EXIL TE O BOABA TE TIPER
Mircea Dinescu
Now available in English: Exile on a Peppercorn, translated by Andrea Deletant and Brenda Walker.
London: Forest Books
82 pp., $12.42
I am not quite sure if, while becoming one of the outstanding stylists of the French language, the Romanian Emil Cioran was answering the question he once raised, "How can one be Romanian?" I do not doubt, however, that, at this point, another question is more dramatic than Cioran's witticism. And this is, "What does it mean to be a Romanian writer?"
The dire civic passivity of the majority of Romanian writers witnessing the atrocities perpetrated by Nicolae Ceauþescu - who has been called the most hated of all tyrants - against the very essence of the Romanian nation unfortunately justifies such a question. All the more so since, while noticing the profound involvement of Soviet, Hungarian, Czech, or Polish writers in open and unequivocal opposition to the devastating totalitarianism in their countries, Westerners see the Romanian writer as an enigma that is more and more difficult to solve.
Of course, not all Soviet writers are Solzhenitsyn or Zinoviev, nor are all Czech writers Havel. Still, it is a real question why today's Romanian writers are so seldom like those who did not hesitate to defy Romania's royal dictatorship. During the 1848 Revolution or the struggle for national unification in 1859 and 1919, writers were restless, active agents, directly involved in events. Their vocation took them to the barricades. Political engagement was for them not only a matter of theoretical concern but also a practical assumption of their historical calling, as a glimpse at Romania's pre-World War II newspapers will reveal. This anti-dynastic, antifascist press bespeaks not only a brilliant Romanian intelligentsia, with exceptionally gifted writers, but also, and primarily, and exemplary civic courage.
By contrast, the yawning abyss of the passivity of the contemporary Romanian intelligentsia appears. More than forty years ago, he communist regime succeeded in robbing the Romanian intellectual of his class status: Today he is déclassé. It is a change that Romanian writers, willy-nilly, out of vanity or rather shame, have ignored. First surprised, then confused, the Romanian writer has not recovered. Never since that ignoble capitulation has the Rumanian writer seriously faced the problem of refraining his natural rights and reviving his class. Not only have unwarranted rights been yielded to a victor, Romanian writers have even abandoned their own social group. The former can be called obedience or fear; the latter has a more repellent name. Most Romanian writers have refused to realize that while they are contemplating the persecution of a colleague today, their turn may come tomorrow.
Frustrated of historical consciousness, contemporary Romanian writers have ceased to be inheritors. Thus, they cannot acquire confidence in a deserving posterity. Terrified by the historical tempo, intimidated by a world where changes occur in geometric proportion - unlike the world of their fathers, where events still seemed predictable - Romanian writers cannot guess the shape of the world of their children. They are disconcerted by the future. They opt
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