beetlethe whistle of the windand the dust of the earth.53

and as the narrator explains, the song had a double meaning: while it expressed the hope of the women to flee, the curse was addressed to tereza.54 this provides a classic example of how, particularly under regimes of censorship, apparently apolitical works can have their mean-ing radically transformed by the disposition of the audience to ‘read’ them in an allegorical key. taken together, the examples of müller’s adaptation of naum’s and tănase’s lyrics also show her concern with problems of artistic property, circulation of motifs in public and private spaces, and tensions between production and consumption of literature in a politi-cally and economically controlled society.

Original Works

more recently, müller’s engagement with romanian has gone beyond atti-tudes to language, or passive absorption of literary influences. in 2005 she published a book of eighty-five romanian-language verse collages, Este sau nu este Ion. this was issued in a print-run of 1500 copies by the well-known iaşi-based publisher polirom, and accompanied by a Cd of the author reading the verses, recorded in July 2005 at the romanian section

52 ‘sie dachten: alles was tereza trägt, ist eine flucht wert.’ Herztier, 118.53 the romanian words of the song are ‘Cine iubeşte şi lasă / Cine iubeşte şi lasă /

dumnezeu să-i dea pedeapsă / dumnezeu să-i dea pedeapsă / târâişul şarpelui / Cu pasul gândacului / Vâjâitul vântului / pulberea pamântului’. it is worth accessing one of the many versions available on the internet to appreciate the dramatic orchestration [e.g. tănase, ‘Cine iubeşte’]. the phrase ‘târâişul şarpelui’ [the snake’s slither] is omitted in the version in Herztier.

54 ‘die melodie sangen sie für sich und die flucht. der fluch des Liedes galt aber tereza.’ ibid. müller plays on the similarity between Flucht ‘flight’ and Fluch ‘curse’, just as in Celan’s Todesfuge ‘death fugue’, there is a hint of romanian fugă ‘flight’.

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of the Berlin-based international broadcaster Deutsche Welle. at around the same time her earlier German-language collages, Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (2000) appeared with a romanian translation in parallel text, with funding from the Goethe institute and the romanian ministry of Culture.55 rumour has it that müller cut up copies of a somewhat scur-rilous Bucharest publication, Plai cu boi,56 and rearranged them on card-board. the poems are generally written in a simple syntax and vocabulary, with many colloquial phrases. one of them bids Adio, patria mea cu ‘î’ din i, cu ‘î’ din a [farewell to my fatherland with the î spelt with an i, and the â spelt with an â], making reference to an orthographic peculiarity of social-ist romania, whereby the letter ‘â’ in the country’s name România and a substantial number of other words was replaced with an ‘î’ (e.g. Romînia), allegedly to de-emphasize the country’s Latin heritage. the name of the country was officially changed to România after 1965, while other words in î were not changed back to â until after 1991.57 the poem emphasizes the unorthodox (for a Latin language) vowel sounds of romanian:

Ăăă, rău, bă, dă-mi nişte bani să mă ăstăBă, tu mă parcă văd că ăla dăhai bă, dînsul păr în gît îî cîine măCît îl mîngii mîncă sîrmăBă, mă vîr o săptămînă pînă îmi dă zahăr mă.o să fie găinărie.

the text, extremely hard to render into english,58 gives the impression of incompletely overheard conversation, and gives as much emphasis to the phonetics of romanian as to semantics: notably palatalized consonants

55 müller, Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame / În coc locuieşte o damă.56 Plai cu boi (2001–2008) was the main publication of former romanian dissident mir-

cea dinescu, now a wealthy media personality; the title, meaning ‘upland with oxen’ and considered a characteristic romanian landscape, is an obvious play on Playboy.

57 e.g. basic words like sunt ‘i am’, când ‘when’, cât ‘how much’, all of Latin origin, were spelt sînt, cînd and cît. for an account of these orthographic changes, see deletant, ‘rewrit-ing the past’. the consonants indicated by â and ă represent slavic influence on romanian (before the mid-nineteenth century romanian was spelt with a Cyrillic alphabet, in which these sounds were represented by the letters ѫ and ъ).

58 Very approximately ‘oh, terrible, hey, give me some money so i can this guy / hey, you me i can almost see that guy’s giving / hey, him hair in the throat’s a dog, man / as you stroke it it eats wire / hey, i’ll thrust myself in for a week till he gives me sugar. it’ll be chickenshit.’ Collage no. 40 partakes of a very similar poetics: ‘Băăăăăă, / secetă / mitică / pierdut vacă / căutat geabă mă, / nu găsit / trezit şopîrlă, / mică/ îndoielnică, / tare frică / omorît’ [ohhhhhh, / drought/ mitică / lost cow / waste time looking man, / not found / woke up small / dubious / lizard, / scared shit / killed’]

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(e.g. ‘ts’, ‘sh’), short vowels, such as the â and î discussed above. there is also some alliterative play on diacritically marked letters, a feature of romanian which is thus strongly emphasized.59

in another sequence, müller’s target is not the everday, conversational phonetics of romanian but the rather pompous registers of bureaucratic, journalistic prose:

dar, in general, pe plaiurile noastre, coborîtoarecînd un animal moare nu contează din ce cauză de boală,ori înecat ingheţat intoxicat călcat abandonat legatevadat oricum uscat sau balonat mă, doamne, nude foame românul se complace a savura corpolenţade animal postum susmenţionat.60

the repetitive accumulation of past-participial endings in—at, as well as stock phrases—‘in general’, ‘conspires to savour’, ‘above mentioned’—usually of romance origin, satirize a stilted, impersonal, somewhat self-satisfied register.61 it also captures well a certain tendentious attempt to give universal value to the particular, as the sentence first claims to treat something ‘in general’, before confining it to ‘in our lands’, and then to ‘romanians’. But while adopting a playful attitude to the language, the collages also achieve a colloquial register, and confirm müller’s affirma-tion that her starting point, despite an only average grasp of romanian, was ‘the daily language i learnt when working for the car factory’.62

on visiting romania in 2010, müller was asked, by a journalist perhaps keen to elicit a sympathetic quote, whether she felt happy and at ease in romania. her widely-quoted reply was that it was no significance whether she felt at ease there, but rather whether the permanent residents did.63 while this deflated the interviewer’s expectations of flattery, it also struck

59 Cf. the phrases in tănase’s earlier-quoted song: târâişul şarpelui.60 approximately ‘But, in general, on our lands, descending / when an animal dies irre-

spective of the cause of illness, / or drowned frozen poisoned trampled abandoned tied up astray or bloated, Good God, not of hunger romanians conspire to savour the posthumous corpulence of above-mentioned animal’.

61  this is something that can also be detected in ionesco’s work, especially the satire on pedagogical and philological discourse in La leçon.

62 müller, interview with radio romania international, cit. supra. Cooper, ‘herta mül-ler’, 493, has gone so far as to claim that ‘her dexterity with the romanian language and ability to appropriate and destabilize it suggest that it is as much a part of her identity as her so-called native tongue German.’

63 ‘treaba româniei nu este ca eu să mă simt acasă. ar fi bine dacă nu ştiu câte mil-ioane de români s-ar simţi acasă [it’s not romania’s job to be making me feel at home.

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a chord with romanians who, paradoxically, understood that their home country was not a place where many people felt at home. in this sense, and in others, müller’s engagement with romanian seems to work in two contrary but equally productive directions. on the one hand, there is a tendency towards defamiliarization, considering the language (and indeed the country) as being totally different from German norms. on the other, there is a quite complex familiarity with romanian experiences, includ-ing with intimate and often unanalysed aspects of its language, literature, folklore and other cultural traditions. in this sense, müller’s glosses on the ‘local’ question of relations between two linguistic and cultural groups assumed to be at odds with one another, become an important bridge to larger ones such as the relation between words and things, language and place, the present and the past, personal experience and collective identities.

it would be good if millions of romanians felt at home]’. statement at press conference, Bucharest, 27 september 2010, quoted in ‘herta müller despre lucrurile bune’.

part five

east-westism in the cold war age

chapter ten

sex, lies and stereotypes: images of romania in British literature, 1945–2000*

General Considerations

Knowledge operates at different levels, and when undertaking to examine the images different peoples have of one another, it would be a mistake to imply that such pictures are either evenly composed or uniformly imag-ined by all members of a particular people.

this is particularly true of British images of romania in the last fifty or so years. on the scholarly level, interest in romania is apparently extremely healthy: a recent academic bibliography of writings in english on romania enumerated close on a thousand books or articles, the com-fortable majority of which were published in the last fifteen years.1

on the everyday level, however, the presentation of romania in Britain is considerably less consistent. a short analysis of articles featuring roma-nia in the main section of the london Times over the last three years (1996–1998: see appendix) shows an average of around 30 articles per year, dedicated to an unusual selection of subjects. the launch of a new romanian helicopter may make the news if it is named after count drac-ula; the visit of the president of the united states was considered note-worthy only for the fact that he mistook the romanian revolutionary flag for a latin american poncho; of ten articles treating romanian politics published in 1996, five featured the former tennis player ilie năstase; all two articles on the romanian economic situation in 1998 concerned the sale of former president ceauşescu’s possessions in order to raise funds. orphanages, gypsies, drug-trafficking and murders all get a mention. if the romanian football team’s participation in the 1998 world cup made any impression, it was perhaps caused less by their (purely fortunate) victory over england, than their players’ propensity to anoint their faces with a

* in Romanian and British historians on the contemporary history of Romania, ed. g. cipăianu & v. târău (cluj university press, 2000), 87–100. reprinted by permission of the publishers. among more recent treatments, hammond, British images, brings some new sources to light.

1 siani-davies & siani-davies, Romania.

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magic potion made up of holy water, basil, olive oil and honey (accom-panied by the sign of the cross three times);2 or even their superstitious-strategic dyeing of their hair blonde in the midst of the tournament. a good portion of the comedy programme They Think its all Over, which was screened by the BBc for light therapeutic relaxation after the intensities of the cup final, was dedicated to the special guest, ilie năstase, who was asked to explain the inner motivation of the romanian fan who, it was reported widely in the press, submerged his head underwater in his bath for up to 4 hours a day in order to bring his team good luck.

an acclaimed historical synthesis published in 1996, norman davies’s Europe, despatches romania in similarly garish colours. this encyclo-paedic work of over 1,300 pages finds little to say about romania except that it produced dracula, the iron guard, a folkloric death wish, nicolae ceauşescu and stephen the great. ‘romania has been aptly called the north Korea of eastern europe’, davies summarizes, ‘—a closed country acutely aware of its inferiority, excessively proud of its dubious record, and instinctively given to acting as mediator between other mafia gangs.’3 such unthinking generalizations are unfortunately all too common in British history writing. indeed, they may be said to be more prevalent in the intellectual circuit of British public opinion than the general market: even the most lightweight guide books have no interest in striving for the elegant and offensive one-off judgement, and tend to produce a more balanced picture.4

But in between the groves of academe and the gimmicks of the mass media, a surprisingly substantial number of literary works on romania has been published over the last half century. occasionally they play the role of presenting scholarship to a wider public; many more of them are concerned with depicting everyday life in the country in some detail; in general they gain their legitimacy through a claim to special experience. as they generally claim to avoid an interest in the purely historical or dip-lomatic, and often tend to stress what is interesting to the foreigner rather

2 ‘romanians take shine to england’. ‘ “i’ve advised them to anoint their goal net as well”, [iulian] Bonea [“football lover and renowned druid”] said, “which will prevent the opposition from scoring.” ’

3 davies, Europe, 1105.4 the situation in general and reference works on history differs little in its super-

ficiality from that in works of literary criticism (which have been surveyed critically by marino, Pentru Europa, 88–98). see e.g. the entry for romania in fernández-armesto, ed. Times guide, which refers to demented transylvanian peasants overtaken by visions of vampires.

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than to the native, their relevance to the scholarly student of romania may at first seem reduced. But one only has to consider the playwright eugen ionescu’s words on stumbling across a chance reference to romania in an english novel of the 1930s, to realise the pressure exercised within roma-nia by such apparently innocent allusion:

huxley puts romanians among letts and lapps.consequently, this means that, in the extremely happy event that i

become the greatest romanian critic, huxley will still situate me alongside the artists of latvia and lapland. to be the greatest romanian critic!—this still means you being a poor cousin of the european intelligentsia.

what sad circumstances have forged for romania this walk-on role in culture?5

similarly, the entire direction of u.s. foreign policy regarding interven-tion in the Bosnian crisis of 1993 is rumoured to have been reversed upon president clinton’s perusal of an american travel account of life in the Balkans, robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, which apparently convinced the president that the ethnic problems of the region were the irremedi-able product of ancient hatreds, and that the west’s assistance would be worthless. we must conclude that despite the fact that travel literature has long since lost its position as the sole purveyor of information on dis-tant lands, or as the central database for philosophical anthropology, its importance in shaping mentalities (of the individual or of the general) has by no means disappeared. indeed, one critic recently defined British writing on southeastern europe in general in terms of an ‘imperialism of the imagination’, such were its alleged effects.6

Quantitatively, one can enumerate nearly forty books of travel and reminiscences; around a dozen biographies, mainly of royal personages or of dictators; and six or seven works of fiction. what follows, then, is not a systematic book-by-book treatment of all ‘literature’ dealing with romania, but a first attempt to examine a few themes which recur within British images, and to suggest directions for further research. i have tried to look at themes beyond the obvious—vampires, political instability, ‘Balkanism’—which have already received a degree of attention, even if their explanation is by no means complete.7 this has led me to examine problems of sexuality, art, history and what one might call the ‘literarization’

5 ionescu, Nu, 57. the novel referred to is huxley’s Point Counter Point. huxley was widely read in interwar romania: for details see dimitriu, ‘huxley’. see also ch. 8 above.

6 goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania. see also golopenţia, ‘clichés’.7 nandriş, ‘the historical dracula’ (still in many ways the best article on the subject).

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of romania. the emphasis is on works in the mainstream of the British book market: although there is no really scientific measure of the influ-ence of a given text on public opinion, i have tried to take account of a work’s popularity or prestige, when assessing its potential for creating longer-term models or stereotypes. i have not ventured to look at images produced on television or the mass media generally, although such a study would certainly prove interesting.

it also matters whether a narrative is presented as historical or fictional. some writers of travel accounts are prone to ‘dramatize’ their allegedly empirical adventures, thus promoting a register of exoticism (which is never theless claimed as a ‘romanian reality’) while novelists have attempted a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style pretending to the status of political reportage. these degrees of fictionality obviously influence the reception of images in the literary sphere, and need to be taken into account too.

Sex, Lies and Stereotypes

the great romanian historian nicolae iorga once remarked that the good thing about the British in romania, as opposed to the french, is that they don’t imagine that all the local women are ready to run from one end of the country to the other and make love to them, simply in order to obtain the latest fashion magazine or a bottle of paris perfume.8 this statement is perhaps only comparatively true. it is not for me to judge whether the British are vainer than the french: but at the same time there is no deny-ing that sex plays a significant role in British-romanian relations, or at least in the British imagination of them. two memoirs of pre-war roma-nia published in the 1980s stress the sexual invitingness, which is made to seem part of nature: patrick leigh fermor recalls rolling in the transylva-nian haystacks with some suitably bucolic peasants;9 while ivor porter in Bucharest remembers

one sunday morning i walked to the outskirts of the town . . . i approached two young women leaning on a fence, the next moment, one of them had pointed her breast and was squirting milk at me and both were in fits of laughter. i walked on, dumbfounded. for the rest of the day i kept asking myself whether this had been a gesture of high spirits or an unfriendly act

8 iorga, Ce datorim cărţii englese, 8.9 leigh fermor, Between the woods and the water, 129–30.

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directed against a western intruder. i invented a great deal of political and moral gobbledegook to sooth my wounded puritanical soul.10

of the six or so fictional works treating romania, at least five have as a major plot feature anglo-romanian relations of a particularly close kind. olivia manning’s Balkan Trilogy (1960–1965), certainly the best-known of these works and the one closest to ‘classic status’ in the public acception, revolves around a British council official, guy pringle and his wife har-riet, and the tribulations of their early married life in the Bucharest of 1939–1940. as romania moves from dictatorship to dictatorship, and away from nominal allied guarantee into the arms of the germans, the mar-riage of guy and harriet is threatened by the former’s liaison with one of his pupils, the self-pitying and self-promoting sophie oresanu. according to the narrator,

she had the usual rumanian face, dark-eyed, pasty and too full in the cheeks; but her manner of seating and holding herself demanded from her the defer-ence due to a beauty. now that her self-importance was justified, there was a flaunting of this demand.11

guy’s interest in her begins as a gesture of sympathy (she is short of money and the victim of political oppression within university circles), but ends up being a risk to the interests of his marriage. it is in the nature of fiction for the political to be sublimated into the personal. whether the leading British character’s casual and risky affair should be regarded as an allegory for the dangers awaiting British political policy, and the need not to be fooled by pasty-faced dark-eyed nations flaunting their importance and demanding attention to the detriment of British domestic interests, is a matter for debate;12 but the image of romania represented physically, either as a sexual enticement or a threat, is perhaps characteristic of British novelists’ approaches.

further significant fictions with major romanian themes did not to my knowledge appear until after the revolution of 1989. all British novelists writing about an alien culture have to overcome the problem of mak-ing their plot relevant to the preoccupations of their British readership:

10 porter, Operation autonomous, 4. hammond, British literature and the Balkans, 77, commenting on my interpretation, finds it ‘overstated’, but the examples he proceeds to adduce seem rather to support my case.

11  manning, Great fortune, 241.12 cf. maurice pearton’s assessment of Britain’s agreement to guarantee romania’s

frontiers in march 1939 as ‘a sudden, and to that degree uncharacteristic, response to a romanian initiative’. pearton, ‘British policy’, 89.

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and those who have depicted romania in the 1990s have addressed this difficulty largely by treating love relationships between romanians and westerners. Bel mooney’s narrative of 1993, Lost Footsteps,13 features a romanian woman, ana popescu whose only son was the result of an affair with a visiting american archaeologist in the 1970s. in 1989, she has her son taken to frankfurt where he arrives alone and is registered as a refu-gee seeking asylum. the novel chronicles her dramatic suffering following her own failure to escape, and, after the revolution, her odyssean wander-ings in the west in search of her escaped child. the novel is largely nar-rated through the eyes of the principal romanian character: the British, french, german and american characters are viewed ambiguously. Brit-ish council officials in Bucharest indulge in questionably sincere flirta-tion; desire is always hampered by economic considerations and national interests. romania is portrayed synecdochically as a helpless, victimized woman, equally let down by the sympathetic but uncommitted west and the brutal, abusive man that is the communist state.

paul Bailey’s Kitty and Virgil describes the intense and poetic love between a romanian refugee poet and an englishwoman working in pub-lishing in london. the name of the principal romanian character indi-cates not only his romanness but his status as a kind of modern guide to the underworld. on the romance is superimposed a second theme com-mon to many writings, fictional or otherwise, on romania: its portrayal as a kind of nether region of europe, a ‘Bermuda triangle of the mind, a place that concentrates all one’s anxieties about unnamable dangers and the darkness of the unknown’ as one literary traveller put it.14

perhaps the most interesting take on the idea of romanian-British rela-tions as being inevitably tinted with romance and subterranean danger is the novel by alan Brownjohn, published in 1997, The Long Shadows. the protagonist, tim harker-Jones, is drawn to romania when researching the biography of his dead novelist friend, philip carston, who, it emerges, had a powerful emotional attachment to his romanian translator and portrayed her in his novel A Time Apart (which she may have helped to co-author) about a woman from an unspecified east european country visiting eng-land. the biographer visits romania several times both before and after 1989, but is unable to establish the exact nature of the relationship,

13 mooney, Lost footsteps. the title is an (acknowledged) borrowing from the earlier escape memoir by silviu crăciunaş, Lost footsteps.

14 hoffman, Exit into history, 232.

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which the translator angrily refuses to divulge. meanwhile, a former Brit-ish council official who was party to the novelist’s visit to Bucharest and to ‘târgu alb’ (the provincial capital, where the translator lives), has writ-ten a play dramatizing the novelist and translator’s relationship as a pas-sionate and tragic love affair across the iron curtain. thus a variety of perspectives is achieved on the representation of anglo-romanian sexual relations: it is quite possibly a spiritual affair, but the average liberal mind would still prefer to cast it as a dramatic sexual entanglement and/or an act of political defiance. indeed, the whole question of interpretation and stereotype is problematized throughout the novel, and to some extent can be said to constitute its subject.

another thing all these writers have in common is a tendency towards ‘literarization’ of romania. also characteristic in this respect is a little-known short story by one of Britain’s best-known contemporary writers, Julian Barnes, entitled ‘one of a kind’. a British writer claims to have a theory about romania, that it can only produce one genius in any field: eminescu in poetry, ionescu in drama, enescu in music, Brâncuşi in sculp-ture, năstase in tennis, and ceauşescu in communist dictators. he asks his émigré romanian interlocutor whether there is an equivalent novelist, and the reply is that there was one great novelist, his childhood friend nicolai petrescu but he was prevented from writing freely under com-munism, and produced only one great work, a megalithic epic that was a tacit comment on the megalithic culture that produced it. the émigré and the novelist had a pact that he would write no more after the success of his solitary masterpiece. however, the english writer’s visit to a confer-ence in Bucharest brings the émigré bad news: his friend has caved in and churned out several sequels in order to please the régime.15

in some cases (Barnes and Brownjohn), the paradoxes of romanian literary production under communism are wittily and poignantly treated. elsewhere, this literarization is perhaps a product of foreign writers’ dif-ficulties in representing a little-known culture, both in terms of their own immersion and familiarisation, and in attempting to convey a particularly ‘romanian’ set of symbols and aesthetic references to their anglophone audience. thus Bel mooney’s romanian characters cherish memories of oltenian rugs or peasant horas, moldavian monasteries, folklore and

15 Barnes, ‘one of a kind’.

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mircea eliade.16 paul Bailey’s novel works through a similar stock code of cherished cultural items by which his poet hero sets store: he quotes romanian literature to his lover, teaches her romanian words and prov-erbs, and waxes lyrical about the transylvanian spring and the village museum in Bucharest.17 romantic, but less than realistic.

this is perhaps less the result of a trend towards postmodernist inter-est in the problems of textuality—none of the novels under discussion is particularly innovative technically—than of a vague sense of admiration for east european intellectual life in British culture, not always backed by a deep understanding of the context that produced it. it is certainly a change from older representations—nineteenth-century english travel-lers tended to be thoroughly disdainful about literary culture in romania;18 and olivia manning captures an old-school cliché well by having one of her english characters (inchcape, the director of the British council in Bucha-rest) pronounce casually: ‘they’re quick. But all rumanians are much of a muchness. they can absorb facts but can’t do anything with them. a

16 mooney, Lost footsteps, 156 (rugs & horas); 193 (folklore); 23–6, 346 (monasteries); 421 (mircea eliade); 464 (Mioriţă). romanian women’s poetry such as is available in english, from hélène văcărescu to ana Blandiana, is extensively quoted.

17 Bailey, Kitty and Virgil: oltenian carpets, 26, 33; ion creangă, 26, 164–8, 204; plum brandy, 35, 43; icons, 26; lucian Blaga, 29; eminescu, 50, 147, 181ff. (lead character has an argument with his father over eminescu’s nationalism), 251; mioriţa, 51, 146, 251; Bacovia, 62, 72, 111, 251–2; roman ancestry meditated upon, 84–5 (virgil), 125 (marcus aurelius), 262 (trajan), and passim; village museum, 268 (‘what is not savage in our history is enshrined there’, the lead character tells his lover); dracula, 113 (stoker angrily refuted); romanian words, 43, 76, 106, 111, 118, 133, 150, 152, 232; romanian sayings, 116, 120, 154, 186 etc. english characters quote hamlet (140) and King lear (23), and recommend the hound of the Baskervilles (112); wicked hungarian, 146 (accuses romanians of being ‘thieves and peas-ants’); a folk legend, 185; russian skoptsy cab-drivers in Bucharest, 197; Brancuşi, 237. on the other hand, virgil also likes good old english hymns, and the poetry of george herbert. Bailey’s fictional poet has the usual experiences recorded in intellectual exiles’ memoirs: when interrogated by the securitate, he is made to discuss american literature, just as in manea’s On Clowns, 86; also like manea (xi) he treasures folk tales as an antidote to com-munist ideology.

18 the British consul in Bucharest in the first decade of the nineteenth century, william wilkinson, averred that ‘an early propensity to learning and literature receives but little encouragement’ and had a low opinion of the local versifiers: ‘if any are able to talk familiarly, though imperfectly, of one or two ancient or celebrated authors, or make a few bad verses that will rhyme, them assume the title of literati and poets, and they are looked upon by their astonished countrymen as endowed with superior genius and abilities’ (wilkinson, Account, 129), while in 1877 Berger (A winter, 211–2) remarked rather unjustly that ‘there is no intellectual life whatever here. no conversazione, no scientific meetings, no lectures, no libraries, no public galleries. and even if there were, there is not a soul who would go a stone’s throw for any one of them.’

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lot of stuffed geese, i call them. an uncreative people.’19 fortunately, this last prejudice is less in evidence these days: but it seems partially to be being replaced with one of romanians as mysterious hyperintellectuals, which is explained by the joint legacy of communism and peasant origins. if alecsandri’s invented proverb of the 1850s, ‘the romanian is born a poet’, is less quoted in romania itself, it remains a thriving myth outside romania’s borders.

all these fictions are supported by, and sometimes draw their detail from, the more numerous and popular genre of travel accounts. thus some of the circumstantial detail in olivia manning’s trilogy can be traced to earlier books on romania: her descriptions of life on the prut in 1939 surely owe something to sacheverell sitwell’s book, Roumanian Journey, published in 1938; in both cases the landscape is chagall-like, full of empty horizons, naive painted shop signs, mixed races. likewise manning fol-lows sitwell in describing sinaia as having a characteristically russian feel.20 elsewhere in her fiction, manning consciously seeks to debunk the idyllism and peasant-worship of her predecessors, notably hall, sitwell and patmore, and indeed the protagonist harriet pringle remarks at one stage on how little the rose-tinted view of romania propounded in travel books corresponds to the world she encounters. on the other hand, a book like patrick leigh fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water, which is a memoir, fifty years after, of a journey from london to constantinople undertaken in 1934, is very conscious that the territory that he is describ-ing owes much of its mystique to earlier representations in fiction:

how closely the geography of austria-hungary and its neighbours approxi-mated to the fictional world of earlier generations! graustark, ruritania, Bor-duria, syldavia and a score of imaginary kingdoms, usurped by tyrants and sundered by fights for the trone, leap into mind: plots, treachery, imprisoned heirs and palace factions abound and, along with them, fiendish monocled swordsmen, queens in lonely towers, toppling ranges, deep forests, plains full of half-wild horses, wandering tribes of gypsies who steal children out of castles and dye them with walnut-juice or lurk under the battlements and melt the chatelaine’s hearts with their strings.21

19  manning, Great fortune, 40.20 manning, Spoilt city; sitwell, Roumanian journey, 22–24. goldsworthy also remarked

on the similarities, Inventing, 197. one might also note that the surname ‘oresanu’ she gives to guy’s romanian lover may well be drawn from starkie’s Raggle-Taggle, 283–92, which features an encounter with a finance inspector with that name (which is usually spelt Orăşeanu, not Oresanu).

21 leigh fermor, Between the woods, 170. a similar point about sitwell’s claims to be covering unknown territory is made by ogden, ‘english travel writing’.

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despite this profuse citation of literary models—saki, anthony hope, hergé, the hungarian novelist maurus Jókai—leigh fermor claims that the territory he covered was ‘immeasurably old, and at the same time brand new and totally unknown.’22 Being unknown thus becomes one of romania’s best-known characteristics. dracula is not explicitly men-tioned, but local belief in vampires is affirmed, and their polyglot names are cited for effect, in a style similar to that of Bram stoker.23 leigh fer-mor’s transylvania is a rose-tinted land, full of anglophile hungarian counts, robust romanian peasants dressed in white, and long-haired gypsies who—improbably in the 1930s, for the practice died out almost completely in the late nineteenth century—are still panning for gold in the flowing streams.24 this selective antiquarian evocation is designed partly to commemorate the uniqueness and diversity of a world that dis-appeared with the arrival of communism; but cannot always serve for a reliable picture of the past.

leigh fermor’s book is one of the most cited by subsequent writers, who have grown in number since 1989, although he himself is said to have been so disgusted after his visit to Bucharest in 1990, that he found himself unable to write the projected third volume of his travels, cover-ing the ground between the iron gates and istanbul, via wallachia and moldavia.25 as the country received more and more foreign visitors since the revolution, it is perhaps more difficult for writers to be claiming to describe the unknown. instead they may assert a familiarity, derived

22 leigh fermor, Between the woods, 11.23 ibid., 124: ‘[count] istván . . . took me to see an old shepherd, who unfolded tales

of spirits, fairies and werewolves. (Priculici, akin to the slavonic vrkolak, were named; they were vampires. and stafi and strigoi, who sounded like a mixture of evil spirits and ghost; and witches too, if strigoi, like the italian strega, come from the latin stryx). all the country people thereabouts believed in these supernaturals and dreaded them.’ cf. stoker, Dracula, 7: ‘i could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so i quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out. i must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were Ordog—satan, pokol—hell, stregoica—which, vrolok and vlkoslak—both of which mean the same thing, one being slovak and the other servian for something that is either were-wolf or vampire. (Mem., i must ask the count about these superstitions).’

24 for the disappearance of this trade, see achim, 52–3, 123–4. contemporary accounts—e.g. sitwell, Roumanian journey; hoppé, In Gipsy camp; starkie, Raggle-Taggle; Bercovici, Story of the Gypsy; popp serboianu, Les Tsiganes—however romanticized, do not claim to record washers for gold.

25 mentions of leigh fermor in murphy, Transylvania, 12; crane, Clear waters, 313, 327; russell, Prejudice, 57, 81, 111. perrie, Roads that move, broadly follows leigh fermor’s route. for the discontinuation of his trilogy, see lewis, Kindred spirits, 273–6.

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nevertheless from the same stock of older images. ‘i did not get to roma-nia until 1994,’ writes the veteran traveller Jan morris,

but i felt i knew them well already. they were frenchified latins, pecu-liarly implanted among the slavs of the east, and they were famously raffish, intriguing, high-flown, unpredictable and unreliable. at first it seemed to me that most of their conversations concerned tunnels [. . .] louche but devout, often elegant in a feline way—with women tram-drivers smoking on the job, and headscarved baboushkas sweeping leaves—with vulpine sellers of medicinal roots and peasants in high fur hats—with cinematic rogues, coats over their shoulders, trying to cheat you with financial transactions—with slyly evasive bureaucrats and delightfuly cynical historians—with conversa-tions bafflingly opaque, and memories almost fictionally improbable—the romanians struck me as a cavalcade of everything i thought of as most unchangeably Balkan.26

morris deliberately blurs the line between what he may have observed personally and what might be a foreigner’s prejudices, a technique which allows him to project a learned familiarity with the exotic as compensa-tion for the brevity of his encounter. still, his attitude is at least more favourable than certain other travellers, such as v.s. pritchett, whom ‘romania annoys almost from the beginning’. adam nicolson, on an 1985 visit, found the romanians’ personal attitude offensive, and remarks that ‘personality matches a chute into barbarity on the other side’, without perhaps considering that the construction of personality is an intrinsic trait of the genre he is practising. Jason goodwin, on foot in 1991, merely found that ‘the language set my teeth on edge’.27

over twenty accounts were put out by mainstream publishers in the years 1985–2000, although most of them were episodes of more widely-spread travels covering the Balkans or eastern europe as a whole. indeed, such is the pressure of the market in Britain that many of them have to make their journeys more interesting by choosing eccentric means of transport: on foot (Jason goodwin, nick crane, peter o’connor); by bicycle (dervla murphy, georgina harding, Brian hall, giles whittell); by donkey (sophie thurnham); even carrying a pig (rory maclean). others follow the length of the danube (guy arnold), or the carpathian moun-tains (crane).

some of these accounts are indeed rather superficial, and the his-torical detail paraded is frequently off-beam: one traveller describes the

26 morris, Fifty years, 151.27 pritchett, Foreign faces; nicolson, Frontiers, 208; goodwin, On foot.

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phanariot rulers of wallachia and moldavia as being ‘islamic greeks’;28 another thinks that Budai-deleanu’s Ţiganiada (The Gypsiad, circa 1800) is ‘acknowledged as the first poem written in romanian’,29 and practi-cally claims to have discovered, single-handedly and against the will of obstructive historians, the allegedly unknown history of gypsy slavery, which is not only mentioned in numerous romanian history books of the communist period, but even by other better-informed British travellers.30 a recent and well-received history of constantinople refers to ‘stephen the great, prince of wallachia’, another thinks he is transylvanian; a third refers to iaşi as his capital city.31 a visitor to the Bukovina in 1991 thinks the traditional gateways and windows of the peasant houses are evidence of ‘Brâncoveanu style’.32 and a biography of princess marthe Bibesco, published in 1997, locates the town of turnu severin in Bessarabia.33 admittedly, the British reading public may not be excessively demanding when it comes to such detail—but many of these accounts, particularly the ones written by journalists and which often function in lieu of more serious political overviews, both claim prestige on account of the arcane knowledge set forth and refer to history as an explanatory factor in con-temporary developments, often with the same irresponsibility as the local politicians themselves. this carelessness with facts invalidates the con-clusion of one traveller, that ‘if it was english to want data, then it was romanian to make do with rumours, myths. . . . myths add drama to dull old data, and drama feeds the romanian soul.’ it is in fact frequently the imprecision of many of the english authors that creates this perspective; just as the attribution of passivity to the romanian is often the product of

28 gardner, Curtain calls, 73.29 fonseca, Bury me standing, 175. the first printed poem (i.e. leaving aside the question

of oral poetry and song of doubtless much older date) in romanian is generally acknowl-edged to be ‘stihuri pentru stema ţării’ (verses on the country’s coat of arms), probably by the metropolitan varlaam, published in his compilation The Romanian Book of Teach-ing at iaşi in 1643.

30 ibid., 174–86; but earlier mention in nicolson, Frontiers, 209.31  mansel, Constantinople, 149; gardner, Curtain calls, 83; russell, Prejudice, 64.32 drysdale, Looking for Gheorghe, 75. Brâncoveanu style is actually an ornate late

17th-century local variation on ottoman and venetian baroque styles, found in walla-chian monasteries and country houses; revived at the turn of the 20th century and called neobrâncovenesc.

33 sutherland, Enchantress, 36. this error was at least picked up by a reviewer, noel malcolm in the Sunday Telegraph, who rightly pointed out that this was ‘like saying south-ampton is in scotland’.

sex, lies and stereotypes 245

the position of the foreign describer rather than an objectively observable characteristic.34

other travellers, however, seek to ridicule this telescoping approach to history, such as the hiker nick crane, who speculates, on hearing that the ancient dacians communicated with their deity by ritually throwing mes-sengers onto a cluster of spears, as to whether this explains ‘the vigour with which romanians have adopted the public telephone’.35

elsewhere, one tends to meet with a good deal of generalization along the same lines from traveller to traveller. numerous writers feel obliged to mention ionesco and dadaism, as some kind of invariable explanation for the parts of romanian life they don’t understand.36 in other accounts, intellectual life is richly reported and opinions presented for the reader to judge: such subjects as romanian protochronism,37 or the relation of the intelligentsia38 and the clergy39 to political power are given a nuanced treatment, and not all writers fall into the trap of allowing a single encoun-ter to stand for an entire national characteristic.

it is tempting from a specialist’s perspective to find evidence in these contradictions of a derogatory, even pernicious representation of roma-nian life. But such an interpretation would be the victim of the partiality it seeks to criticise. a classic case of this can be seen in the various aca-demic debates arising over the ‘real’ nature of the Bucharest portrayed by olivia manning. many travellers cite this work as a sumptuous evocation of a lost 1930s paradise;40 specialists in romanian history, on the other hand, have seized upon it as a legitimate rebuff to the myth of ‘the paris

34 herzfeld, Anthropology, 49ff. an acute analysis of theories of romanian passivity by deletant, ‘fatalism and passiveness’.

35 crane, Clear waters, 299–300.36 Barnes, ‘one of a kind’; russell, Prejudice, 125; mooney, Lost footsteps, 318, 432;

drysdale, Looking for Gheorghe, 80, 156, 170; Brownjohn, The dark shadows, 321, all cite ionesco and/or dadaism as something originally and characteristically romanian; daniels, Wilder shores, prefers reference to gogol (88), lewis carroll (77 & 106) and Kafka (81), but the connotations—a cruel, mad, fictional world—are similar, as they are for chamberlain, In the Communist mirror.

37 daniels, Wilder shores, 98–100.38 daniels (for the late 1980s); hoffman (for 1990) are both valuable in this respect. 39 murphy’s encounters with orthodox priests, for instance (Transylvania, 113–4) sug-

gest a discrepancy in the degree of support given to the ceauşescu régime by the clergy at rural and élite levels; runciman’s memoir of visits to romanian patriarchs under com-munism is sensitive to the different attitudes of patriarchs Justin (1977–1986), and teoctist (1986–present day) (A traveller’s alphabet, 129–39). this book is also well worth consulting for reminiscences of such figures as Queen marie, marthe Bibesco and nicolae iorga in the 1930s.

40 drysdale, Looking, 54; daniels, Wilder shores, 80–1; hoffman, Exit, 256.

246 chapter ten

of the east’, dwelling instead on its portraits of dirty, dusty boulevards and starving peasants.41 But surely one of the novel’s virtues is the fact that it represents many Bucharests: the prejudices of both romanian and eng-lish characters are dramatized, and counterpoint each other continuously. when British characters criticise the locals and attribute to them qualities of laziness and dishonesty, counter-examples are brought to bear. some of the romanian characters are casually anti-semitic—but not all of them behave in this way. some idealize the peasantry (guy), others (drucker, dobson) condemn them as idle beasts. if we see a romanian character is portrayed as lazy, gluttonous or dishonest, manning the novelist does not seize upon this as truth but for the fact that the behaviour conforms to an image held by a westerner: ‘yakimov was delighted to observe that she did everything a woman of oriental character was reputed to do.’42 in this case, as in many of the more sophisticated works on romania in general, prejudice is represented rather than simply perpetuated.

Beyond the weak historical explanations and the tendency towards generalization, then, the more intelligent writers are able to illustrate the diversity of opinions on romania’s identity and its future without declar-ing a definitive and damning verdict of their own. many accounts are ‘written up within an inevitably fragmentary and subjective viewpoint, but benefit at the same time from the spontaneity of direct contacts and a position of detachment.’43 in conclusion, to paraphrase oscar wilde, one may say that if there is one thing worse for romania than being written about by the British, then that is not being written about. it is to be hoped that future travel accounts and fictional portrayals are able to build on the diversity and plurality of their predecessors’ representations, and that a more sophisticated and consistent picture will prevent romania from returning to being a marginal blur on the retina of the western vision.

41 Boia, Istorie şi mit, 215; veiga, Istoria Gărzii de Fier, 282, cites manning’s novel as factual evidence of poverty and desperation among the peasantry in 1939; deletant, intro-duction to Marea şansa, likewise sees manning’s vision as a negative one, and provides some possible explanations.

42 manning, The great fortune, 202.43 cernovodeanu, ‘image de l’«autre»’, 585.

sex, lies and stereotypes 247

table 5. articles in The Times about romania, 1996–1998.

index title year no. article about

aid/charities 19961998

11

volunteers praisedBlue peter Romania Appeal funds mismanaged

animals/caves 19961998

11

new life-forms in mangalia caveill-treated bears

Bombs & explosions 1997 1 16 workers killed at military airfield in craiova

children/young people

19961998

63

all orphanages/adoption/child-smugglinglearning patterns among rom. orphans in uK (thes)

defence/aircraft & aeropace

199619971998

261

arms contracts; nato expansionhelicopter to be named after vampire; nato expansion × 5.British to help train romanian army

diseases 1998 1 ceauşescu’s old clothes go to leper colonydrugs 1998 1 British trucks have drugs ‘planted’ on

them in rom.economic situation 1998 2 sale of ceauşescu artefacts to boost

economyeducation/ universities/uBB/languages

199619971998

236

internet project; student describes summer teaching (thes)minority language problems (thes)ditto × 5 (thes); hun. lang. issue cd. endanger govt (as Politics).

emigration 1998 1 103 illegal immigrants caught entering uKespionage 1998 1 retracts 1997 statement that tőkes was

informer (see Politics)food & drink 1997 1 five romanian prisoners die drinking

methylated spiritsfrancophonie 1997 1 romanian membership of francophone

associationprisons/ hairdressing

1997 1 criminals develop lice to avoid jail

history 1997 1 romania angered by dracula centenary celebrations

housing 1997 1 president urges citizens’ responsibility for street children

insects/roads 1998 1 swarm of bees causes closure of national highway

literature 1998 1 contestatory letter following feature on nina cassian

motoring 1998 1 traffic policeman stops thieves with toy pistol

248 chapter ten

table 5 (cont.)

index title year no. article about

murder 1998 2 British aid worker in manslaughter charge after road accident; constanţa human rights lawyer decapitated

national flags 1997 1 clinton mistakes revolutionary flag for poncho

nuclear energy 1996 1 first romanian nuclear power station opened

politics & government

1996

1997

1998

10

10

3

4 re. elections; 5 re. ilie nastase; caramitru is made ministernato expansion × 5 (as Defence); King michael’s return × 3; lászló tőkes said to be securitate informer; (letter) ousted British conservative govt. should be sent to romania.hun. lang. issue (cf. Education); ciorbea resigns; vasile pm.

race relations 1997 1 causes of gypsy exodus to Britainradio 1996 1 BBc radio helps romania devise soap

operarom national opera 1998 2 programme + letter praising performanceroyal family 1996 4 princess margarita’s marriage + 3 letters

re. her royal statussexual offences 1997 1 essex vicar arrested in Bucharest

suspected of paedophiliaspecial reports 1996 4 economic investment supplement + 3

contestatory lettersstudents 1998 1 rom. & Bul. students join erasmus

mobility scheme (thes)switzerland, rels. w. 1996 2 swiss ambassador’s liaison w. ‘romanian

mata hari’theft 1998 1 paintings stolen in 1969 from Brukenthal

museum found in ustravel & tourism 1996

1998

2

2

unspoilt countryside; article follows travel writers’ tracksceausescu lifestyle holidays; trips to people’s palace

uK, rels. with 19961997

1998

13

3

volunteers praised (as Aid and Charities)u.K. foreign secretary to visit Balkans; King michael pleads for romania’s entry into nato + letter (all as Politics)prince of wales visit × 2; British training (as Defence)

sex, lies and stereotypes 249

table 5 (cont.)

index title year no. article about

usa rels. with 19961997

11

hilary clinton’s visit + photoclinton visit (as Politics/nato); poncho gaffe (as National Flags)

source: The Times Index. reading, uK: primary source media, 1996, 1997, 1998. the index covers the following publications: Times (daily newspaper); Sunday Times (sunday news-paper); The Times Literary Supplement (weekly review); The Times Educational Supplement (a weekly supplement for teachers & the educational profession); The Times Higher Edu-cational Supplement (a weekly review for university lecturers & the higher educational profession). the circulation of the Times and the Sunday Times is near to a million whereas that of the supplements is nearer 50,000. this Index by no means covers all references to romania, but rather records articles in which romania is a principal subject of the article. from the Times itself only the main news section (home & foreign, leading articles, let-ters, obituaries and some other parts) is indexed, and not sport, business, features. thus the footballing reference cited in the second paragraph of this article was not found in the Index. the ‘literature’ heading contained for 1998 a letter contesting the comportment of the romanian poet nina cassian under the communist regime, but not the original article, a feature on cassian, which provoked the letter. of 39 articles on nato accession recorded for 1997, 6 featured romania specifically and in detail; others may have included incidental or summary mention of the country. in this sense the survey i have undertaken is not completely representative—but offers a rough guide to what one newspaper and its supplements considered newsworthy and characteristic of romania in recent years.

more recently, siani-davies, ‘tabloid tales’ has analysed the British popular press’s reac-tion to the 1989 revolution; and good critical surveys of the german and dutch print media have been made by salden, ‘Kriminell, corrupt und rückständig’, and Bosma, ‘onbekend makt onbemind’.

Chapter eleven

paradoxes of oCCidentalism: on travel and travel Writing in CeauşesCu’s romania*

Can we talk about a unitary romanian image of the West in the Cold War period? any investigation of ‘the image of the other’ needs to spec-ify the range and nature of sources, as well as the limits of the source base. the few existing studies on romanian views of the outside world under the communist regime tend to treat the early (pre-1965) period and stress the negative light in which the West was portrayed in official pro-paganda as against an idealised private view.1 the most detailed study of ideology in Ceauşescu’s romania, while offering a highly complex and nuanced interpretation, maintains nonetheless that in 1970s and 1980s romania ‘to be against the regime had become synonymous with being pro- european, whereas Ceauşescu and those in factions more or less allied with him ranted against Western imports and the europeanising oblitera-tion of the national soul’.2

here i use a previously neglected type of source, namely published and unpublished accounts of travel to western europe and the wider world in the period 1948–1989, to suggest a slightly different line of thinking about the public image of the West in late communist romania.3 short of a com-plete survey, i have laid emphasis on establishing a base of materials so that research may develop in different directions henceforth. examina-tion of several of these accounts suggests that the pronounced develop-ment of a strong national ideology under Ceauşescu was not necessarily incompatible with writing extensively about western europe or even with the production of a pro-european discourse, often by the same writers.

although there are detailed bibliographies of the communist period,4 there is no detailed guide to travel literature published in romania from

* in The Balkans and the West, ed. a. hammond (aldershot, 2004), 69–80 and then in In and out of focus, ed. d. deletant (Bucharest, 2005), 183–200.

1  onişoru, ‘“vin americanii!” ’; Ţârău, ‘Caricatura şi politica externă’.2 verdery, National ideology, 2.3 the theme has become less neglected since first publication of this chapter: see e.g.

guentcheva, ‘images of the West’; Bracewell, ‘new men, old europe’; and some studies in péteri, ed. Imagining.

4 popa, Ceauşescu’s Romania; for a general guide see deletant, Romania, 261–7.

252 chapter eleven

1948 to 1989. perhaps more seriously, there are not to my knowledge any recent scholarly studies of the legal framework and sociological practice of travel during this period.5 however, information extracted from other bibliographies may give us an idea of the number of travel accounts pub-lished in different years; of the kinds of places travel writers went to; and the kinds of things they said.6 thus, a bibliography of recommended works for public libraries issued in 1964 contained a limited number of books of reportage and accounts of journeys, dedicated almost exclusively to highly favourable descriptions of the countries of the Communist Bloc.7 examples include the soviet travels of major prose writers like mihail sadoveanu, george Călinescu, george oprescu, Cezar petrescu, Zaharia stancu and geo Bogza;8 established socialists like scarlat Callimachi, and dumitru Corbea;9 or younger figures like victor Bîrlădeanu, ioan grigorescu, a.e. Baconsky, and traian Coşovei.10 others issued ‘pages from Korea’; ‘notes from the Bulgarian people’s republic’; ‘on the margin of the gobi desert’ or reported from ‘Cuba, the free territory of america’.11 poland was considered ‘the phoenix Bird’ by ioan grigorescu but portugal appears hardly to have been considered at all let alone great Britain or holland.12 although the quantity of travel books published was relatively small, it was clearly considered a significant genre with a major didactic function to play as all important romanian writers practised it, including poets such as tudor arghezi, nina Cassian, demostene Botez and tiberiu utan.13

5 some miscellaneous but valuable first-hand observations from different perspectives in hale, Ceauşescu’s Romania, 106–8; neuberg, Heroes’ children, 89, 115–6, 329; deletant, Ceauşescu and the Securitate, preface. on ‘micul trafic’, i.e. legal small-trade border cross-ings: Chelcea & lăţea, România profundă, 191–207; on the german exodus: hartl, ‘Zum exodus der deutschen’; on forcing dissidents to emigrate: scarfe, ‘dismantling’.

6 my basic source for this period is the fortnightly bulletin Bibliografia R.S. Romania; Bibliografia literaturii române. see also gafiţa & Bănulescu, Scriitori români contemporani.

7 gafiţa & Bănulescu, Scriitori.8 sadoveanu, Caleidoscop; Călinescu, Kiev, Moscova, Leningrad; idem, Am fost în

China nouă; oprescu, Jurnal; petrescu, Însemnări; stancu, Călătorind; Bogza, Meridiane. Călinescu’s ‘fraternal’ travel writings are conspicuously absent both from the 17–volume edition of his Opere put out in the 1960s; and from the 1978 anthology of his travel writing entitled Însemnări de călătorie. this gives an idea of how such early russophile texts were already being marginalized by editorial strategies under Ceauşescu.

9 Callimachi, Un călător; Corbea, Anotimpuri.10 Bîrlădeanu, Aerul tare; grigorescu, Scrisoare din Moscova; idem, Învinsul Terek;

Baconsky, Călătorii; Coşovei, Dimensiuni.11  porumbacu, Drumuri şi zile; nedelcu, Însemnări; rău, La marginea deşertului Gobi;

popovici, Cuba.12 grigorescu, Pasărea Fenix.13 arghezi, Din drum; Cassian, Dialogul vîntului cu marea; Botez, Prin U.R.S.S; utan, Kai-

mazarova.

paradoxes of occidentalism 253

their topographical compositions attemped to establish an aesthetic geo-graphy favouring the Communist Bloc and ignoring the West. the spirit of the era may be said to be encapsulated in the lines written by the poet eugen Jebeleanu:

o thought, thy wing Beats only towards moscow.14

only those holding senior positions in the field of culture were able to publish accounts of the non-communist world. thus in the mid-1950s mihai ralea (1896–1964, a literary critic and philosopher who had been arts minister in the early communist government of petru groza, subse-quently romanian ambassador in the usa and france, vice-president of the grand national assembly and president of the romanian national Commission for unesCo) published a book of travels about the far West of the americas15 and another work on france.16 the latter, although more a series of philosophical reflections on france’s historical destiny (revolutionary, of course, rather than ‘the sick man of the West’) drew extensively on ralea’s personal experience and emphasized his access to first-hand knowledge.17 likewise horia stancu—son of socialist-realist novelist and then director of the national theatre Zaharia stancu—aired his impressions of scandinavia.18 eugen frunză, politician and director of the review Flacăra [the flame], published an account of a trip to West germany in 1959.19 demostene Botez, a leading poet and director of the review Viaţa Românească [romanian life], issued a book of verse dedicated to romanian-Bulgarian friendship entitled ‘rainbow over the danube’20 and published further poems about Bulgaria and Czechoslova-kia in his 1958 volume Prin ani [through years], as well as a whole book on his soviet travels;21 but also managed to have his impressions of marseilles

14 ‘gîndul, aripa ta /Bate doar spre moscova’. Jebeleanu, ‘Zboară gând’ (1953).15 ralea, În extremul occident.16 idem, Cele două Franţe. a french edition, entitled Visages de France and prefaced by

roger garaudy, was published in paris in 1959.17 shortly afterwards ralea’s impressions of egypt, holland, england and spain (under-

taken before the communist takeover and published as Nord-Sud in 1945) were re-edited in his selected writings: Scrieri din trecut.

18 stancu, Călătorind prin ţările Nordului.19 frunză, Oameni şi cărţi.20 Botez, Curcubeu; idem, Prin ani.21 idem, Prin U.R.S.S.

254 chapter eleven

from the late 1920s published in a french review22 while his Carnet23 of 1961 contained verses inspired by a trip to paris. alexandru siperco, roma-nia’s representative on the international olympic Committee, published travel notes on sweden, france, italy and mexico in 1959;24 two years later, senior literary critic and director of the romanian academy library tudor vianu’s Jurnal included a description of a visit to vienna as well as ones to moscow and new delhi.25 this limited demarcation of access to and permission to describe the West obviously led, within the intellectual sphere, to a privileging of travel, which became marked out as a source of authority and a badge of significance.

so things were changing, but slowly, in conformity with the partial opening up of romanian foreign and economic policy towards the West in the 1960s. in 1956 the Youth publishing house [Editura Tineretului] inaugurated the series În jurul lumii [around the World], dedicated to works of reportage and travel, with the work Meridiane sovietice by the classic socialist writer geo Bogza; but soon afterwards it began to publish books first about the non-aligned world (e.g. nicolae moraru on south america,26 or raja nicolau’s notes on india);27 then works about west-ern europe28 and the united states,29 although romanian readers had to wait until 1966 for a travel book about Yugoslavia.30 as for the big sister, france, by 1967 a romanian-american commentator was able to observe that ‘there are no political dangers connected with the restoration of the french image.’31 one of the first book-length accounts of america,

22 idem, ‘marseille il y a trente ans’. in 1965 the volume from which these impressions were drawn (În căutarea mea) was republished in idem, Chipuri şi măşti.

23 idem, Carnet.24 siperco, Note de drum.25 vianu, Jurnal, 96–9.26 moraru, În lumea contrastelor.27 nicolau, Străbătînd India.28 stancu, Călătorind; siperco, Note de drum; popescu, Drumuri europene.29 sidorovici & Brucan, America; grigorescu, Cocteil Babilon. several chapters of the

latter were reprinted in grigorescu’s Zigzag pe mapamond, which also covered indone-sia, Cyprus, poland, greece, the Caucasus, france and india. grigorescu went on to front a popular television programme ‘spectacolul lumii’ [the spectacle of the World] with numerous accompanying books; in 1998 he became romanian ambassador to poland. he reworked and extended his account of his american travels in Dilema americană, but using much of the original copy: comparison of this relatively favourable text with the original 1963 version would make an interesting exercise.

30 Bîrlădeanu, De la Dunăre la Adriatica. several other relatively favourable descripti-ons of Yugoslavia appeared shortly afterwards: arghezi, Paşi prin lume, 233–61; cf. porum-bacu, Drumuri şi zile, 47–73; plopeanu, Secvenţe iugoslave.

31  fischer-galaţi, ‘france and rumania’, 114.

paradoxes of occidentalism 255

ioan grigorescu’s Cocteil Babilon, although it provided strong critiques of automobile culture, the race question, u.s. foreign policy and the urban slums of new York, revealed that ‘after the soviet train, . . . the american train is possibly the most comfortable in the world’ (79) and that Coca or pepsi-Cola are ‘cold drinks which, although frequently and unilaterally evoked at home as liquours of damnation, have nothing wicked about them’ (152).

the change in attitude and geocultural orientation was evident in the publication strategies of a conformist writer like the poet and essayist a.e. Baconsky. in 1968 Baconsky published two volumes entitled (in the original) Remember, which were extremely similar in appearance but quite different in content. the first was subtitled Jurnal de călătorie [travel Journal] and reprinted—with modifications—some of his previously pub-lished description of Korea, China, the soviet union and Bulgaria. the second was subtitled Fals jurnal de călătorie [false travel Journal] and described florence, rome, venice, paris, salzburg, graz and vienna. the idea of a text ‘falsifying’ generic conventions had been used by romanian avant-garde writers in the 1930s such as eugen ionescu32 and Benjamin fondane33 to imply the inadequate representational possibilities of tradi-tional forms and, on a more metaphysical level, a ‘crisis of the real’. (it was later used in an ironic sense by the writer Costache olăreanu in a book about not going anywhere in particular).34 here, Baconsky claimed that he did so because his two months spent in the West were not a journey, but an ‘interior adventure’.35 he appeals to a subversive avant-garde practice, with the possible implication that he would like to tell the reader more but that circumstances do not permit; but also allowing the interpretation that an account of the West could not be as ‘realistic’ as a description of the east.

it certainly raised pointedly the question of which cultural hemisphere would dominate the construction of epistemic value: a burning one for writers and well as politicians if they wished to continue to publish. meanwhile, around the same time, former proletcultist poet and cul-tural commissar mihai Beniuc stopped publishing eulogies to the soviet union and produced instead two volumes of topographical verse about

32 ionescu, ‘fals itinerar critic’, in idem, Nu.33 fondane, Faux traité d’esthétique.34 olăreanu, Fals manual. i was unable to consult pădureanu’s Discuţii din priviri—

False note de călătorie, to discover what was ‘false’ about these travel notes. 35 Baconsky, Remember. Fals jurnal, 7.

256 chapter eleven

transylvanian locations: In the Cuc Valley (1959) and The Apuseni Moun-tains (1965). his rather hackneyed 1967 poem ‘apusuri, răsărituri’ [Wests, easts] summed up much of the sense of ambiguity and shifting points of referentiality of the decade:

West, easts, stars . . . movement below, movement aboveand i, moving between them,lost and gone.What the outcome will be, fate will decide!36

Whatever hand fate may have had in deciding the course of events, the approximate scholarly consensus is that, following a relative thaw from the mid 1960s, the romanian Communist leadership under nicolae Ceauşescu attempted to exercise increasingly repressive methods of sym-bolic control through a stronger nationalist discourse from the early 1970s, and entered a phase of extreme isolation from the rest of the world during the 1980s.37 one might then expect that the production of accounts of the world in late Communist romania would follow this pattern, and that fewer descriptions of the West would appear, alongside possibly negative caricatures of the capitalist world.

What is curious is that the number of books published in romania describing voyages to foreign countries, including the West, suffered no decline in the 1980s.38 it may not have became automatically easier or more fashionable to write about western europe as time went by: indeed, what happened more precisely was that romanian travellers continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s to visit, write about and publish accounts of a wide number of countries, including thailand, Canada, australia, greece, scandinavia, turkey, italy or Britain while the eastern Bloc countries received considerably reduced treatment.39 i mentioned earlier

36 ‘apusuri, răsărituri’, 57. the title may also be translated as ‘sunsets, sunrises’, possibly containing reference to Beniuc’s fluctuating career, as he was demoted in 1965 from his post as president of the Writers’ union.

37 By ‘scholarly consensus’ i mean that the analyses of verdery, National ideology, 98–134; deletant, Romania, 145ff; shafir, Romania; and gabanyi, The Ceauşescu cult, do not seriously differ over periodisation, although they may offer different types of explanation for what happened.

38 this affirmation is based on approximate counts of titles i have extracted from Bibliografia R.S. România. Cărţi.

39 i have not systematically researched ‘images of the other’ produced in newspapers or television in communist romania but a short time spent browsing the periodical publica-tions bulletin, Bibliografia R.S. România. periodice şi seriale, suggested to me that focus on

paradoxes of occidentalism 257

that the traveller ioan grigorescu’s 1961 work The Phoenix Bird was about poland; in 1970 the same author published Inflammable Phoenix which described a flight over the north pole and to Japan.40

in 1973 a specialist publishing imprint, the Editura pentru turism was set up within the central state system, changing its name to Sport-Turism in 1975 and producing a large number of works on internal and foreign travel and tourism as well as auxiliary works like language manuals and regional histories. the average annual output for book-length accounts of foreign lands by all publishers in the socialist republic was about 20 books, a small proportion of the total market but enough reading mat-ter to keep an enthusiastic public quite busy. this period also saw the reprinting or translation for the first time into romanian of such clas-sics of world travel writing as Captain Cook, sterne, Casanova, alexander von humboldt, dickens, Charles darwin, Jules verne, antoine de saint-exupéry, ilya ehrenburg or francis Chichester. there was an emphasis on exploration which to some extent fitted within the confines of com-munist reverence for progress and science but also enabled a focus on Western travellers. moreover, an academic discourse on romanian travel writing reemerged for the first time since the 1930s, with critical surveys and anthologies being produced;41 and even, in 1985, a historical diction-ary of romanian travellers and explorers.42

the explanation behind this apparent anomaly may be simpler than at first meets the eye: the success of Ceauşescu’s personality cult depended heavily on the idea that under his leadership the country had found a place in the world order and its topography and culture were compara-ble to the traditionally ‘great’ civilizations.43 as the romanian Commu-nist party programme of 1975 put it, ‘the rCp will most consistently work for broad cooperation among all european states, based on full equality, mutual observance of independence, non-interference in internal affairs and mutual advantage.’44 strategies for inserting romanian cultural

the Communist bloc was stronger at newspaper level than on the level of monographs, and slightly more favourable. obviously further research may refine or alter this conclusion.

40 grigorescu, Fenix inflamabil.41  hilt, Călători şi exploratori; Zalis, Scriitori pelerini; tebeica, Români pe şapte con-

tinente; sângeorzan, Pelerini români; Borda, Călătorie; anghelescu, Călători români în Africa; Cazimir, ed. Drumuri şi zări; Berindei, ed. Călători români paşoptişti. Critical study of the subject had been inaugurated by iorga, Românii în străinătate; and potra, Călători români.

42 Borda, Călători şi exploratori.43 the interpretation of gabanyi, Ceauşescu cult, 87–9; and Brînzeu, Corridors, 10–11.44 Programme of the Romanian Communist Party, 203.

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products into a context of global significance varied: some might write about the West in order implicitly to declare its inferiority to romania, while others might, through a sophisticated appreciation of Western cul-ture juxtaposed with a treatment of romanian themes, suggest lines of comparability or even ways to imitate or learn from the West.45 apart from anything else, this travel writing received its legitimacy from the travel patterns not only of the elite of cultural commissars but also from that of Ceauşescu himself, who made no fewer than 103 official foreign visits during his first 17 years in office, to places as far apart as Washington and pyong Yang, as Zaire (where he was awarded the national order of the leopard) and luxembourg (where the order of the golden lion of nassau was conferred upon him).46

But the travel writers themselves took a more sophisticated approach than simply motivating their activity and their discourse in these terms. obviously, in a culture where formal and severe limitations on foreign travel operated, there could be little open discussion of how the author had managed to make it abroad; discussions about buying tickets, chang-ing flights or being met at airports tended to be framed in a tone of curi-osity which nevertheless did not make such contexts appear unusual.47 more often texts or sections of text open with epigrammatic generalities about the place visited, with an insouciant air, as if people talk like this all the time, for instance about italy:

all summer long italy belongs to the tourists.48the gigantic prism of italy has managed to refract all the world’s land-

scapes, the peninsula decanting the symmetries of an anthropomorphic universe.49

sicily is the southern pole of italy just as venice represents its northern pole.50

45 a good description of general strategies for discussing the West, present in most domains of cultural production under Ceauşescu, and a materialist reading of the stakes of the argument, in verdery, National Ideology, 179–82. more particularly on the idea of romania’s image in the West, rostás, ‘internal perception’.

46 gabanyi, Ceauşescu cult, loc. cit. documentation is available in the 2–volume publi-cation by Ceauşescu, O politică de pace.

47 such discussions tend to be met with more frequently in accounts that present themselves in private diary mode: e.g. giurescu, Jurnal de călătorie; marino, Prezenţe româneşti.

48 novăceanu, Noaptea, 13.49 Balaci, Jurnal italian, 5.50 paler, Drumuri prin memorie, 15. in naples, however, paler admitted that ‘to operate

mechanically with the notions North and South becomes dangerous here. naples refuses categorization’ (96).

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or about Britain:

unlike rome, which does not hide its age, london and paris appear, on first contact, to be capitals of the 19th century.51

i once defined travel in italy as an archetypal journey in which analogy and generalization constitute the most important operations that experi-ence has to work with.

What distinguishes travel in england from all other travel is, i would say, precisely the absence or rather the inutility of such operations or criteria.52

Whenever i am in london, my steps lead me to the tate gallery. for this haven of art on the banks of the thames, i have nurtured, ever since my adolescent years, a secret and endless love.53

as many of the authors of such texts were professional academics abroad on a more or less formalised exchange schemes, these gambits of abstrac-tion reinforce their professional status as arbitrators and definers of such matters, while the fact of travelling both provides the opportunity for the summoning of empirical evidence and confirms the success of the intellec-tual in having ‘arrived’ somewhere. such examples indicate the intelligent mixture of an apparently open, confessional subjectivity with the implicit engagement in a series of civilizational comparisons within a framework of assumed knowledge. they also, of course, reinforce the categories within which comparison is undertaken, particularly that of national character. elsewhere, however, cultural difference is asserted against comparability, in another opening in the ‘philosophical’ register:

Cities look different from each other not because they are placed differently in a geographical sense, nor because their parks and buildings follow differ-ent styles, or because their history was different in each case—all these are nothing but negligible consequences or insignificant premises: towns do not look alike because each one of them has a different, ineffable soul, which cannot be compared.54

despite herself, however, this well-travelled author, ana Blandiana, is indulging explicitly in a comparative exercise. the poetic prose pieces anthologised in her 1987 Cities of syllables juxtapose miscellaneous

51  duţu, Modele, imagini, privelişti, 166.52 dumitrescu-Buşulenga, Periplu umanistic, 159.53 arsenescu, Chipuri, imagini, privelişti, 75.54 Blandiana, Oraşe de silabe, 25. these texts were published earlier under the not-

quite-candid title of Cea mai frumoasă din lumile posibile (‘the best of all possible worlds’), which plays on not one but two ambiguities: 1) which the best of all possible worlds might be; 2) whether the irony of voltaire’s famous phrase should be upheld or withheld.

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thoughts on cities from Washington, santa fé and philadelphia to paris, venice, messina and madrid; but also on romanian locations such as alba iulia, huşi, and Bucharest, with much more reduced mention of Commu-nist Bloc cities (about six pages on russian cities, half a page on prague, and another on a town in Czechoslovakia whose name the author cannot remember).55 Blandiana includes a meditation on the difference between america and europe (criterion: different attitudes towards grass in the urban environment)56 but the east-West divide within europe is not alluded to whatsoever.

other writers use this technique of juxtaposing travels inside and out-side romania, or within and without the Communist Bloc, to induce a notion of the normality or even the splendour of the former. for instance, journalist ştefan Berceanu, in a volume significantly entitled Towards the Good Regions, interleaves acounts of a visit to a rembrandt exhibition in paris in 1969 with a holiday in the romanian town rîmnicu vîlcea, which latter enabled Berceanu to sense ‘the process of transformation and becoming of our nation.’57 after rome, Berceanu goes to Bucharest; after paris, to the romanian seaside; the eternal return. likewise, Ceauseşcu eulogist adrian păunescu described his journey to vienna but also praised the romanian countryside in his work From Bârca to Vienna and Back, Bârca being the Bessarabian village in which he was born.58 But then he had a high example to follow: nicolae Ceauşescu’s younger brother florea, also a journalist, published a book in 1982 entitled Travelling through the world which opens with an essay in praise of the recently-built Bucharest metro, followed by enthusiastic accounts of ‘the treasures of uzbekistan’, slovenia, prague, thuringia, the rhine valley, madrid, China, north Korea and mexico.59

it is true that florea did write other books concentrating more par-ticularly on the communist bloc;60 but this was not the general trend and the mixture of communist and non-communist locations was far more common. other examples include one-time president of the Journalists’ union nestor ignat’s Traveller’s Album, which takes us to mexico but

55 Blandiana, Oraşe, 32–4, 88–9, 126–7, 137–8, 163–4; 53–4, 156–7.56 Blandiana, Oraşe, 96–7.57 Berceanu, Spre bunele tărîmuri, 24.58 păunescu, De la Bârca la Viena şi înapoi.59 Ceauşescu, Drumeţind prin lume.60 e.g. Popasuri în Balcan; Izbînda în stepă; Magistrala Baikal-Amur.

paradoxes of occidentalism 261

also to mozart’s vienna, to paris but also to dubrovnik;61 or the highly-reputed poet gheorghe tomozei’s Travels in a Hot-Air Balloon, in which you can read about hollywood, Berlin, Bruges, the holy land, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, italy, russia, West germany, Yugoslavia, paris, hungary, poland, greece, and finally romania, ending with a section on ‘ipoteşti (the moldavian birthplace of national poet mihai eminescu) seen from the cosmos’.62 similarly, linguist alexandru rosetti’s Journeys and Portraits covered greece, india, israel, the u.s.a., albania, africa, and Brazil as well as france, Britain and germany.63 it was as if the Cold War did not exist in romania and globalization had arrived early: an ideological position which sat well with nicolae Ceauşescu’s protestations of independence and claims to have surmounted the east—West divide.

it is to this aspect of Ceauşescu’s ideological posturing that veteran traveller ioan grigorescu’s rather oblique reflections, on the occasion of a visit to the great Wall of China, surely refers:

i see once more the great Wall of China, this dragon of stone placed to straddle the mountains, following only the peaks, avoiding the valleys, and i understand the worthlessness of walls erected between peoples, just as ‘the iron curtain’ or ‘the bamboo curtain’ have proven flimsy. We no longer need walls or ‘curtains’ between men. people need to communicate; nothing is more contrary to human nature than xenophobia and isolation.64

different travellers gave different and more or less veiled explanations for what they were doing. according to the literary critic adrian marino, writing after the fall of Ceauşescu about the tone he adopted in his travel texts published in the 1970s, the ostensibly unruffled mode was a poten-tially subversive strategy:

to lead, as far as possible, a normal intellectual life, independent and active, in harsh conditions of controlled culture and repression is one of the hard-est enterprises to undertake in any totalitarian regime in the world. [. . .] to introduce and maintain, in other words, a minimum european spirit

61  ignat, Din albumul unui călător. the contrasts are put in evidence on the book’s dust jacket which bears images of a Breughel painting, Quetzalcoatl, some unlocalizable fisher-men, and the city of dubrovnik.

62 tomozei, Călătorii cu dirijabilul.63 rosetti, Călătorii şi portrete. this edition collected a series of rosetti’s travel publi-

cations from 1938 to 1973, which enjoyed at least five editions in the communist period (‘definitive edition’, 1983).

64 grigorescu, Al cincilea punct cardinal, 402. Cf. Programme of the Romanian Commu-nist Party, 204: ‘europe cannot be divided; it must remain a single entity, in order to ensure peace and security.’

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in romania in conditions of isolation, autarchy, anti-europeanism, anti- intellectualism, ruralization, egalitarianism and Ceauşist chauvinism.65

Which is all very well except that the regime was sometimes staunchly pro-european. for nationalist writer iosif Constantin drăgan (1917–2008, expatriated in italy but one of the closest collaborators with the Ceauşescu regime), it was a proud achievement to be ‘european’ in 1979, and not so much in conflict with the regime as proof of its self-declared achievements:

to feel in europe as if in a ‘native land’, without spiritual and cultural fron-tiers, to militate for the the realization of an international community in which peoples may determine their own fate; this is the ideal for which the author of these volumes strives, and the reason for transcribing his existen-tial experience.66

it is clear then, that over the course of forty years the ideological use to which travel literature was put changed considerably. from fairy-tale socialist realism, where the selection of destination and the immediate tone in which it is described provide simple and transparent indicators of the text’s purpose and position, to the paradoxes of a regime which was profoundly isolationist but nevertheless found it in its interest to produce relatively favourable accounts of the West.

it might be objected that travel literature is an obscure genre with little public impact. We can gauge a certain amount from the print-run figures which appear (not in all cases) on the final page of romanian books of the period, and they are surprisingly large in some cases: while a book by academic alexandru duţu which mixed travel sketches with essays on the history of mentalities appeared in only 3,600 copies, other more popular works about western europe or the united states enjoyed runs of twenty or even thirty thousand copies.67 these are impressive figures, particularly for a genre that rarely found its way onto school literature syllabi and may not have had a separate section in public libraries.

in a world where foreign political reportage was limited and diplomats’ memoirs a non-existent genre it would be tempting also to speculate on the social significance of the reception of these texts: what were the read-ers made to think, and did they act differently? the importance of ideas

65 marino, Evădări în lumea liberă, 6, 8.66 drăgan, Europa Phoenix, left dustjacket flap.67 grigorescu, Cocteil Babilon (26,160 copies); novăceanu, Noaptea . . . (20,160); marino,

Prezenţe româneşti (21,000); tudoran’s novel La nord de noi înşine had a run of 30,000.

paradoxes of occidentalism 263

about the West among actual and potential emigrés from romania was remarked as early as 1980 by ion vianu, who described the image of the West as a mythe-espace, as distinguished from temporal utopias such as the idea of the golden age.68 more recently, an influential commentator has noted that

the desire to flee beyond the ‘iron curtain’—for economic, political or spiri-tual reasons—modelled not just the destiny of those fleeing, but also that of those who stayed at home, torn between the fear of risk, prudence in the face of the unknown, and the dream of travelling undisturbed in the para-dise of ‘the civilized countries’69

it is of course hard to know whether the books were actually read, and if so how. in the course of my research i spoke to a number of romanians who had grown up under Ceauşescu, and who recalled the experience of reading works about western europe by writers such as Blandiana, romulus rusan70 or eugen simion71 as either an escape or a surrogate; my argument here has been a variation on this, namely that such texts played the ideological role of asserting that romania was not an isolated or dis-advantaged culture, and that this may have encouraged acceptance of the status quo. (one may also add that Ceauşescu was aided in the creation of this illusion not only by romanian travel writers but also by Western diplomats and politicians who saw fit to shower compliments on the dic-tator during the period of his political rapprochement with the West in the 1970s).72 such an argument may also explain some of the anomalies of post-communist romanian culture, such as the fact that even extreme right-wing parties pronounce themselves in favour of romania’s euro-pean integration.73 debates on the efficacy of propaganda are not always easily resolvable. But if, as gail Kligman has argued, ‘the widening cred-ibility gap paralleled the increasing divide between the party/state and

68 vianu, ‘le mythe de l’occident’.69 pleşu, Chipuri şi măşti, 249.70 husband of ana Blandiana: author of travel books about the united states and the

mediterranean such as America ogarului cenuşiu; O călătorie spre marea interioară.71  literary critic identified with an aestheticist, so-called ‘apolitical’ stance, since 1994

president of the romanian academy; author of parisian journal Timpul trăirii, timpul mărturisirii [a time to live, a time to bear witness].

72 British, american and french diplomatic courtship of Ceauşescu in this period is well documented: see percival, ‘Britain’s “political romance” ’; harrington & Courtney, Tweaking the nose of the Russians; stolojan, Avec de Gaulle.

73 see the statement of nationalist party Romania Mare’s pro-european foreign policy on their website at: http://www.romare.ro/prm_ext.html (accessed on 2 october 2002).

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its population’, one is tempted to place travel writers on the side of the party/state rather than on that of the population, particularly given that they were the ones who had travelled and could form judgements as to the comparative position of romania in europe and the World.74

one might further note, that unlike fiction or poetry where an author has a degree of manœuvre to disguise critiques in the form of allegory or fable, travel accounts in the contemporary world make a claim of veridic-ity on the reader; there is possibly less scope for oblique or implicit col-lusion between reader and author. in other words writers appeared to be engaging their readers in something politically subversive, i.e. reading favourable accounts of the West; but this either implicitly bolstered the regime (when favourable accounts of the West were juxtaposed with eulo-gies of Ceauşescu’s romania) or alienated readers (private identification with the West as abdication of responsibility for the domestic situation) or deceived them (by making them perceive freedom of travel as a reward for the cultured, rather than an appanage of the loyal). further research may help us answer these difficult questions of reception: for the time being, however, it is clear that it was quite possible to print favourable first-hand accounts of western europe and america in Ceauşescu’s roma-nia; that such books were reproduced in large quantities; and that these accounts did not necessarily work against the regime’s interests.

74 Kligman, Politics of duplicity, 118; the discussion here is about different types of ideo-logical material but may be applicable to the case of travel literature too.

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Index

Aar, River 151Aarau 151Aarberg 151academies 15, 42, 139

Romanian 15, 121n20, 254, 263n71of Mining, Schemnitz 68of Siena 79

Academia Mihăileană 47, 103Actium, Battle of 17Addison, Joseph 78, 94Aesop 39afterlives, literary 83–4, 133, 146, 183, 201agriculture 11, 14–21, 26, 34–5, 38, 40–1, 46,

48–51, 54–7Akkerman, Treaty of 144Alba Iulia 67, 260Albania  261Albanians 49, 118, 124n33, 155Albanian language 72, 222n38Alecsandri, Vasile 52–3, 111n66, 130–3,

183, 222–3, 241Alexander I, emperor of Russia 141, 143allegory 90n97, 134, 182–3, 202, 226, 264;

see also fableAllgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek

(periodical) 75alphabets, scripts 108n54, 148, 188–9, 227Alps 111–12Alt-Zedlisch [Staré Sedliště] 68Altstätten, Switzerland 150America(s) 73, 76, 78–9, 253

Cuba dubbed ‘free territory of ’ 252north 73, 79South 73, 254see also United States of America

AmericansAfrican 154n82Latin 89n95, 154n82, 233native 64, 85, 87, 118US citizens 83, 235, 238

Ammianus Marcellinus 51Anghelescu, Mircea 91–2, 98n27, 137,

143, 152Animals 37, 43, 67, 101–2, 173, 228, 211n22

bears 22bees 247beetles 226cows 20, 34–5, 102n38, 227dogs 74, 131, 227

donkeys 128, 243gadflies 102n38goats 102horses 111, 131, 211n22, 241humans as 22–3, 89large 101livestock 42, 67, 145oxen 227n56pigs 35n71, 125, 243snakes 52stags 102see also birds

Annual register (London) 78, 83, 85Anthimos the Iberian [‘Antim Ivireanul’],

Metropolitan of Wallachia 38anthropology 85, 105, 179, 235antisemitism 89n93, 177–82, 197n25, 211Apollo 187Apuseni mountains 256Arabs 105, 118, 157

Arabic books 120language 157, 220

Aragon, historians from 87Arduino, Giovanni 79–80Arghezi, Tudor 205, 252Armenian language 22

people 145Armies, see Military service; Soldiers; WarsArnold, Guy 243Asachi, Gheorghe 32, 47–8, 57, 157Asia 106

fertile plains of 105negligence imputed to 138see also east, Orientalism

Asturia, historians from 87Aurelian, Roman emperor 51Australia 256Austrian empire, Austria-Hungary 72–5,

81, 86, 88–90, 106, 108n52, 124–6, 135, 138, 142–3, 162, 241Austrian danube Company 104see also Habsburgs; Vienna; Salzburg

Azumabad [Patna] 78

Baconsky, A.e. 252, 255Baden, Grand duchy of 151Baden-bei-Wien 149Baï Ganyo, fictional Bulgarian traveller 158Baia, battle of (1467) 37

294 index

Bailey, Paul 238Bainţi [Baineţ, Muşeniţa commune,

Romania] 100Bakhtin, Mikhail 190, 192Bălcescu, nicolae 50–2, 54Balkans, Balkan peoples 7, 64, 66, 116,

136, 243, 248Balkanism 4, 235Occidentalism of 118see also Ottoman empire; Rumelia

Balkan Trilogy (novel) 237Banat of Temesvar 34, 64–7, 71–80, 87–8,

124, 131, 143, 149–50, 214–9German dialect of 221–2

Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia 68–9Barbu, Ion 205Bariţiu, Gheorghe 53, 163Bârlad 106Barnes, Julian 239Barthes, Roland 151Bartram, John 79Batten, Charles 102Baudelaire, Charles 209Bavaria 126, 135, 143Bawr, General F.W. 126n38Beniuc, Mihai 255–6Bentham, Jeremy 125n33, 138Berceanu, Ştefan 260Bérenger, Jean 216Berger, Florence 240n18Berlin 75, 80, 108–9, 124, 128, 197, 213,

227, 261Congress of 58, 178University of 108, 165, 174

Bermuda triangle, Romania compared to 238

Bern 98n51, 151Bessarabia 244, 260

Southern 58–9Bhabha, Homi 116, 153n78Bibesco, Marthe, Princess 244Bielski, Martin 21Birago, Freiherr Karl von 106birds: sparrows 74

canaries 101crows 101pheasants 101phoenix 252

Bishops  20–2, 38, 125n33, 125n35metropolitan bishops 42, 47, 139

Bîrlădeanu, Victor 252bitterness, embitterment 44, 150, 173Black Sea 18, 72–3, 98, 105Blandiana, Ana 240n16, 259–60, 263

Blue Peter Romania Appeal, mismanaged 247

Boaistuau, Pierre 25Bogoyavlenski [Theophany] Monastery

100Bogza, Geo 252Bohemia 68–9, 76–7, 80, 86

Mining and Minting directorate 68nobiliary registers of (Landestafeln) 68Royal Society for the Sciences 69

Boia, Lucian 200n29boyars/boiers see noblesBolintineanu, dimitrie 183Bolliac, Cezar 54Born, Ignaz von 67–90 passimBöröcz, József 113Borrow, George 109Bosphorus 104–6Boswell, James 96–7Botez, demostene 252–3Bracewell, Wendy 112Brăila 131Brâncoveanu, Constantin, Prince of

Wallachia 119–20[brâncovenesc], architectural style 244

Brâncuşi, Constantin 204n10, 239, 240n17Braşov [Kronstadt] 142–3Bratislava see PressburgBrătianu, Ion 183Brazil 261breast(s) 46, 82, 222, 236Brecht, Berthold 208Bretons 57Breuilly, John 188Bright, Richard 68, 83Britain see United Kingdom; england;

ScotlandBritish Council 237–40British culture, literature, people 6, 76,

92–3, 95 112n68, 113n72, 233–49 passimprone to inebriation 120as travellers 117, 139, 154

British Library 82n68Bruges 261Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu 248Brussels 32Bucharest 15, 29–30, 48, 50–51, 55,

57n160, 115, 119–21, 126n28, 135, 138–9, 142, 144–6, 149–50, 154, 165, 180, 189–91, 193, 197, 217, 227, 229, 236–40, 242Academy 42as ‘Paris of the east’ 245–6Gara de nord 135University of 205

index 295

Bucovina see BukovinaBuda 14, 144, 154

see also Pest; BudapestBudapest 164, 217Budai-deleanu, Ion 89, 128n42, 244Bukovina 89, 162, 224, 244Bulgaria 31, 132, 252–3, 255, 261Bulgarians 66, 104, 118, 155

fictional, putative 158, 211Burns, Robert 188Büsching, Anton Friedrich 77Byzantium, see east Roman empire;

neo-Byzantine style

Caesar, Augustus 18Caesar, Julius 20–21, 59Caesar, Octavius 17Călinescu, G. 175–6, 183n69, 197, 252Callimachi, Scarlat 252Canada 256Cantemir, dimitrie, Prince of

Moldavia 40, 72Caragiale, Ion Luca 187–97 passimCardinal, Roger 91Carniola 73Carol of Hohenzollern, Prince (1866–1881)

and King (1881–1914) of Romania 58, 190

Carp, Petre 166–7, 181Carpathian mountains 111–2, 243

southern 71carpets, Oltenian 240n17Carra, Jean-Louis 29, 121–6Carroll, Lewis 245n26Casanova, Giacomo 257Cassian, nina 247, 249, 252Castile 109

Castilian language 24, 220castles, fortresses 35, 38, 105–6, 150, 241Catalans 87Catherine II ‘The great’, empress of

Russia 139Cato the elder 17Caucasus 254n29Ceauşescu, Florea 260Ceauşescu, nicolae 116n1, 162, 214, 233–4,

239, 245n29, 247–8, 250–64 passimCelan, Paul 204n10, 224, 226n54censors, censorship 43, 143, 226Ceres, Roman goddess 19Cernăuţi / Czernowitz / Chernivtsi 100,

129, 162, 224Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 192Chagall, Marc 241

Chakrabarty, dipesh 158Charles VI, emperor of Austria 138Charles, Prince of Wales 248Chesarie, Bishop of Râmnic 125Chichester, Francis 257China 255, 260

Great Wall of 261Chishull, edmund 77n47, 120–1Christianity, Christian countries, customs,

people, thought 32, 65, 120, 141, 144, 172–3, 210–11see also eastern Orthodoxy; Greek

Catholic Church; Jesus Christ; Protestantism; Roman Catholic Church; Society of Jesus; bishops; monks; priests

Christmas 99–100Cioran, emil 201n*, 204n10Ciorbea, Victor 248Ciorănescu, Alexandru 125n32–3city, cities 18, 73, 105–6, 147, 150, 259–60

and language 25, 219, 221distant 91greedy 19Moldavian, virtues of 132–3synonym for Christian West 32

Clarke, edward daniel 83Clary von Altringen, Karl Ignaz, Graf 75classical legacy, sources 17–24, 47, 73,

88n88, 96, 124see also Greece; Latin; Rome

Clinton, Bill 233, 235Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea 162, 176Codrescu, Teodor 103–8, 114, 157Cola (Pepsi, Coke) 255civilization, notions of 1, 15–6, 24, 31, 46,

63, 105, 123, 130–3, 136, 139, 152, 164–5, 173, 179, 193, 259, 263

colonization 64, 216–7colonialism see imperialismColumbus, Christopher 130Comarnescu, Petru 206, 209n17Communism, as ideology 240n17, 257

as regime 2, 161n1, 218, 238–44, 251–64 passim

Communist Bloc 252–3, 260Comte, Auguste 171Conservative Party of Great Britain 248

of Romania 165–9, 181Conservatoire national des arts et metiers,

Paris 98Constantinople 45n117, 104–6, 113, 144,

157, 241, 244see also Bosphorus; Istanbul

296 index

constitutions 41n100Romanian 56, 169, 216

Cook, Captain James 76, 83, 257Corbea, dumitru 252Cornea, Paul 97Coşmani village 100Coşovei, Traian 252Costăchel, Valeria 35Costin, Miron 38–40Costin, nicolae 22, 37n81, 40Cotnar (wine) 175country, countryside 17, 47, 204, 248, 260

meaning of word 112see also landscape; village

Crainic, nichifor 206Craiova 210, 247Crane, nicholas 243, 245cranioscopy 180Creangă, Ion 183, 240n17Creţu, Ion 184n71Critical review (London periodical) 77Croatia 73Cuc Valley, Prahova county 256Cuciur Forest [Kuchuriv], Bukovina 100Cumans 43Curierul de Iaşi (newspaper) 165Curierul rumânesc (newspaper) 145Curious Account of Wallachia 65–90

passimCurtea de Argeş, Cathedral 58Cuza, Alexandru Ioan, Prince 56Cyprus 254n29Cyrillic alphabet, script 108n54, 148,

188–9, 227n57Czech Republic 68

Czechs 73Czechoslovakia 253

see also Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Habsburg Monarchy

Czernowitz see Cernăuţi

dacia 24, 51dacians 18–21, 24, 111, 173, 184, 245dacianization 180

Dacia litterară (periodical) 49, 107dada, movement 224, 245dalmatia 66

dalmatians 89n96, 124dante Aligheri 187danube 19–21, 24–28, 32, 53, 55, 58–9, 72,

98, 103–6, 108n53, 119, 130–1, 142, 145, 217, 243, 253

darwin, Charles 170, 195, 257

daughters see womendavies, norman 234death 38, 69, 95, 142, 178, 206, 233, 247

by axe blows 39n90by cholera 145by decapitation 248by guillotine 122by hanging 67by impalement 67, 74cult of 172–77early 54, 176of literature 206poem about 163

delius, Christoph Traugott 73, 80der Mühle 151Deutsche Welle 227diaries, journals 72, 93–114 passim, 144,

157, 206, 258n47dickens, Charles 191, 257digression, interlude, interpolation,

interruption 73–4, 100n134, 106, 111, 123, 147

dinescu, Mircea 227n56dionisie Lupu, Metropolitan of

Wallachia 141dionysus 187discovery, as concept 2, 13, 129

of Balkans 130of europe 2, 16, 137of landscape 112

dniester, river 65dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin 197n25dracula, Count (fictional) 233drăgan, Iosif Constantin 262drăgăşani, Battle of (1821) 142dragons 52dragoş, founding Prince of Moldavia 103dragoslav the pig-herder 35n71dress, clothing, costume 28, 29n54, 39,

45, 48–9, 57–8 77, 103, 120, 125, 131–3, 138, 149, 207, 226

drinks: coffee 102cola 255milk 20plum brandy 240n17poisoned 179spirits 102n38, 178, 247wine 74, 145, 175

drunkenness 37, 102, 120, 190, 195, 206, 210

dubrovnik 261dupront, Alphonse 209n17duţu, Alexandru 262

index 297

east, Orient 4, 24n42, 57–8, 85, 88, 94n11, 103, 130–3, 138, 151, 190, 255–6Jews of 179Middle 120near 144, 157Oriental reputation 246‘Paris of ’ [i.e. Bucharest] 245–6religious thought of 172–3sensoriality of language in, imputed 

211Slavs of 243see also Orientalism

east Roman empire (Byzantium) 34, 41, 88n88

east-West divide 63, 136, 221, 255crossing of 5, 261see also Iron Curtain

easter 194–5eastern Bloc, see Communist Bloceastern Orthodox Church 42, 47, 57–8,

88n91, 99–100–1, 104n45, 120, 125, 137–9, 149, 162, 173, 176, 195–6, 245n39doctrine 139monastic rules 100see also Romanian Orthodox Church

eastern europe, see europe, easterneckhardt, Meister 187economic conditions, systems 11, 16,

48–52, 55, 139, 150 168, 175–8, 238, 247–8, 263policy 254studies, theories, writings 46, 48, 57,

98, 183, 226, 233economies of knowledge, political 63, 122

textual 149edirne, see AdrianopleEditura pentru turism / Editura Sport-

Turism 257Editura Tineretului 254education 22, 47, 67, 89, 96, 103, 109–11,

129, 138, 142–4, 146, 150, 152, 155, 162–3, 174, 191, 217–8, 247–8of peasants 42of women 108n54see also academies; enlightenment;

schools; seminaries; students; universities

egypt 253n17egyptians 69, 86

ehrenburg, Ilya 257ehrler, Johann Jakob 75, 83n69eliade, Mircea 187, 191, 201n*, 204n10,

205, 240

eliade, Pompiliu 146eminescu, Mihai 17, 33n66, 161–85

passim, 187, 189, 191, 239, 240n17, 261emperors see Alexander I; Augustus

Caesar; Catherine II; Charles VI; Joseph II; Leopold II; Octavius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius; Maria-Theresa; nicholas I; napoleon; Peter II; see also Sultans

empires, in general 59, 63–4, 87Romania at crossroads of 216see also imperialism; see also individual

entriesengland 30, 76–7, 253n17, 259

football team loses to Romania 233libraries of 83

english culture, language, people 22n22, 24, 71, 76, 80, 82–3, 89, 93, 119–21, 127, 149, 154, 214–5, 220, 235–46 passimas prudes 235–6tea 191tourist brochure 128n46

enlightenment 63–91 passim, 122, 148, 156, 164see also Republic of Letters; secularism

enthusiasm 91, 171, 257epistolary genre 72–4, 86, 97n22, 98n28,

108–9, 123–5, 157errors, categorical 233

factual 124–2, 244n33interpretive 188, 233moral 154typographical 191

ethnography 20, 98, 105n46, 107, 129, 146n62and empire 59, 63–90

eufrosin Poteca 141europe 1–6, 21–33, 53, 85, 93, 126, 135–42,

146–58, 172, 179, 204, 260Academies of 140Central 14, 87, 125n34, 136Classical/Roman 59curiosity, european 65, 121, 123, 126discovery of 2, 16dress 103, 125, 131, 138eastern 12, 14, 30, 35, 72, 81n63, 85, 116,

141, 167, 204, 234, 243 (history of term 63–6, 87–9as inadequate 113as hyperintellectual 240as nonspecific setting 238as victims 182)end of, predicted 210as family of nations 153–4

298 index

Great Powers of 55inns of, excellent 150intelligentsia of 235languages of 22, 130lighthouses 104media of 71mines of 75music of 130nationalism in 167, 179, 185plains of, fertile 105position of Romanians in or in relation

to 15, 21, 53, 106, 121, 128–9, 134, 146–157, 189–90, 204, 216, 234, 238, 251, 257, 262–4

relations with non-europeans 63, 89southeastern 65, 136, 235see also Balkanssouthern 57, 113n74spirit of 12–13as synonym for Russia 139time standard 108urban, industrial 112n72Western 2, 11–12, 32, 34, 104, 116, 141,

157‘wheel-going’ 131

european integration 12exile 18, 30, 32, 73, 108, 142–3, 156, 162

fable 22, 26–7, 147, 171, 264facts, factuality 20, 69, 96–7, 108, 151–2,

240, 244fairy tales 172, 262Farfara, Zoe [Zoe Golescu] 138fathers see menFederaţiunea (newspaper) 164Ferber, Johann Jakob [Johan Jacob] 

73–4, 76–7, 79–81Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 168–9, 171fiction 22, 49, 66, 90, 111n66, 130, 190–7,

205, 214–5, 236–41, 264taken as fact 246see also lies; facts

Fielding, Henry 93–5Filimon, nicolae 49, 98n27First World War 204, 216fishing 23, 26, 45, 261n61Flag, mistaken for poncho 233Florence 255flowers 101, 120, 222Fondane, Benjamin 224, 255food, meals 15, 50, 67, 74, 95, 99–101, 151

see also drinkForster, Georg 76Fortis, Abbé 66, 78, 80Fortuna, Goddess 18

Fourmennois, Gabriel 25France 79, 81, 108, 139, 141, 153, 157, 164,

187, 204, 210, 253, 263n72Consul of 142

Frankfurt 64, 168, 238Franz-Joseph, emperor 164Frătăuţi village 100Freemasonry 69–70, 86, 144French cigarettes 49

clothing 131songs 101

French culture, education, language, people 2n8, 12, 24n43, 25–33, 48, 53, 71, 80–2, 89, 93, 108–10, 111, 122, 125–33, 136, 138, 142, 153, 162, 164, 180, 189–91, 202–8, 211, 216, 224, 236, 238, 243, 253n16, 254

Fridvaldsky, János 76Friedel, Johann 83Frunză, eugen 253

Galata, Istanbul 106Galaţi 103–4, 106, 178Galitsyn, Andrei 100Gáldi, László 210n19Galicia (Austrian) 72n27, 165gardens 101–2, 106Gavriil Callimachi, Metropolitan of

Moldavia 139, 141n20Gellner, ernest 14, 161Gender, awaits further analysis 6

but see marriage; men; sexuality; womenGeneva 109–11, 143–4, 150–1Gentoo see HinduGeorgian language 157German culture, language, people 5,

14n12, 15n13, 33n67, 43, 69–90 passim, 93, 105, 118, 136, 149, 151–3, 156, 161–2, 164, 167, 213–29 passim, 238, 249caricature 211Romanian Germans [Rumäniandeutsche]  216–21, exodus of 252n5Swiss Germans 124–5

Germanic peoples 20, 32see also Goths; Saxons; Suevi; Swabians

Germany 24, 108, 145, 156, 187West 203, 215, 237 253, 261fantasies of 129occupation of Romania by, 1916–1918 204see also Holy Roman empire; Prussia

Getae 18–21see also dacians

Ghica, Alexandru dimitrie, Prince of Wallachia 48

Grigore IV Ghica, Prince of Wallachia 142–4, 154–6

index 299

Ghica, Ion 183Gibbon, edmund 18, 76Glajar, Valentina 213Glaserhütte [Sklené Teplice] 69Glasgow, University of 96Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 66, 91–2Goethe Institute, Bucharest 227Gogol, nikolai 245Golden Age 45, 263Golescu, dinicu 45, 98n26, 102n39, 116–7,

126, 135–58 passimGolescu, Iordache 138, 142, 145, 155Goodwin, Jason 243Goths 94Göttingen 75–6Gray, Alistair 188Gray, Thomas 47–8Graz 149, 255Great Britain see United KingdomGreceanu, Radu 118–21Greece 254, 256, 261

independence of 140polysemy of 122revival of 121

Greek Catholic Church 162Greek Church, see eastern OrthodoxyGreek culture, language 22, 34, 42–3,

153n77, 187–92, 222n28Revolution 126tragedy 205

Greeks 3, 5, 19, 39, 43, 66n11, 118, 124n22, 137–44 passim, 155–6cultural schizophrenia of 153n78ill-intentioned 88‘Islamic’ 244scapegoating of 155, 180

Gregorian calendar 104n45Gregory, Bishop of Râmnic [Grigore

Râmniceanul] 139Grellmann, Heinrich Moritz 88Grigorescu, Ioan 252, 254n29, 255, 257,

261–2Griselini, Francesco [Franz] 80, 83Grosswardein [Oradea] 82Groza, Petru 253Gruber, Tobias 73Guevara, don Antonio, bishop of

Guadix 21–7, 31, 40Gypsies 87–8, 127, 142, 233, 241–2, 244,

248

Habsburgs, Habsburg Monarchy 42, 64–5, 70, 80, 82, 87, 89, 119, 128, 131, 142–3, 164, 216see also Austria

Hacquet, Balthasar 73Haeckel, ernst 195Haenke, Thaddäus [Tadeáš, Tadeo] 73Haines, Brigid 219Hall, Brian 243Hall, donald 241Hanover 76happiness 73

general (civil, national, public) 43n107, 45–6, 149–50, 152, 156

unattainable 183, 194Harding, Georgina 243Hauterive, comte d’ [Alexandre Maurice

Blanc de Lanautte] 27–30Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 168–9,

171Heimatdorf literature 218, 223Heliade Rădulescu, Ion 48, 108n27Herbert, George 240n17Herder, Johann Gottfried 32, 66,Hergé 242Hermannstadt [Sibiu] 67, 76 125n35Herodotus 19, 21Hindu [‘Gentoo’] 78history, analysis vs. narrative 84, 96–7,

147ancient 124cultural 1–7, 98n28, 122n24curated 57, 240definitions of 7, 206n12depicted visually 57, 101economic 11, 52n143, 64episodic 119intellectual 84literary 15n15, 99, 102, 122, 126material vs. representational 64national 107, 114, 127–8, 136, 148,

165–74, 181–3, 191natural 81personal 211–2political 124, 202regional 215, 257social 7of science 70

historians 20, 21, 30, 32, 38, 43, 99–100, 141accused of being obstructive 244cynical 243foreign, vilified 128poets as 50travel writers as 94–5, 122–5, 126n38,

209History of Charles V (Robertson) 109Hitler, Adolf 203n7Hobsbawm, eric 188, 190

300 index

Hodoş, nerva 146Holland see netherlands; United ProvincesHollywood 261Holy Roman empire 87Hope, Anthony 242Horace [Quintus Horatius Flaccus] 18–20

Horatian aesthetics 77–8horani 34–4Hortis, Samuel ab 75–6Huber, Austrian Consul 106Humboldt, Alexander von 87, 257Hume, david 76Hungarian culture language, people 3,

14, 43, 57, 70, 75–6, 89n96, 118, 136, 175, 189, 217–8, 240n17, 241costume 28, 67

Hungary 37, 64–72, 76–7, 82, 87, 126, 135, 143, 152, 217, 261see also Austria-Hungary; Transylvania;

SlovakiaHuşi 260Huxley, Aldous 207, 235

Iaşi 49–50, 55, 103, 106, 108n54, 110, 129, 132–3, 172, 194–5, 211, 226, 244Academy of 42, 47, 103Junimea [Youth] Society of 165Theatre in 49Metropolitan cathedral 58University of 165see also Curierul de Iaşi; Socola

MonasteryIdealists, German 164, 167–8identity, thematized 1–12

authorial 93, 123–5Bulgarian 211collective 136colonized 158crisis of 146, 153n78european 116fragmented 116, 153–4, 182French 204n11German 217inauthentic 116Jewish 211and memory 113mistaken 196national 3n10, 188, 213negotiated 129peasant 12–59 passimpolyphonic 188–92positioned vis-à-vis another 134Romanian, passim; Spanish 87self-presentation of 89n95, 91–114

passim, 116–7, 125, 135–60 passim

various but not salient 125, 209–12see also nationalism

Ignat, nestor 260–1imagology 2–3imperialism, colonlialsm 23–4, 27, 59,

63–90 passim, 93 112–3, 116, 118, 158, 235see empires; europe

India 85, 87, 154, 205, 254, 261Indians 64, 158

see also Americans, nativeInstitut Lemoine, Paris 142Ioncioaia, Florea 107Ionescu de la Brad, Ion 56, 98–9, 126n62Ionescu, eugen [eugène Ionesco] 162,

201–12 passim, 214, 224, 228n61, 235, 239, 245, 255

Ionescu, eugen senior 204Ionesco, Marie-France 201n*, 211–2Ionescu, Thérèse, née Ipcar 204Iorga, nicolae 7, 28n51, 36, 46, 147n65,

191, 236, 245n39Ipoteşti 261Ipsilanti see YpsilantisIron Curtain 239

see also east-West divideIron Gates 242Israel 261‘Israelite Question’ see Jewish QuestionIstanbul 88n91, 121, 132, 137, 142, 242

see also Bosphorus, Constantinople, Galata, Pera, Scutari

Istria 66Italian culture, language, people 27, 71,

79–80, 82, 136, 209n17, 217, 242n23historians 21n30Peninsula 258secret societies 144songs 101

Italy 21n30, 31, 57, 73, 77, 79–80, 92, 98n28, 102, 129, 187, 254, 256, 258–9, 261–2

northern 126, 135, 141, 143–4

Jacobins 122Moldavian, so-called 46n121

James, Henry 194Jebeleanu, eugen 253Jerusalem, Patriarch of 120Jesuits see Society of JesusJesus Christ 53, 178, 195

‘Christ of nations’, Poland as 53, 171Jews 3, 5, 88, 145, 172, 194–7, 203, 210–12

Jewish Question 177–9see also antisemitism

John I Albrecht, King of Poland 38Johnson, Samuel 76

index 301

Jókai, Mor [Maurus] 242Jones, Captain, fictive adventurer 67, 85Jones, Sir William 85Joseph II, emperor 69–72, 75Journal Encyclopédique (periodical) 123journals see diaries; newspapers and

periodicalsjournalism, journalists 30, 110, 124, 161–85

passim, 191, 202, 244, 260satirized 191, 228see also newspapers

Jove [Jupiter] 18–19Joyce, James 194Junimea [Youth], literary societyJustice, elizabeth 79Justin, Patriarch of Romania 245n39

Kafka 245n36Kaliakri 104Kaliningrad see KönigsbergKant, Immanuel 163–4, 167–8, 171Kaplan, Robert 235Karlsburg [Alba Iulia] 67Kaunitz, Wenzel Anton von 88Keysler, Johann Georg 77Khan of Crimea [probably Qaplan II

Giray] 102Kiev [Kyiv] 100Kinglake, A.W. 131kings and queens see Carol I, John I

Albrecht, Louis Ix, Marie, Michael Idacian 184Scottish 188see also emperors and empresses

Kiossev, Alexander 158Kiselëv, Count Pavel d. 141Kleeman, nicolaus 72Kligman, Gail 263Koczian, Anton 73, 80Kogălniceanu, Mihai 49–50, 55–6,

99–100, 102, 107–9, 128–9, 183Köleséri, Samuel 76Kolowrat-Krakowsky, Count Leopold 69Königsberg [Kaliningrad] 165Korea, north 234, 252, 255, 260Körner, Carl Theodor 153Kosovo legend 171Krajina 68Küçük Kaynarca, Treaty of 71Kule-Kapısi watchtower 105

La Fontaine, Jean de 26–7Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra 201n*Lammenais, Hugues-Félicité Robert

de 53

landscapes, scenery 57, 87, 91–114 passim, 120, 129–30, 227n56, 241mental 213

language, ideas of  25, 32–3 , 58, 162–4, 219–23, 243history of 32–5, 85, 220literary 52–3, 138–9, 144polyglossia 187, 242spoken, vernacular 22–5, 48, 52, 58, 87,

118, 139, 146, 150, 188–90, 219–23Lapland 207, 235Latin 13–14, 18–21, 24n43, 35, 40n93,

57–8, 76, 82, 119n14, 188–90, 220, 242Latinism, Latinity 15, 25¸ 32–3, 217, 227, 243see also America, Latin; Roman

alphabet; Romance languagesLatvia 207Latvians, see LettsLaurian, August Treboniu 15, 21, 189law, law codes 28, 38–42, 56, 68, 123, 164,

169–70, 174–5, 204customary 28‘Wallachian’ 34

lawyers 190, 204decapitated 248

Lazăr, Gheorghe 146, 156n89Leask, nigel 79Legionary movement 176Leigh Fermor, Patrick 236, 241–2Leipzig 58, 64, 69, 71–3, 82, 84, 144Leopard, national Order of (Zaire) 258Leskov, nikolai 192Letts 235Lever, John 67, 85Lévi-Strauss, Claude 105Liberal Party, Romanian 177n51, 180–2liberty, ancient 28

modern 181lies, lying, slander, calumny 24, 127–8,

149, 235–46Ligne, Charles-Joseph, prince de 139Linnaean classification system 82

applied to monks 69Lion, Golden, of nassau, Order of

(Luxembourg) 258Liprandi, Pavel 143Lisbon 94lithographs 57–8Lithuania 35–6Littler, Margaret 219Livy 20Lombroso, Cesare 195London 20, 57, 64, 66–7, 71, 76, 78–9, 82,

85, 90, 121, 208, 233, 238, 241, 259see also Tate Gallery; Times newspaper

302 index

London Magazine 78Loti, Pierre 151Louis Ix ‘the Saint’, King of FranceLouvre Museum 57Love, abandoned 226

between sovereign and people 149economically motivated, imaginary 236of the fatherland 17, 54, 149, 168as political allegory 238–40thwarted 50

Lovinescu, eugen 2Lunéville 108Lutherans 217Luxembourg 258

Macedonia 98Machiavelli, niccolò 192Maclean, Rory 243Macmichael, William 138–9Madrid 109, 260Magee, Bryan 168Magyars see HungariansMahmud II, Sultan 156Maior, Petru 14, 128Maiorescu, Titu 165–70, 177n51, 182–4,

197Maitreyi (novel) 205Malcolm, noel 244n33Malte-Brun, Conrad 132Malthus 27Mandar, Théophile 82Mangalia 247Manning, Olivia 237, 240–1, 245–6Marcouville, Jean de 25Marcus Aurelius, emperor 22, 24, 240n17Margarita of Romania, Princess 248Marie of Romania, Queen 245n39Marin, emile 204n11Marino, Adrian 261–2Marmara, Sea of 106Marriage 50, 68, 86, 104n42, 138, 237, 248

bigamy 204early age of among Romanians 67

Massimu, Ion 15, 21, 189Mătăeşti 100Maurerfreude, die 69Mavrokordatos family 22Mavrokordatos, Konstantinos, Prince of

Wallachia and Moldavia 28, 40–2Mavrokordatos, nikolaos, Prince of

Wallachia and Moldavia 22n34Mavrokordatos-Firaris, Alexandros 27Mediterranean Sea 263n70Medieval period see Middle Ages

Mehadia 143, 149–50Melville, Herman 194memoir genre 95–6, 110, 115, 129–30, 158,

184, 201, 204, 211n21, 214, 236, 238n113, 240n17, 241, 245n39, 262

memory, personal 105, 110–14, 197, 210improbable 243nostalgic 92, 239–42traumatic 204, 207

menambitious 156bad and poor 195as brothers 108, 138, 142–3, 145, 260capable of swearing oaths 48clothing of 67as fathers 50, 72, 108, 128, 204, 205, 210fighting 17, 21, 37, 145as great-grandfathers 137, 204n11handsome 223magnanimous 169not for sale 41as sons 38, 40, 104, 108, 119, 141–3, 145,

162, 238, 253thieving swineherds 35n71ugly 223wicked 223wise 22young 156, 223see also soldiers

Merin, John Baptist 77Messina 260metaphysics 163–4, 169, 172–5, 181, 183Metternich steamboat 106Mexico 254, 260Michael I, King of Romania 248Michelet, Jules 30–33, 52n143Michelson, Paul e. 114Mickiewicz, Adam 53Middle Ages, Medieval period 11, 28n51,

35, 74n35, 102, 114, 216Medievalism 174–7

middle classes, bourgeois: european 112n72derided by Ionesco 205non-formation of in Romania 166–7

Middle east 120Midy, emmanuel-Adolphe 103migration 26, 177, 213, 219, 226, 252, 263Mihăileşti 100Military Frontier, Habsburg 73, 216military service 35, 38Miller, Arthur 208–9, 212Milocco, Benedetto 80Mines, mining, mineralogy 68–77, 80, 83,

86, 110, 145, 216, 242

index 303

Minciaky [Minchaki], Matvei Iakovlevich, Russian diplomat 143

Mioriţa [‘The ewe-Lamb’], ballad 175, 240n16

missionaries 74Moldavia, Principality of passim;

Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of 42n102Metropolitan of 42, 47, 139

Moldavians 21, 27, 32, 36–41, 46–7, 49, 52, 55, 99, 103–114, 123–4, 127–33, 146n62, 184, 190chronicles 37landscape, setting 57, 98, 111–2, 191,

194, 261monasteries 239

Moldoviţa monastery 99Monastery of the Caves, Kyiv 100monks 46, 86, 99, 139, 141, 172

classified 69Monnet, Antoine Grimoald 80–2Montaigne, Michel de 187Montenegrins 66Monthly Review, periodical 77Mooney, Bel 238–40Moraru, nicolae 254Morat, Switzerland 151Morlacks 66, 78Morris, Jan 243mothers see womenmountains 23, 26, 32, 34, 37, 47, 52, 57,

75, 86, 91, 97, 105n46, 106, 109–12, 243, 256, 261see also Alps; Apuseni; Carpathians

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 69–70, 261Mueller, Joseph 73Müller, Herta 5–6, 213–29 passimMumuleanu, Barbu Paris 141Munchhausen, Hieronymus Carl Friedrich

von, Baron 76Munich 143–5Murphy, dervla 243, 245museums and galleries 240, 248

see also Brukenthal Museum; Louvre; Tate Gallery; Village Museum

music 69, 115, 132, 225, 239see also song

Muslims; Phanariots erroneously identified as 138–9, 244

naples 258n50napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of

France 141narration, order of 93–114, 143, 151–2

narrative 22, 55, 79, 84, 147–52of adventure 66–7, 72, 76, 84, 172, 236embedded 111, 130–2, 134n61fantastic 72, 76, 84, 129, 172grotesque 195historical 54importance of  4, 114interior 255interpretive 203insider 205moral 27ontological status of 236performed through actions 30point of view 215, 238–9, 246short 190–7, 202n6, 239surreal 214of transition 158vernacular 50, 192see also allegory; description; digression;

fable; fairy tales; fiction; history; memoirs; travel accounts

narrators 93n8, 130–2, 225–6, 237nash, Richard 84năstase, Ilie 233–4, 239, 248nations, ideas of, discourses of passim

definitions of 163dignity of; including the peasantry 44inferior but precious 112mad 203old 1threatened 171transformed 260unified 14, 16, 168, 187, 189young 192, 216

nationalism, nation-building 14, 59, 156, 161–85, 240n17, 256, 262–3cultural 2, 14language and 33, 148, 155, 163, 187–90,

195naum, Gellu 224–6neamţ county, Moldavia 110negruzzi, Constantin 49–50neo-Byzantine style (architecture) 70netherlands  252, 253n17newspapers and periodicals 43, 55, 67,

69, 75–82, 123–5, 130, 145, 157, 164–5, 217, 233–4, 247–9, 257n39

nicholas I, emperor of Russia 143nicolau, Raja 254nicolson, Adam 243nietzsche, Friedrich 187nitzkydorf/niţchidorf, Romania 217Nizam i-Cedid (reformed Ottoman

military) 104

304 index

nobles, nobility, boyars 29, 34–7, 42–56, 68, 103, 109, 113, 119, 126, 128, 132, 137–56 passim, 166, 169criticized 44, 47, 52, 149, 153see also savages, noble

Nova acta eruditorum (periodical) 69noyes, James 83Nuovo giornale d’Italia (periodical) 76

O’Connor, Peter 243Obertyn, Battle of 21Observer, newspaper 208–9Occidentalism 117–8, 154, 251–64 passim;

see also WestOdobescu, Alexandru 33, 54, 57Oerlemans, Onno 95Olăreanu, Costache 255Oldson, William 178–9Olten, Switzerland 151Oltenia [Little Wallachia] 141, 143

rugs 239, 240n17traveller from 98n28

Oprescu, George 252Oradea [Grosswardein, nagyvárad] 82Organic Regulations 107Orient see eastOrientalism 3–4, 64, 88, 123, 138, 151

ironized 128–33see also Balkanism

orphans 19, 103, 204orphanages 233, 247

Orthodoxy see eastern OrthodoxyOttoman empire 40, 57–8, 72–3, 76, 99,

102, 104, 119–20, 126, 131, 137, 141, 154, 175, 216see also Porte, Sublime; Rumelia

Sultans; Turkey

Paget, William, 6th Baron Paget 118–20painters, painting 91, 101, 130–1, 248, 261Paler, Octavian 258n50Palm Sunday 101pandour soldiers 145Pankhurst, Sylvia 162Paoli, Pasquale 96Paris 30, 64, 82, 98, 108n52, 109, 129,

133, 142, 187, 203–4, 209–10, 236, 254–5, 259–61of the east (i.e. Bucharest), see

Bucharest; Treaties of (Versailles, Trianon, St. Germain) 216

Treaty of (1856) 55World exhibition (1867) 57see also Institut Lemoine; Journal de

Paris; Louvre Museum; Sorbonne

Parks 259Parks, George R. 91Pârvulescu, Ioana 183n69Paşoptişti, 1848-ers 162Pastior, Oskar 225pastoral literature, european 47

German 218, 223–4Patapievici, Horia-Roman 115–7, 134Patmore, derek 241peasants, peasantry 11–59 passim, 82, 113,

146n62, 149–50, 154, 166, 171–2, 180–4, 191, 194–7, 223, 234, 236, 239–46uprising 70n16, 142

Pera, Istanbul 106Pest [Budapest] 143Peter II ‘The Great’, emperor of Russia 

40n95, 72, 141Petrarca, Francesco [‘Petrarch’] 187Petrescu, Camil 205Petrescu, Cezar 252Petru Şchiopul [‘Peter the lame’], Prince of

Moldavia 36Philadelphia 260Philippidēs, daniil [dēmētrēs] 43, 153n77Photeinos, Michael 41photographs 58, 249

and identity 209, 212Physikalische Arbeiten, periodical 73Physikalische Bibliothek, periodical 76Piatra neamţ 110Pinis, Russian consul in Bucharest 142Pippidi, Andrei 66–7Pisa 144Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini) 20Plai cu boi, scurrilous Romanian

publication 227Platon, Archimandrite 101Pliny the elder 20Poda von neuhaus, nicolaus 68Poenari 35poets, poetry 17–19, 32, 46–7, 50, 52–3,

97–8, 111, 130, 141, 153, 162–85 passim, 201, 205, 209, 213, 225–6, 244, 249, 252–3, 255–6, 259, 2261, 264Romanians typecast as 31, 129, 222–5,

238–41as first historians 50, 94

Pogor, Vasile the elder 46Pogor, Vasile 184Poland 12, 37, 58, 65, 171, 252, 254n29,

257, 261army of 37–8King of 38

Polish language, people 21, 35, 118, 175Porte, Sublime 46, 104, 138, 143–4

index 305

Porter, Ivor 236Portugal 252Posidonius 20postcolonialism 3–4, 64–5, 113

questioned 116, 158post-communism 3, 12, 182Prager gelehrter Nachrichten, journal 69Prague 68–9, 87, 260Pratt, Mary Louise 117pre-Romanticism 205Pressburg [= Bratislava, today’s Slovakia]

143, 149, 217pretentiousness 122priests 36–8, 41, 59, 120, 145, 163, 193,

245n39, 248printing, print culturePritchett, V.S. 243Protestants 20, 120, 217Protochronism 245Prussia 86

Archives of 165Consul of 142

public sphere, reading public 69–70, 78–84; 93–4, 121, 138, 145, 148–9, 208, 234–6, 244, 257, 262

Pumnul, Aron 162–3Punishment 226Putna monastery 100Puttenham, Thomas 24Pyong Yang 258

quarantine 106, 144–5Quinet, edgar 32–3Quinezu, emanuel 59

Rabelais 187race 22, 248, 255

British consul discounts importance of 29–30

racism 155–6, 177–81Rădăuţi 100Radio România Internaţional 225n50Radu de la Afumaţi, Prince of Wallachia 

35Raicevich, Ignaz Stefan 89n96, 124–5Ralea, Mihai 253Rallet, dimitrie 98n27, 132–3Raspe, Rudolph erich 76–7, 81Raynouard, François 33răzeşi (free peasants) 166Realzeitung der Wissenschaften, Künste und

der Commerzien, journal 69Redriffe [Rotherhithe] 95religion, of Romanians 13, 67, 100–1, 176,

178–80, 194–7, 211, 245

critique of 163, 173Oriental 172–3see also Christianity; eastern

Orthodoxy; enlightenment; Hindus; Jews; Muslims; priests; Protestants; Roman Catholicism; secularism

Rembrandt van Rijn 260Republic (work by Plato) 169Republic of Letters 65 et seq., 122Revue des deux-mondes, periodical 32Rhine 21, 24, 26

Falls, Valley 151, 260Rhone Valley 111Rigas Fereos [Velestinlis] 138Rîmnicu Vîlcea 260

bishopric of 125, 139Robertson, William 76, 78, 85Roma 217

see also GypsiesRoman alphabet 188Roman Catholicism, Catholic Church 70,

74, 80, 217Roman empire 18, 25, 27, 48, 76;Romance language(s) 32–3Romanes language 217Romania, passim

Academy of 15Arts Minister of 253as woman 237–8Conservative Party of 165–9, 181coast of 18, 105Communist Party 257, 261n64Constitution of 56, 169, 216mention by name, avoidance of 215Ministry of Culture 227, 248national Bank of 205national Commission for UneSCO 253national Theatre of 193, 253Orthodox Church of 245n39

România literară (journal) 110Romania Mare [Greater Romania

Party] 263Romanian language 32–7, 52–4, 70n16,

78, 87, 104, 108–10, 138, 148, 155, 162–5, 187, 195, 197, 213–4, 217Herta Müller on 219–23, 226–9hybridity/polyphony of 188–92independence of  162Latinity of 15, 27, 33, 58, 162, 189–90, 220orthography, scripts 108n54, 148,

188–9, 227Slavic elements in 33, 220sonority of 164–5perceived to be derided 146actually derided 243

306 index

Romanian-Bulgarian friendship 253Romanticism 25, 30–3, 91–114

passim, 174, 187, 205–6and language 164and profundity 154postcolonial 240–2

Rome 19, 22–8, 92, 255, 259–60Rosetti, Alexandru 261Rosetti, C.A. 30–1, 50Rosetti, Maria 30Rougemont, denis de 203n7Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 29n53, 96, 122–3,

174Rumelia 155

‘european Turkey’ 30, 98, 132Rumyantsev-Zadunaiskii, Count Pyotr

Alexandrovich 102Runciman, Steven 245n39rurality see countryside; landscape;

peasants; villagesRusan, Romulus 263Russia, Russian empire 12, 55, 59, 65, 79,

88, 99–100, 119, 121, 138–45, 150, 216army of 71, 141, 260–1consul of 45n117, 142–3protectorate over Principalities 107see also USSR

Russian culture, language, people 3, 42n102, 48, 87, 105, 118, 142–3, 156, 192, 241influence on Romanian language 97–8see also Skoptsy

Russophilia 143, 252–3Russo, Alecu 103, 107–14, 129

Sadoveanu, Mihail 252Said, edward 3, 64, 116St. Cyril 148St. demetrius 106Saint-exupéry, Antoine de 257St. John the evangelist 101St. Methodius 148St. Panteleimon  102St. Petersburg 99–101, 121Saki [H.H. Munro] 242Salzburg 255Sanskrit 85Santa Fé 260Sartre, Jean-Paul 208–9Saul, George, serdar of Moldavia 124–5savages

ignoble 4, 18, 29, 57–8, 79, 85, 196, 217ironized noble 122, 129noble 28–9, 66, 78

Saxons, Transylvanian [Siebenbürgen-Sachsen] 217

Scandinavia 253, 256Schemnitz [Banská-Štiavnica] 68–9Schleiermacher, Friedrich daniel ernst 171schools 42, 103, 106, 143, 155, 162–3, 165,

191, 224of mining 87see also academies; education;

seminaries; universitiesSchopenhauer, Arthur 161, 167–74,

184–5science 68–72, 122, 139, 164

and racial theory 178–80, 195Communist reverence for 257

Scotland 76, 79n54, 87, 188Scots 83, 138Scott, Sir Walter 188Scutari [Üsküdar] 106Sebastian, Mihail 210–1Second World War 218secularism, anticlericalism, atheism 69,

86, 163–4, 173, 193Securitate 224–6, 240n17, 248Ségur, Louis-Philippe, comte de 139seminaries 42–3, 162–3Serbia 35–6, 65, 73, 131, 217Serbian language, people 31, 78, 118, 125,

171, 217, 242n23Seri-Pervas steamboat 104sex, sexuality 235–46 passim

extra-marital 190paedophilia 248see also love

shame see stigmaShanin, Theodor 13Sherman, Stuart 93Sibiu 67, 76, 125n35Sicily 258Simion, eugen 263Şincai, Gheorghe 43–4, 128n43Şiperco, Alexandru 254Sitwell, Sacheverell 241Sklené Teplice [Skleno], Slovakia 69Skoptsy 240Slavic language, language group, linguistic

features 33–7, 138, 175, 189–90, 220, 227n57, 242n23

Slavici, Ioan 168, 183Slavonia 73Slavonic see SlavicSlavs 57, 217, 243slaves, enslavement 23, 72, 76, 78, 82,

244

index 307

Slovak Republic, Slovakia 69language 242n23see also Czechoslovakia; Hungary

Slovenia 260Smith, Adam 76, 96smoking 130

pipes vs. cigarettes 49by women 243

snow 100, 106, 109, 223Socivizca, Captain 66, 78, 85Society of Jesus [‘Jesuits’] 68–9, 74n36Socola monastery 42Solca monastery 100soldiers 17, 21, 28n51, 33n67, 35, 37–8, 58,

72–3, 78, 84, 104, 143, 145, 205see also war; military service

Solothurn, canton & town 151song 17, 31, 47, 50, 101, 153, 175–6, 222,

225–6see also poetry, music

Sorbonne, University of 204Sorel (Chartrain), Pierre 25Soviet Union, see USSRSpain

Spanish empire 87Sport-Turism publishing house 257Staël, Madame de 66Stafford, Barbara Maria 81Stancu, Horia 253Stancu, Zaharia 252–3Stărcea [Sterche, Ukraine] 100Staré Sedlište, Czech Republic 68Starkie, Walter 241,Ştefan cel Mare [‘Stephen the Great’],

Prince of Moldavia 37, 57, 105, 172, 175,Sterne, Laurence 267Stigma, stigmatic identity, stigmatization

116, 126–7, 154–5, 203Stolojan, Sanda 211, 263n72students 98n28, 108, 141, 144, 195, 247–8Sturdza, Mihai, Prince of Moldavia 46, 104Subjectivity 1, 91, 91–114

passim, 154, 246, 259Suceviţă monastery 100Suevi 20–1Sulina 104–6Sulzer, Franz Josef 124–5Sultans, Ottoman see Murad, Mehmed,

Mahmud IIsurrealism 201, 206, 224

see also dadaSunday Times newspaper 249Suţu, neculai [nikolaos Soutsos], Grand

Postelnic of Moldavia 48

Swabians, danubian [Donauschwaben] 217–8

Sweden 254Swedes 72, 118, 213Swift, dean Jonathan 156Switzerland 98, 111–2, 126, 135, 143, 150,

151Ambassador of to Romania, in sex

scandal 248Székely 143

Tacitus 20, 24Tănase, Maria 225–6, 228n59Tappe, e.d. 189n8, 194Tatars 102Tate Gallery 259Tecuci 106Temesvar, see Banat; TimişoaraTemeswarer Nachrichten, newspaper 75Teoctist, Patriarch of Romania 245n39Ţeranul Roman (newspaper) 55Thailand 256Theatre 49, 51n140, 149, 154, 201–11

Romanian national Theatre 193, 253They Think it’s All Over (British television

programme) 234Thiersch, Professor Friedrich Wilhelm 

145, 152Thornton, Thomas 126–7, 154–5Thracians 19, 197Thunmann, Johan erich 72, 84Thuringia 260Thurnham, Sophie 243Ţigăneşti 106Tilly, Charles 12Times newspaper 233

supplements to 247–9Timişoara 73, 83

Banat of, see Banat of TemesvarUniversity of 218

Timpul, Bucharest newspaper 165Tismana monastery 34Tomozei, Gheorghe 261Townson, Robert 82–3Toynbee, Philip 209trains, railways 196, 255Trajan, emperor 240translation, translators 22–5, 32, 35–6,

40–1, 43, 47, 64, 71–6, 79–85, 108–9, 116, 126–7, 130n51, 133, 136, 139, 144, 148, 154–5, 202, 257ambiguity not captured by 256n56editing or emendation of 80–1, 128in defence of 127

308 index

fictional 238–9lost 133opposition to 107mistranslation 20n29, 41n27parallel text 227published before original 225pseudotranslation  22under a different title 214–5verse translation 224

Transylvania 21, 43, 64n7, 65, 67–8, 70–1, 73–4, 76–7, 80–1, 87–90, 142–8, 150, 152, 162, 216, 240, 242, 256haystacks of 236

Transylvanians 14, 33, 43, 89n96, 98n28, 128, 191, 217–8, 225, 234Stephen the Great not 244

travel accounts 1–2, 5–6, 27–30, 33n67, 63–159 passim, 233–64 passimas autobiography 92–110as database 235as essay 52, 94, 97n23, 104, 111, 129–33,

147, 236, 244, 260as history 94–5, 122–5, 126n38as impressions 79, 91, 99, 132, 145as sermon 147enlightenment and 63–91, 111, 122–5,

148–58, 253–4political function of 72, 75, 94 137,

153–8, 235–6, 244, 262reception of 82–3, 91–134 passim, 146,

262–4 (see also public sphere)reviews of 75–81, 123–4, 147n65, 244n22Romantic 91–3, 97–8, 108–144, 241–2as social science 98–9translation of 71–85 passim, 108–9, 116,

121n20, 127, 129, 154–5, 215, 257see also epistolary genre; history;

memoirs; narrative‘travelees’ 118–34travellers

bureaucratic 87, 103–7ethnographic 63–90 passimfictional 130–2, 158military 126n38monastic 99–103scientific 68–72, 79–80, 84–7, 92n6,

98, 109Tulcea 10–54Turkey, Republic of 256

see also Turks; Ottoman empire; ‘european’, see Rumelia

Turkish culture, language 49, 139, 155, 157Turks 118

meaning Ottoman empire 40, 58, 72, 76, 102, 104, 120, 126, 154, 175

Turnu Severin, mislocated 244Tynan, Kenneth 208Tyrol 73Tzara, Tristan 204n10, 224

UneSCO 253Uniate Church, see Greek Catholic

ChurchUnited Kingdom of Great Britain and

northern Ireland 78, 83, 85, 87, 90, 139, 208, 252, 256, 259, 261, 263n72Ambassadors, Consuls 119, 240n18Archives 119n14empire 87Parliament 96see also British culture, literature;

england; ScotlandUnited Provinces 26

see also netherlandsUnited States of America 171

literature of 240n17President of 233see also America, Americans

Universities 224of Athens 144of Berlin 108, 165of Bucharest 205, 237of Geneva 150of Glasgow 96of Iaşi 165of Leipzig 73of Munich 152n72of Timişoara 218of Vienna 68, 165‘Romanian, in dobrogea, at Constanţa’

(fictional) 193Sorbonne 204

Ureche, Grigore 37–8Üsküdar, Istanbul see ScutariUSSR 188, 218, 252–5Utan, Tiberiu 254Utopia (work by Sir Thomas More) 169Uzbekistan 260

Văcărescu, Hélène 240n16Văcărescu, Ienăchiţă 141Văcărescu, nicolae 44Văcăreşti monastery 119Valencia, historians from 87Vampires 67, 234n4, 235, 242, 247Vamvas, Professor neophytos 144Van Graaf, nicolaas 79Vandals 94Varlaam, Metropolitan of Moldavia 

244n29

index 309

Varna 104Vasile Lupu [‘Basil the Wolf ’], Prince of

Moldavia 39Vasile, Radu 248Venedict, Hegumen of Moldoviţa

monastery 99–100, 107Veniamin Costachi, Metropolitan of

Moldavia 42Venice 22, 25n44, 64, 79, 89n96, 138, 255,

258, 260Venus and Madonna [‘Venere şi Madonă’,

1870], poem by Mihai eminescu 206Verdery, Katherine 000Verne, Jules 257Vianu, Ion 263Vianu, Tudor 206, 254Velyky Kuchuriv, Ukraine see Cuciur ForestViaţa românească review 253Vienna 64n7, 67–9, 75, 83, 87, 89, 108, 121,

123–4, 131, 138, 143, 149–52, 154, 157n92, 164–5, 216–7, 254–5, 260–1Siege of 216

villages 12–59 passim, 80, 99–101, 120, 145, 147, 151, 193–7, 214, 217, 221–4, 260

Village Museum, Bucharest [Muzeul Satului] 240

Virgil 18, 240n17viticulture 40, 221Vlad Ţepeş [“The Impaler”], Prince of

Wallachia 148, 172Vladimirescu, Tudor 44–5, 52, 141–2Vogoridi, Stefan 104Vogoridi, nicolae 104Voltaire 76, 80, 259n54Vulcănescu, Mircea 206, 212n27

Wagner, Richard (composer) 187Wagner, Richard (writer) 215Wallachia, passim

‘Ad-Hoc councils’ 55assembly 51country houses 244n22court 120, 125n26customs 88law 34‘Little’ [= Oltenia] 141Metropolitan of 38, 141monasteries 244n22rights of 144village 80

Wallachians see Romanians; note on use of term 66n13

WarCold 171Crimean 30, 83, 132, 139

Russo-Turkish (1768–1774) 89, 99Russo-Turkish (1828–34) 000First World 204, 216Second World 218

Washington dC 258, 260Weber, eugen 12, 59Welles, Orson 209Wenskus, Reinhard 11West, Western culture, ideas, people 1,

5, 7, 12, 15–33 passim, 40, 85, 104, 113–4, 116–21, 126, 129, 134, 136–46, 153n78, 162–3, 169, 178–9, 187, 189–90, 192, 203, 221, 224, 237–8, 251–64 passimarchitecture 58dress 125egocentric 16, 246enlightened 77hegemonic 63–4, 207(not necessarily 89–90, 127)selfhood 154–8see also east-West divide; europe

White, Hayden 84Whittell, Giles 243Wiedlisbach 151Weiner Anzeigen (periodical) 75Wilde, Oscar 246Wildegg [Möriken-Wildegg] 151Wilkinson, William 29–30, 129n47,

240n18Williams, Raymond 18, 112wine see drinkwives see womenWolf, eric 12Wolff, Larry 63women

bathing outdoors 82beautiful 138, 223, 237burnt alive 39, 78clothing of 57, 67, 149, 226as daughters 19, 32, 50, 68–9, 104n32,

201, 204, 211Geto-dacian 19gifted 169lyrical attitude towards 187metafictional 238as mothers 204–5, 210, 222, 225Orientalized 246patriotic 30poets 240provocative 236Romania portrayed as 237–8singing 101smoking 243tramdrivers 243Viennese 149

310 index

as wives 19, 30, 32, 175, 191–3, 196, 204, 210, 237

working 193, 238World Cup (soccer) 233

xanthus 39xenopol, A.d. 174

Yiddish 217Young, Arthur 97–9youth, young people 49, 103, 108–11,

128–30, 144, 148, 156, 163, 168, 172, 180, 204, 236, 247of Romanian state 190, 216of national language 192

Youth Publishing House see Editura Tineretului

Ypsilantis, Alexandros (1791–1828), Greek independence leader 141–2

Ypsilantis, Alexandros, Prince of Wallachia 1774–1782, 1796–7 28–9, 41–2, 124, 125n34

Zaire 258zemleani 35–6Zugabe zu den Göttingischen Anzeigen von

gelehrten Sachen (periodical) 75Zur wahren Eintracht Masonic lodge 69