Romanian Literature as World Literature ed. by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, Andrei Terian (review)

Fifteen authors explore the nature of Romanian literature not as a creation of the modern nation-state but as a product of the engagement of Romanian authors over time with the literatures and cultures of near neighbors and more distant lands. They by no means argue for the irrelevance of the nation-state or of a national literature, but they reject the notion that a literature can be confined within political boundaries—that it can, in a sense, be withdrawn from the wider zones of literature and culture and still remain creative. They also ask if Romanian literature has to be written by an ethnic Romanian or in the Romanian language or within the frontiers of a Romanian state. They are thus concerned with the literary relationship between the “center” (the West, and, in the first instance, France) and the “periphery” (Romanian writers) in modern times. They wonder if it expresses itself through a continuous borrowing by the latter from the former as by a minor culture from a major culture, or is it a kind of give-and-take where the junior partner makes original contributions to European and world literature.

The authors are in general agreement that Romanian literature emerged and developed through the engagement of poets and prose writers with European and world literatures and cultures. In examining the works of Nicolae Milescu and Dimitrie Cantemir of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Bogdan Creţu argues that their careers reveal that neither language nor territory can account for the emergence of a Romanian literature. Rather, he attributes the phenomenon to a tradition, which he calls Byzantine or Eastern Orthodox. The sources of the works they produced, he suggests, were not specifically Romanian, but were common to Southeastern Europe and even regions beyond which shared the Byzantine–Orthodox heritage. Nor can they be called “Romanian literature,” as modern literary critics do by placing them within the borders of the modern nation-state. Alex Goldiş, writing on the twentieth century, comes to similar conclusions. He, too, insists that literary history cannot be limited to a national territory. He cites George Călinescu’s massive Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în present (The History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present; 1941) as a characteristic example of a nationalist literary history designed to downplay foreign influences on Romanian writers in order to protect their originality and show that their sources and they themselves were Romanian.

Two authors reject outright such an approach by drawing on the career of Mihai Eminescu, generally considered to be Romania’s national poet. Andrei Terian argues that Eminescu was at the same time a national and a transnational poet because he drew inspiration from both indigenous and foreign sources. He explains how Eminescu’s encounter with the Vedic hymns and other Hindu texts of India brought the significant shift from a national to a world perspective that enabled him to write poems that fully revealed his genius. Carmen Muşat also emphasizes Eminescu’s work as an example of diverse literary traditions coming together in the Southeastern European zone and being molded by individual creative brilliance.

All the authors are, in their own way, engaged in defining “Romanian literature.” Mircea Diaconu asks directly if Romanian authors living outside Romania but writing in Romanian belong to Romanian literature? He also wonders about the relationship between Romanian literature in Romania and Moldovan literature and where to place Ion Druţă, a Moldovan writer who moved to Moscow and writes in Russian, and Lucian Blaga and Liviu Rebreanu, Romanians from Transylvania who moved to Bucharest after the First World War? Imre József Balázs raises similar questions about Hungarian literature being written in Romania after 1920 and in the exile communities after 1956. Doris Mironescu examines the careers of three writers who left Romania—Herta Müller in Germany and Andrei Codrescu and Norman Manea in...