My happy days in Hell

Last week I mentioned Simon Winder whom I knew to be a book editor as well as author of the well-researched and literate Germania and Danubia books. I had not, however, realised that he is the genius behind the Central European Classics series of books issued by Penguin

I’m rereading one of them - György Faludy's autobiography My Happy Days in Hell, first published in 1962 - and finding it one of the most powerful bits of writing I've ever encountered. Far better than Gregor von Rezori's slightly surrealist evocation of an earlier generation - The Ermine in Czernopol - which I had been trying to read earlier in the week, its picaresque descriptions and musings occasionally give me glimpses of Voltaire's Candide.....
Faludy's 2006 obituary gave this vignette

This is the Hungarian-Jewish poet's story of his flight to France and Africa in the late 1930s, his years fighting as a volunteer in the US air force, and his return after the war to Hungary, where, after refusing to write a celebratory poem for Stalin's birthday, he was interned, emerging three years later as one of a very small number who survived. Often at risk of death, even flirting with it in his encounters with Nazis and communists, Faludy revelled in the sheer sensation of being alive. Born in 1910, Faludy spent most of his highly productive later life in Canada and died in 2006 in Budapest where he returned in the late 1989. An exultant sensuous verve jumps from the pages of this sometimes bleak, never deceived and yet always life-affirming book.

The book is a supreme example of a "poetic" book - with detailed and insightful observations scattered on every page, whether about the day he departed America (after 5 years there); or arriving back to the nightmare of 1945 Budapest before the 3 years he languished in prison there. This interview some 25 years ago catches catches his waspish tone

Well, look. I am 77 years old. When I was growing up there was still such a thing as Western Civilization, something I love almost as much as life itself. In any form in which one could recognize it, it's largely gone now. Or rather is transmuted into the bizarre society one finds now everywhere from Sâo Paulo to Singapore, with far too many people, a general subliteracy and, at the top, the hierarchy of technocrats, most of them — except for their technical specialties — as uneducated as the proles working for them at minimum wage, or less

Two Hungarian literary sites give a very good summary of this incredible man’s life - here and here  I just missed the anniversary of his birth - September 22 (1910 ).

Hungarians are attracting a lot of critical press at the moment – but we should celebrate the amazing contribution they have made to intellectual life in the 20^th century. Here is one of the best tributes to Faludy

BOOK after translated book, a soft-spoken poet who spent a long life writing in an awkward, minority language is taking his rightful place among the giants of world literature — even in his homeland.György Faludy was born in Budapest in September 1910. He was a Jew who wanted desperately to be a Hungarian, but had to spend some of his best writing years in exile or in prison. His poetry, circulated at home illegally during the grim years of Nazi and subsequent Soviet occupation, kept alive the flame of freedom and decency for generations of his adoring public.Despite two decades since the advent of democratic rule in Hungary its literary establishment has managed to keep Faludy’s name out of the schoolbooks. Entirely in vain, for his poetry has now become a potent force in the struggle of post-Communist Europe to liberate itself from the lingering spirit of its bygone tyrannies.Penguin Modern Classics has just released Faludy’s autobiography My Happy Days in Hell , an elegant tale celebrating the triumph of the human spirit. First published in English in 1962, the book anticipated Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago by more than a decade.

A natural teacher and spellbinding raconteur, Faludy leads his reader across a blood-drenched landscape, sharing his enjoyment and surprise at morality, friendship, loyalty and sheer physical as well as aesthetic pleasure that have somehow overcome the carnage. His autobiography is an essential literary document of the 20th century, the testimony of a writer whose stature is comparable to that of his beloved Auden, Lorca, Rilke and Yeats. Faludy, who died in 2006, was my teacher for most of my life and my close friend towards the end of his. I have discussed the book with two of its principal characters, also close associates of the author, who were impressed with the veracity of Faludy’s recollections. Many of the events of My Happy Days in Hell are also described in Faludy’s poetry, written during or shortly after their occurrence. These contemporaneous testimonies confirm the accuracy of the later work.All his life, Faludy was relentlessly pursued by the hostile agents of repression while being well loved by a devoted public. He burst onto the literary stage of Budapest just before the rise of Nazi oppression with a collection of ballads exuding the love of freedom, adapted from the mediaeval French of Francois Villon. 

The Penguin autobiography covers a lively and horrendous 15-year period from Faludy’s first exile to his release from prison in 1953. But the camp never left him. It reappeared, for example, in a poem of 1983.

Learn by heart this poem of mine,

Books only last a little time,

And this one will be borrowed, scarred,

Burned by Hungarian border guards,

Lost by the library, broken-backed,

Its paper dried up, crisped and cracked,

Worm-eaten, crumbling into dust,

Or slowly brown and self-combust,

When climbing Fahrenheit has got

To 451, for that's how hot

it will be when your town burns down.

Learn by heart this poem of mine

He had opted for poetry early, seduced by Budapest's cafés and literary life, but his scientist father would have none of it. Budapest already had 20,000 poets, he said, none of whom could support themselves. The young Faludy was packed off to Vienna to study chemical engineering. He remained unknown to his professors, publishing instead the translations of François Villon, a rebellious 15th-century French poet, that launched his literary career. He also wrote a poem against Hitler that would have earned him 14 years in prison, but he was tipped off and escaped. He fled Hungary in 1938 for France and, when war broke out, took a boat to Morocco, finding eventual sanctuary in the United States and enlisting in the American army. The book opens with a description of the country of his youth, a semi-feudal backwater locked in bitter resentment then as now over Hungary’s territorial losses suffered after the First World War. The author fled to Paris after a Hungarian parliamentary deputy had suffered a heart attack on reading one of his poems, lampooning the politician’s pro-Nazi voting record. The poet thought this was his greatest literary achievement.

In Paris, Faludy wrote and starved a lot, and met many people who later influenced European history. As the Nazis advanced, he retreated first to French North Africa and then to the United States where he served the Free Hungary Movement as its honorary secretary. He later enlisted in the US Air Force to fight the war in the Far East theatre against Japan. He astonished his hosts afterwards by declining their offer of American citizenship and returning to his war-torn homeland at the first opportunity. He soon found himself in prison on trumped-up charges.The poet endured torture in the dungeons of the Communist state security organization AVO, which had been used earlier for the same purpose by the Hungarian Nazi movement, the Arrow-Cross. Eventually he “confessed” to being a CIA spy, but laid a trap for the planners of a prospective show trial by identifying his alleged American minders as Captain Edgar Allan Poe and Major Walt Whitman. He spent his final night in that building — now a museum open to the public called The House of Terror — awaiting his promised execution at dawn before being dispatched instead to serve a 25-year forced labour sentence handed down without a trial.He saved many of his poems composed in captivity by entrusting them to memory. He was assisted in this by his fellow prisoners — including my two informants whom I eventually interviewed in Toronto — who memorized and recited Faludy’s poems during work. On their release from prison in the confusion following Stalin’s death in 1953, the same comrades helped Faludy to compile the poems for publication.

Faludy chose exile again after the collapse of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule, edited a literary journal in London, taught at Columbia University in New York and received a Pulitzer Prize as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto. He was nominated for a literary Nobel Prize.Faludy returned to his homeland yet again at the age of 78, together with his lover Eric Johnson, an American classicist poet, to witness the implosion of Communism and the birth of democracy. He was greeted by a tumultuous welcome and more literary prizes. More than a decade later, he married Fanny Kovács, a poet then aged 28. This was his fourth marriage, in which he spent his final, extraordinarily creative years.English translations of Faludy’s poetry have been collected in East and West (1978) and Learn This Poem of Mine by Heart (1983), both ed. John Robert Colombo, and Selected Poems (1985), trans. Robin Skelton. Faludy’s irreverent Hungarian adaptation of the Villon ballads has been adapted further in my own English Free Women (1991).His poetry is rich in unforgettable, romantic or flippant turns of phrase that unfailingly draw their power from keen perception. The poems are often composed in delicate, chanson-like tones that can unexpectedly give way to heart-chilling horror, without ever compromising the highest standards of literature.

Yet Faludy has remained an irritant to many Hungarian teachers, critics and editors. I think this is because of his irrepressible voice in praise of freedom, an anathema to the very nature of the literary establishment here that has evolved through the long decades of rigid regulation under successive tyrannies. Perhaps he flouted social conventions too often, sometimes by provoking his detractors to embarrass themselves.The literary elite tore into Faludy’s reputation after his death by questioning the veracity of My Happy Days in Hell. While the world mourned the passing of a brilliant mind, a minor Hungarian writer opined in an obituary published by The Guardian newspaper of London that the book contained “picaresque adventures and saucy anecdotes… even if it is uncertain how much of it is based on fact”. 

Meanwhile…in the rest of Romania

I’ve been remiss in not mentioning a couple of events which have been making the headlines here in Romania in the last few weeks. First the demonstrations in most cities against the Rosia Montana gold mine exploitation, spoilation and devastation in the heart of Transylvania.

The project’s opponents criticise the use of cyanide - 12,000 tons of it to be precise - that's 12 times higher than anything ever seen in European goldmining, which would have a devastating and irreversible impact on the region’s biodiversity. Four mountains surrounding the village would be destroyed in the process and Roman mining galleries unique in Europe would be damaged, archeologists and historians have warned on countless occasions. Alas, the Romanian government supports it, singing loudly of its economic value, and ironically, the ecological and cultural benefits for the region.
The new 'law' breaks legal and constitutional provisions for the protection of private property, cultural heritage protection, environmental protection, watersheds, forests, grasslands, public property, access to justice for citizens, free competition - enfin, bref, it is especially designed for a foreign private company - Gabriel Resources. Therefore, the government's proposed referendum is nothing more than a travesty. You cannot have a referendum on a law that is illegal. Not even in Romania.
This so-called 'law', writes Claudia Ciobanu for the Guardian, "would give Gabriel Resources extraordinary powers, including the right to conduct expropriations in Rosia Montana. The text mandates authorities to give the company all necessary permits for construction and exploration by set terms (15 days, 30 days, 60 days, etc) regardless of national legislation, court rulings or public participation requirements. If the parliament approves this law (a vote could take place as early as this month), Romanian citizens will no longer have a say over Rosia Montana. Outrage was compounded by the fact that, while in opposition, Ponta's Social Democrats had declared themselves against the project. This turnabout reinforced the perception that the political class is corrupted and unworthy of trust."

Useful background info can be found on this site and also on Der Spiegel. 

A young Romnian journalist also has a take....

The second event which has been gripping Romania’s cultural elite is the bi-ennial George Enescu International Festival – broadcast on the airwaves with interminable interviews with performers and audience.

Also quite a few book festivals going on – I missed the Transylvanian one at the beginning of the month (frankly I didn't fancy the clipped upper-class anglo-saxon tones which promised to be monopolising the area - compared with the Alba-Iulia Festival organised by Dilema Veche) but I might just make the tail-end of the Bucharest Book street festival. And the Iasi festival beckons 23-27 October – although I will almost certainly still be in Sofia then….. 

Harvest treasures

A day for sensations in the comfort of our cosy stone and wood house in the autumnal mountains – hunkered with a good book in a wicker chair in front of a wood fire in the brick stove; eating local vegetables magically concocted in soups and stews. Pity I can’t quite extend to the Tuscan way of treating beans – left overnight softly bubbling in an old Chianti bottle in the embers of the fire! But I'm just waiting to get hold of a pumpkin to make a soup with a drop of ginger!

And the mixture of grated red beetroot, chopped celery, apple, garlic, pumpkin oil, honey and apple vinegar and touch of lemon offers not only a tasty salad but is so beneficial to organs such as the prostate.

I used to swear by Shopska salad but it has paled by comparison with my current offering - which adds old crumbled toast, an egg, pumpkin oil and generous lashings of Telemen cheese to the usual mix of red onion, tomato, lettuce and garlic.

This encouraged me to look again at one of my favourite celebrations of the older (and better) ways of eating – Beaneaters and Bread Soup which focuses on various individuals in the Tuscan countryside who still stick with the simple and traditional methods – here’s one recipe for bread and beansoup, The bread in the picture, by the way, is the superb large potato one which lasts more than a week! If I can't have the Bulgarian black rye, I'll take this Romanian (actually Hungarian county!) white!   

By coincidence, one of my favourite bloggers’ most recent offering gives marvellous old illuminated treatments of harvest time which includes a medieval document called Tacuinum Sanitatis

And, while we’re celebrating the old ways, let’s raise a glass - or three- (of Murfatlar Feteasca white and Bulgarian red) to the superb photography of Robert Doisneau which usually lie on my desk and some of whose work can be seen here
The last website - online browsing - is a nice find which gives us glimpses of old photographs  and paintings from around the world

Back to the Habsburgs

"Our" cow was moved off the high ground last week down to the meadow around Viciu’s house; and this week saw the first snow on the Bucegi mountain range which the front of the house overlooks (the pic).
The quincy fruits are also large – always, according to grandmother wisdom here, a sign of a tough winter to come. Couldn’t get much tougher than the last one which saw our neighbour’s house snowed in during March – but we’re taking no chances and therefore padded today the central heating pipes with special care. Monday we will have the specialist up to do a bit of tweaking. Thus are the seasons marked on this southern border of Transylvania!

I’m stuck in a bit of a time warp at the moment – Chris Clark’s book on the origins of the First World War - TheSleepwalkers - made me realise how little I know about the world which created the killing fields of the 20^th Century. I therefore reread Simon Winder’s Germania which I had found a bit indigestible at the first read - but which makes a bit more sense this time around. And, coincidentally, Winder published last week Danubia – a personal history of Hapsburg Empire which has attracted this useful review -

Why do we know so little about the Habsburg empire, given that it is the prime formative influence on modern Europe? Its pomp gave us the art, music, literature and pageantry of our high culture; its relationship with the Ottoman East and burgeoning European protestantism drew our religious and our political maps; its collapse fomented the nationalisms that shaped the 20th century across Europe.
A popular abbreviation on the internet is ‘tl; dr’. It stands for ‘too long; didn’t read.’ There’s space for another one that would come in especially helpful for the Habsburg empire: ‘tc; du’ — ‘too complicated; didn’t understand’. It’s much easier to teach schoolchildren about Our Island Story, or the first world war, or the nastiness of Nazis, because at least superficially these are containable subjects. There are baddies (Nazis), there are decisive battles (Waterloo), there are comprehensible treaties (Versailles) and there are what look like reasons for things to happen (railway timetables).

The Habsburg empire, on the other hand, has none of these consolations. Most of the places involved are now called something else, and the empire was cobbled together out of any number of rebellious, feuding or indifferent duchies, grand-duchies, principalities, margravates, palatinates and what have you. ......
One of the main things the empire did was to prevent the Ottomans from overrunning Europe. Its ups and downs often have to do with whether the Ottomans were busy gnawing at its bum or had their attention distracted for a few decades elsewhere. Like most of the things the Habsburgs did — Winder gently but seriously emphasises that to think of the empire as a rational, centralising authority is completely to miss the point — these distractions were often subcontracted........

This is almost an anti-history. Winder approaches his dementingly enormous subject more in the spirit of an amused and irreverent tourist, as his subtitle suggests: as much travel writer as historian. ‘The more we read about the past,’ he marvels at one point, ‘the more completely odd it appears.’
Danubia is framed by the author’s peregrinations around the Mitteleuropean sprawl of the vanished empire — from the dismal flatlands bordering the Danube to tiny towns in Transylvania. He visits dusty old museums (in one he finds a flap of human skin) and decaying fortresses. He observes endless suits of armour, eats stomach-churning omelettes, stumbles on a children’s rock festival in a town in Serbia and sighs frequently for love of the town of Brno.Yet one of the sly contradictions here is that an exceptional amount of reading and travel lies behind the showily teen-agerish dismissal of this monarch or that treaty. Winder plainly knows his way around the empire: he’s not only more knowledgeable than he makes out about military history; he’s also well-read and clever about art and music. Sometimes the winsomeness is trying. A down side of approaching history as a tourist is that, by definition, you never quite inhabit the period. There’s a sort of chronological orientalism to all this pointing and laughing. But at the same time it is very funny.

Danubia promises to be a very useful complement to the doorstopper of a book about the Habsburg Empire which arrived for me yesterday CA Macartney’s 1968 The Habsburg Empire 1790-1918. This promises to be a real resource to help deal with my ignorance of this part of the world.

Abolish the news!

News is a commodity sold on a mass market which despises in-depth assessments but goes for stock clichés and instant opinion. 

Where does one go when one wants, instead, good and thoughtful writing about issues, culture or history? The answer seems to be bi-weekly, monthly or bi-monthly journals of a general nature. 

Avoid journalists – the modern harlot – like the plague and find instead real writers who demonstrate (a) clear and original writing, (b) familiarity with the subject matter and (c) courage in challenging the conventional wisdom. 

This is what the fortnightly London Review of Books (to which I’ve been subscribing for the past year) is now giving me – take John Lanchester's two long articles on the British banking scandal here and also here; novellist James Meek's stark analysis of electricity privatisation; and this piece reviewing various European texts on the crisis as typical examples.

The New York Review of Books – of which I used to be an aficionado – no longer speaks to me…..it somehow seems to have become incestuous….

I would, of course, like to recommend a French or German journal – but cannot find one with the same scope and clarity as LRB. Le Monde and Die Zeit are both great heavyweight journals – one a daily, the other weekly – but are still newspapers with all the pressures that entail. A monthly (German) journal such as Cicero is too narrowly political – others too business. NachDenkSeiten is a website I've come across which has a nice focus. But don't get me started on the tens of thousands of specialised academic titles which waste our valuable time and warp our minds!!

The various monthly European literary reviews (such as Magazine Litteraire) just don’t seem to have mastered the more discursive tone (and editorial genius) of the London, Dublin and New York Review of Books which are patently reaching out to a broader audience than that for simple book reviews (with the strange mixture of internecine and marketing processes that can involve!). These three Reviews prefer to use a recently published book (or better a bunch) as a peg on which to hang a more general discourse. 

I always enjoy glancing at the Romanian version of Lettre Internationale even although its sponsor, The Cultural Institute of Romania now has dubious leadership. Its woodcuts are marvellous and the copious footnotes take me back to the good old days of Le Monde!

I also very much appreciate what Eurozine trying to do - with its collecting in one website the key articles from Europe’s 70 odd cultural magazines – even if most of that content is too highbrow! But at least it does try to give us a sense of what is happening in Europe outside the superficial treatment we get of the eurocrisis and how it is impacting on people. I have remarked several times in this blog about the scandalously uninformed coverage there is of the social context in which the majority of Europeans live their lives.

In desperation I have now added New Left Review and a new-look New Statesman to the list of journals which now wend their way to my mountain retreat. Already I feel a difference!!
But perhaps its time to ask a simple question - there are tens of thousands of journalists and academics churning out articles in (hundreds of) thousands of journals in the general field of politics and social policy. Can we not think of a way of making the better of these pieces more accessible - in various European languages?? That's the Eurozine idea - but they're selecting from a rather precious bunch!
Of course what gets in the way of this simple idea is the specialisation of political, professional and academic silos - there are a few journals who are trying this idea - eg Project Syndicate but from a rather narrow ideological base.
Time for more experimentation!

the poetry of tartan noir

I keep wanting to like poetry – but generally failing. Bert Brecht, Norman MacCaig and Marin Sorescu are the main poets who have ever really got through to me - the first for his political anger; the other two for their wry humour. TS Eliot and Adrian Mitchell also appeal. But I do enjoy and appreciate the poetic style which you can find in good novels and essays.

William McIlvanney has always been an admired writer in Scotland though his renown hasn't spread beyond the borders in quite the way some of us think it should have. 

McIlvanney isn't a crime writer per se; he's also written literary novels, short stories, essays and poetry since the 60s. But he did happen to write three crime novels, starting with Laidlaw  in 1977, that acted as a hard-bitten blueprint for all Scottish crime fiction to come, inspiring a generation of writers to take on the genre in his wake.
Laidlaw's eponymous detective is an existentially troubled individual with a strong moral compass and a stronger sense of socialist justice.

The Glasgow he stalks is a brutal place, rife with deprivation and poverty, yet depicted with dark humour and perceptive, poetic prose. The plot reads like a cliche today, but that's because McIlvanney was first to do it. The murderer of a teenager has to be found and, well, that's it. But McIlvanney subverts expectations, and gives away whodunit early on, focusing instead on the psyches of characters that represent different facets of Glasgow, and by extension Scotland. In a time when English crime writers were still copying Agatha Christie, McIlvanney took the hardboiled ethos of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and applied it to the working classes of the city around him. It was a revelation.

I was spellbound by which I've just read after its recent republication – the toughness of its taut text. Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw left university after one year. He had not failed -"University failed me ... I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened".

"Panda (one of the characters) was like a banana republic threatened by two contending major powers who don’t want direct conflict". (ch.11 p.75)

Laidlaw takes as much pleasure in the ordinary street life of Glasgow and of the dignity of its people. This indomitable spirit is captured in the last action of the book where Laidlaw after an evening’s drinking, dances outside Central Station with an old woman who had been standing in a queue. ‘Son,’ she said, ‘This is the best queue I’ve ever been in in my life.’ (p.298)

McIlvanney’s shorter pieces are marvellous examples of expressive writing and can be accessed on his website. 

Reviews of his work are available on a Glasgow University site about Scottish literature here and here

In researching for this post, I came across a very interesting website about lifesaving poems  one of whose posts was about Marin Sorescu  Perhaps the site can help me with my blind spot for most poetry. I know I need to focus more!

To end - not with a poem but with a symphony of wood! The spoons which head this post are the creation of this artist MANU whose studio in Tirgovishte we visited recently and two of whose beautifully-crafted dressers now have pride of place in our mountain kitchen.  

The politics of painting

Bucharest is a city I would normally avoid in high summer like the plague – but dental issues have forced me to divide what summer I’ve had since my return from Germany in early July between the place and my mountain retreat. And the cooler summer weather has actually made the city much more bearable.

Having bemoaned what I saw as the lugubrious state of Romanian painting with which I was being served up in Bucharest galleries and museums in the past decade, my eyes have been opened in the past 12 months.

The new Museum of (22 separate!) art collections; a website; various finds in antiquarian bookshops; and a small new private gallery have helped me at last to appreciate the beauty of Romanian realist painting of the past century!

New names for me are Bassarab Louis/Ludovic (1866-1933) whose reputation seems to have been unfairly eclipsed by Grigorescu and Andreescu; the exquisite works of Grant Nicolae 1868-1950; Artachino Constantin (1870-1954); Strambu Hippolytus (1871-1934); Baesu Aurel (1896-1928); Leon Bijou (1880-1970); Georgescu Marian (1892-1932); and Aurel Popp 

It is Grant and Popp who intrigue me the most – for the neglect each has suffered – for very different political reasons.
Grant (as his name would suggest) was of Scottish (and high bourgeois) origin – his father was UK consul in Romania and Nicolae came of age when Romanian impressionist painting was at its height  - being part of the great generation of Artachino, Baltazar, Biju, Bunescu, Dimitrescu, Darescu, Eder, Muntzner, Pallady, Popescu, Popea, Ressu, Schweitzer-Cumpana, Steriadi, Theodresci-Scion, Tonitza, Vermont and Verona – all, amazingly, born within ten years of one another!
Nicolae Grant, however, seems to have been air-brushed out of history – his name does not appear in the key 1971 text by Dragut et al of the Meridian publisher’s Romanian Painting in 1111 pictures whose German version I was lucky enough to find this week (for 5 euros!). And, at the moment, I can find no site with which to illustrate his work - but one example is at the side here.

Aurel Popp was born in Satu Mare in 1879 and was (not unlike many painters of the time) a passionate Socialist - which landed him in deep trouble with the Hungarian authorities of the time. Not least because, in 1918, he was elected to the Budapest Soviet. For that heinous offence he was imprisoned, escaped and was hounded in post-war Transylvania. Last week I was delighted to pick up a copy of the 1968 Meridian series (German version) on his work.
And it is one of his paintings which tops this post

Romanian secrets

For several years I have been very puzzled by the apparent banality of Romanian paintings - at least those available in private galleries and most museums in Bucharest. This year I have discovered the secret – the real glories have all been hiding somewhere else. 

I got a hint of this a few weeks back when I first ventured into the newly-opened Museum of Art Collections (housing what were - until the Communists got to them - more than 20 private collections); then when I came across a massive volume which brazenly showed off one modern collector’s prizes.

On Friday after the visit to the Aman Museum, we also happened to wander by accident into a small gallery across from the Athenium (Rotenburg and Uzunov) open only 6 months apparently – which displays Romanian aesthetic gems of the early part of the last century. This painting by Marius Bunescu (1881-1971) is one of their current exhibits

And today I really struck gold when I came across a mysterious site which gives about 70 key Romanian painters and many of their paintings. Its My heart to your heart and is the best site on Romanian painting I have so far come across - although the artindex site has been very useful to me as I have slowly accumulated what is now a very fat file of 350 pages on the Romanian painters who appeal to me.

And, to complete a full August, have a look at these etchings/paintings by Vladimir Kus which are on every page of a literary journal funded by the municipality of Iasi. Iasi is well known as Romania's intellectual capital - but it is quite something for a municipality to be editing such a 100 page cultural journal in these days!! It's been produced every 2 months since 2010 and the website gives us access to every copy - past copies have included great reproductions of Georg Grosz (black and white) and Rene Magritte (colour)
I take my hat off to the editors - pity I don't understand the contents but the quality of this production really deserves greater recognition.
By the way, the old shop which sells these (and about a hundred other literary journals) is an amazing sight - with tall bundles of the papers and journals piled high all around the hapless seller. Living proof of how intellectual Romania has been. You can find it on Bvd Dacia beside the House of Romanian Writers (with an exhibition of Nichita Stanescu's poetry) which itself has a nice garden pub at its back. This takes you into a charming area of old Bucharest houses

A new and hidden gem in Bucharest - the Theodor Aman Museum

For several years we have been leaving nasty notes on the gates of the small Aman museum in Rosetti street asking when the “renovations” would ever end and the public be admitted. 
And lo – ever so quietly – the gates seem to have creaked open 3 months ago! 
Only yesterday did we venture in – and what gems were waiting!

Theodor Aman (1831-1891) was the father of Romanian painting - whose works blend Romanticism and Academicism, as well as bearing characteristics of early/Pre-Impressionism. He took drawing lessons in Craiova and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris from 1850 under the supervision of Michel Martin Drolling and François Edouard Picot. 

He returned to Romania in 1857, already established as a painter. His workshop was one of the most popular meeting places of high society. 

He established the first Fine Arts School in Bucharest (1864), where he was both the first teacher and the director. 
The museum is in that original building whose original features - not least doors and windows but also carved desk and other items of furniture - have all been lovingly restored. 

Many of the paintings are so small, they are impossible to capture on my camera.

The themes used by Theodor Aman in his works - historical painting, Oriental scenes, scenery, still nature - are all distinctly represented in the exhibition. The techniques he employed range from easel painting to engraving and drawing. Moreover, his works range from large scale painting (particularly heroic representations of the past and historical portraits) to small scale works (contemporary or daily life projects).

Entry was free - so was use of the camera (very rare!) and the generous time which the guide gave us. A real find - to return to........

The origins of the First World War - the how rather than why

Coincidentally, the historian who has written the new, detailed study of the origins of the First World War which I mentioned yesterday (Christopher Clark) has just reviewed a couple of other books on the same subject. It starts the same way as the book itself (which kept me captivated for five full days).  Its appeal lies, for me, in showing how a few players seem to have tipped the balance in the declaration of war - particularly Poincare. In the opening pages we learn of the scale and significance of French loans to Serbia in the period preceding and during the 2 Balkan wars; and, later, how Poincare buttered up the Russians and helped push them to full and final mobilisation. 

The book suggests (rightly or not I can't say) that the Balkans itself has tended to be relegated in most serious accounts of the causes of the war and his book certainly puts it back in central place. It also has an interesting section emphasising that his account is more concerned with the "how" of events, rather than the "why"......      

The debate over the origins of the First World War is older than the war itself. Even before the first shots were fired, Europe’s statesmen constructed narratives depicting themselves as innocents and their opponents as predators and breachers of the peace. Since then, the debate has spawned a historical literature of unrivalled size, sophistication and moral intensity. In 1991, a survey by the American historian John Langdon counted 25,000 relevant books and articles in English alone.
The debate is still going strong today, for several reasons. First, the war unleashed the demons of political disorder, extremism and cruelty that disfigured the 20th century. It destroyed four multiethnic empires (the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman). It killed at least ten million young men and wounded at least twenty million more. It disorganised the international system in immensely destructive ways. Without this conflict it is difficult to imagine the October Revolution of 1917, the rise of Stalinism, the ascendancy of Italian Fascism, the Nazi seizure of power or the Holocaust. It was, as the historian Fritz Stern put it, ‘the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang’. It is hard to imagine a worse initial condition for the modern era of which we are the inheritors.
A second reason is the exceptionally intricate character of the crisis that brought war to Europe in 1914. The Cuban Missile Crisis was complex enough, yet it involved just two principal protagonists plus a range of proxies and subordinate players. By contrast, the story of how the First World War came about must make sense of the multilateral interactions among five autonomous players of equal importance – Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Russia and Britain – or six if we add Italy, plus various other strategically significant autonomous sovereign actors, such as the Ottoman Empire and the states of the Balkan peninsula, a region of high political tension and instability in the years before the outbreak of war.
To make matters worse, the executives of these states were anything but unified. There was uncertainty (and has been ever since among historians) about where exactly the power to shape policy was located within the respective governments. The chaos of competing voices is crucial to understanding the periodic agitations of the European system during the years leading up to the war. It also helps explain why the July Crisis of 1914 became the most opaque political crisis of modern times. There is virtually no viewpoint on its origins that can’t be supported by selecting among the available sources. Some accounts have focused on the culpability of one bad-apple state (Germany has been most popular, but none of the great powers has escaped the ascription of chief responsibility); others have shared the blame around or have looked for faults in ‘the system’. There has always been enough complexity to keep the argument going.
The debate is old, but the issues it raises are still fresh. One might even say that the political crisis of July 1914 seems less remote – less illegible – now than it did thirty or forty years ago……………. What must strike any 21st-century reader who follows the course of the crisis is its raw modernity. It began with a cavalcade of automobiles and a squad of suicide bombers: the young men who gathered in Sarajevo with bombs on 28 June 1914 had been told by their handlers to take their own lives after carrying out their mission, and received phials of potassium cyanide to do it with. Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organisation with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge: extra-territorial, secretive, scattered in cells across political borders, its links to any sovereign government were oblique.
Since the end of the Cold War, a system of global bipolar stability has given way to a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers – a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914.
It is less clear now that we should dismiss the assassination at Sarajevo as a mishap incapable of carrying real causal weight. The attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 is an example of the way in which a single symbolic event – however deeply it may be enmeshed in larger historical processes – can change politics irrevocably, rendering old options obsolete and endowing new ones with an unforeseen urgency. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s reminded us of the potentially lethal nature of Balkan nationalism. These shifts in perspective prompt us to rethink the story of how war came to Europe in 1914. This doesn’t mean embracing a vulgar presentism that remakes the past to meet the needs of the present. Rather, it means acknowledging those features of the past where our changed vantage point can afford us a clearer view.
The impact of these changes can be discerned in recent writing on the origins of the war. There has been a globalisation of the field of vision. The prewar polarisation of Europe into opposed alliance blocs now looks less like a purely continental European story and more like the European consequence of world-historical realignments driven by conflicts along a range of imperial peripheries in China, Africa and Central Asia. Rather than searching for the antecedents of the actual war that broke out in 1914, recent studies have tended to stress the open-endedness of international relations in a world in which nearly all the key players had more than one potential enemy. The European alliances, it has been argued, didn’t necessarily make war more likely: they could have the opposite effect if one ally refused to back the adventurism of another, as happened on several occasions in the decade before the war. Anglo-German naval rivalry may not have predestined an armed conflict between Britain and Germany: a number of recent monographs have shown how decisively Britain saw off the German naval challenge and have questioned how much impact the matter had on British geopolitical thinking. Periods of détente before 1914 were not deceptive moments of respite from mutual hostility but represented a genuine potentiality of the international system. On the eve of the July Crisis, as a recent article by T.G. Otte has shown, the British Foreign Office was on the verge of dropping the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 and seeking a rapprochement with Germany. Far from being inevitable, in other words, this war may actually have been improbable. On this reading, it was not the consequence of long-run historical ‘forces’, but of short-term realignments and shocks to the international system.

The Financial Times has another excellent review of some books on the causes of the First World War - as does the excellent Dublin Review of Books

The painting is a Popescu - but a Constantin Isache (1888-1967) not Stefan (1872-1948)

Balkan journeys

Despite the name of this blog, I’m actually on the periphery of the Balkans and do not even begin to try to understand its history. I’ve travelled (very briefly) in Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia; spent several years in Bulgaria and have known Romania for 20 odd years but have read few books about the countries in the Region. Lucian Boia is the only serious history historian of the last country with a book currently available (Romania – Borderland of Europe 2001 (although I noticed that the Frost English bookshop has a couple of slim histories in English); if you look really hard you may unearth in Sofia a copy of Richard Crampton’s A Short History of Modern Bulgaria (1987).

Otherwise I’ve read only Mark Mazower’s very brief The Balkans; and Dervla Murphy’s typically punchy description of her cycles through the disintegrating Yugoslavia of the early 1990s Through the Embers of Chaos – Balkan journeys.

However, Christopher Clark’s recent The sleepwalkers – how Europe went to war in 1914 is the first book which really helps me make sense of the region. It is a stunning and gripping read which has also altered my understanding of the respective roles of France, Germany, Russia and England in letting loose  murderous and senseless violence on the peoples of Europe -  

We are introduced to a shadowy world of fanatical terrorist cells engaged in plots that range across state borders, funded and armed by secret organizations that are connected, with carefully constructed plausible deniability, to official government ministries. The fanatics in this case are Serbian nationalists rather than Islamic fundamentalists (though it should be said that Serbian nationalism has long had strong religious overtones), but their outlook and methodology seem startlingly modern. So too are the polarizing pressures and media attention their activities generate, especially in terms of a positive feedback loop in which even presumably moderate figures feel compelled to emphasize their militancy for fear of appearing weak. When, after a series of botched attempts, one youthful member of an organization known as the Black Hand finally succeeds in murdering the heir apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it triggers a war in which many of the participants have only a peripheral relationship to its proximate cause. Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly don't seem so far away from the Balkans.

The second part of The Sleepwalkers is a traditional diplomatic history reminiscent of A.J.P. Taylor's classic 1954 study The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1914. Clark reconstructs the realignment of European great-power politics in the four decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The hallmark of his approach is pluralism: he demonstrates that for every national player in this drama, decision-making power was decentralized. In parliamentary societies, there were considerations of party politics, as well as the relationships between the military, the diplomatic corps, and a nation's political leadership. But even in presumably autocratic societies like Russia, policymaking was hardly straightforward; figures like Tsar Nicholas II or Kaiser Wilhelm were often managed by their ministers rather than leading their countries, and public opinion could influence strategic considerations no less than it did in France or England.

The final segment of The Sleepwalkers returns to Sarajevo in 1914, opening with a depiction of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that spools with cinematic clarity. Clark then proceeds to chart the sequence of decisions -- more like miscalculations -- that culminated in catastrophe. In light of his preceding analysis, it's clear that he rejects the notion of an overriding cause or a principal villain. As he explains in his conclusion, "The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over the corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol." And yet the weight of his own analysis makes clear that Clark blames some figures more than others. Serbian nationalists were not only irresponsible in the intensity of their fervour, but in their insistence on the legitimacy of territorial claims flatly denied the realities of history and the presence of non-Serbs in places like Albania and Bosnia. (Serbian conquests in the Balkans in 1912-13 were followed by atrocities strongly reminiscent of ethnic cleansing.)

Russia's support of the Serbs was part of a larger pan-Slavic strategy that had less to do with mystic chords of memory than trying to realize a long-term goal of succeeding Ottoman Turkey as the master of the Straits of Bosphorus, one that led the Russians to take dangerous risks. And French desperation for a strong partner to counter Germany virtually goaded the Russians to take those risks.

Conversely, Clark rejects the view that Austria-Hungary was an empty husk of an empire lurching toward collapse -- indeed, Franz Ferdinand had a plausible scenario for a reformed and federalized polity that reduced the disproportionate influence of Hungary and gave more representation for Slavs, including Serbians (one reason why radicals wishing to see the empire break up were so intent on killing him). Vienna's demands in the aftermath of the assassination were not unrealistic, though its delay in issuing them -- here again the baleful influence of internal divisions, one of which were foot-dragging Hungarians -- led rivals to mobilize their opposition. Germany is often portrayed as ratcheting up the pressure by giving the Austrians the notorious "blank check," but Clark depicts Berlin as believing the crisis could be resolved locally long after everyone else had concluded otherwise. British Conservatives welcomed war as a means of preventing Irish Home Rule, since fighting Germany would deprive Liberals of the military tools to implement a policy that had vocal, and possibly violent, opponents

Those wanting a brief overview of the origins of the war can do worse than the Authentic History reference. And the masochists who want to explore the representation of the Balkans in various writings can attempt these two academic pieces Imagining the Balkans and Balkanism in political context

update; here's a long and critical Serbian review of the book - http://www.balcanica.rs/balcanica/uploaded/balcanica/balcanica_44/18%204%20M%20Vojinovic%20The%20Slipwalkers.pdf

Be very afraid!

I’m pleased that my readers have chosen, without any encouragement from me, to elevate a 2 year old post about the financial crisis to top of today’s pops. Perhaps you had, telepathically picked up my study last week of FT journalist Gillian Tett’s 2009 book Fool’s Gold about how the toxic new financial instruments were invented in the 1990s and how they subverted our social systems. One of the LRB reviewers summarises her book very well here (apologies if this is behind a firewall)

One of my favourite (rather manic) bloggers has a typically caustic description of this period - and then moves to some prescriptions -

The new movements we need now (and I’m increasingly drifting away from anything ‘political’) should be underpinned by these five very simple ideas:
1. Small, creative and vulnerable must triumph against big, monied and powerful
2. The co-operative side of our species nature must be given a larger role in the shape of mutuality
3. The centralised, bureaucratic State must have its influence reduced in favour of communitarian entrepreneurial ideas
4. Globalist mercantilism must be abandoned in favour of self-sufficiency and limited trade
5. Education must teach more civics, offer more personal challenge, and give an equal role to socio-cultural subjects

Despite the rhetoric of the past 5 years, the excesses of the banking class continue – indeed intensify. And point to a new phase of collapse - with eurocrats leading the way in setting the scene for wholesale robbery of what’s left of middle-class people like me. Shades of Weimar! Who said history never repeats itself??

Theft of a nation

As I was writing yesterday’s post, I realised how little I knew about how the restitution of Romanian property (seized by the communists a half-century ago) had actually been attempted in recent years.
It seems I am not alone! The assessments seem to be subjective, confused and out-of-date. I was particularly disappointed by the 2008 study Property Restitution - What went wrong in Romania? by the Romanian Academic Society which promised to tell all but from which I emerged little the wiser - but at least knowing that the Romanian process was indeed distinctive (in central Europe) in its laggardly and utter confusing approach

A very short article in a recent issue of Journal of Property Rights in Transition updates a substantial and enlightening 2006 academic article on the subject entitled The Roof over Our Heads: Property Restitution in Romania; by Lavinia Stan - in The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Vol.22, No.2, June 2006, pp.180–205 (which can be accessed and downloaded from www.academia.edu

Until 2005 successive Romanian governments blocked attempts by owners to recover their dwellings, siding with the tenants who were using the dwellings (well connected political, business, and cultural luminaries) against the owners (elderly persons or residents of foreign countries). Only 5 percent of all owners received their homes back. In 2005, a Property Fund (Fondul Proprietatea) started to compensate owners whose properties could not be returned because they had been demolished, bought by the tenants living in them, or (abusively) retained by the government offices (mayoralties and ministry departments) using them. The Property Fund relied on shares in large state-owned companies.

Because it was constituted over 15 years after the privatization process was launched, during which most such companies had been transferred into private hands, the Fund controlled few assets effectively. As such, many owners continued to receive neither property, nor compensation. Executive interference in the activity of the judiciary meant that many courts disregarded procedure and infringed both the Romanian Constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights when hearing restitution cases, thus prompting an increasing number of owners to approach the ECHR. This is why in 2010 the Court asked the government to revamp its property restitution scheme.

From October 2010 to April 2013 Romania did nothing to comply with the ECHR request. The vested interests of powerful political elite members in retaining ownership of the nationalized dwellings by disregarding the rights of the owners explain why the authorities did not consult with the owners, although consultations were recommended by the Court and would have involved little effort.

Political instability was also at play. There were no fewer than four cabinets during that time period (headed by Prime Ministers Emil Boc, Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, and Vasile Ponta), the first three of which were weak cabinets delegitimized by scandals, frequent replacements of ministers, and an unclear policy direction. Instead of solving the restitution cases, by providing the Property Fund with the means needed to compensate owners, punishing Fund leaders for mismanagement and waste, and protecting owners from undue pressure to renounce their property rights, these governments perpetuated an untenable system.

According to some reports, 1,000 intermediaries well connected to the Fund cashed in 1.5 billion Euros for property claims they brought from disillusioned initial owners, who simply gave up the fight. These intermediaries received compensation at higher rates and faster than thousands of owners whose claims the Fund refused to consider promptly and honestly.

All of this serves to prove just how right Tom Gallagher got it with the subtitle for his 2005 book Romania – theft of a nation. And his 2006 article for Open Democracy is perhaps as pithy a summary as you will get anywhere of this kleptomania and how it has been sustained.

And I see that this book by Lavinia Stan has just been published Transitional Justice in post-communist Romania – the politics of memory

Romanian "elites" shameless in theft

The restitution of property nationalised by the Romanian communist regime has been a long saga – with only 10,000 homes apparently restored and 200,000 cases outstanding at April 2013. Many glorious fin de siècle buildings have crumbled to dust under the combination of neglect, uncertainty, squatting, anticipated costs of rehab and illegal demolitions. Curiously every Romanian city has a clutch of grand palaces waving the flags of political parties which seem to have escaped what has passed as the restitution process.
The aftermath of the sudden Romanian revolution of December 1989 allowed a variety of political parties to assert their rights to an amazing array of places in all the major cities of Romania. God knows what goes on there – the windows are open in the summer but there is absolutely no sign of activity. The properties are worth billions…giving the parties (let alone the individuals who control them at various points of time) access to limitless bank credit. For more on this saga see this May 2013 piece from the Property Rights in Transition Journal

And what about the art collections which I referred to in a recent post? That post mentioned ever so casually that I had come across a very heavy and fascinating 380 page volume (from 2005) which itemises 500 or so paintings in an incredible collection of 60 year-old business-man Tiberiu Postelnica.
In my innocence I wanted to contact him, congratulate him on his taste and, who knows, perhaps even have a viewing. Curiously, however, even the Romanian version of google unearths very few references to either the man or his collection.
But I do discover that he is apparently the nephew of Ceaucescu's last Minister of the Interior and Head of the Securitate, Tudor Postelnica – and worth at least 10 million euros. You can imagine the process by which he came to accumulate the collection he now has and so shamelessly boasts about in this 380 page volume!!!

Gandul newspaper reported 2 years ago how 120 works of classic Romanian art were purchased from the Romanian Union of Artists under strange circumstances for 280,000 euros by an anonymous buyer who was almost certainly Postelnica

"There were two works of Baba, small, two Patrascus, two Palladys, a Lucian Grigorescu, a small Tonitza, two works by Ciucurencu a larger; some Catargi paintings on cardboard; and quite a few drawings by Ressu, "said the President of the Union of Artists. He also explained that he preferred direct selling because it was the quickest way to get money: "It was a public sale but not a public auction. Had I made ​​a public auction, then the Ministry of Culture would have had the first right of refusal. Under these circumstances, I had to do a letter to wait three months for them to come and classify the assets if works or part of the Treasury, and other months in which I address or MCC museum, to ask them if they want to buy these papers etc. they probably would have responded and only then was allowed to come to auction. After these six months, I should have apply to an auction house for the Union circulated, to auction only work of its members, those in life. We have no right to do auction with works of deceased artists. would be delayed so that a half-year auction 

I had started today wanting to blog about my great find – Romanian painter Constantin Artachino who was born on 7 November 1870 of a Turkish family living at the Marmara Sea which came to Bucharest in 1877. His colours are glorious and several of the paintings redolent of some of my Bulgarian painters such as Dobre Dobrev. The example which heads the post - from the Danube - is typical. 

Good bookshops can (and do) beat Amazon - Let the word go out

I feel totally vindicated in my Amazon boycott. The prices I am getting are more than 10% better than Amazon’s deliveries to my Romanian base.

And the relationship I have developed with the very knowledgeable bookshop owner is priceless.

My next step is probably to buy good first editions from online second-hand bookshops – although too many of them seem to have an exclusive tie-in with Amazon which charges about 10 euros for delivering an 8 euros book.
Come on independent bookshops, you can do better than this!!

The cartoon is one of several which Ethical Consumer is now using in their very welcome campaign to boycott Amazon - which also includes this guide on alternatives to the giant.

Zeitgeist

I am trying to identify writers who give us a sense of life at a particular place and time… a zeitgeist. And to understand what exact skills that requires. Marcus Aurelius and Montaigne perhaps abstract too much from their context to qualify; Pepys and Boswell, as diarists, focus perhaps just a bit too narrowly on the London quotidian. Marcel Proust is simply too incestuous.

I am left with names such as George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Vasily Grossman and Hans Fallada but also people such as Richard Cobb, Tony Judt, Timothy Garton Ash and Geert Mak. 

What do they have in common (apart from all being male!)? Orwell, Grossman and Mak were/are journalists; Koestler and Fallada writers; Cobb, Judt and Garton Ash academics. 

The terms, of course, are arbitrary – indeed my distinctions seem to imply that journalists and academics do not also write! In using these terms, I was simply referring to the main source of income. 

Half of those on the list wrote novels – some (Orwell and Fallada) famously so but that is not quite how we remember them. The sort of writing I am talking about seems to exclude the “suspension of disbelief” required by novelists…..Clearly many good European novels do give a sense of “zeitgeist” (Voltaire’s Candide; Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Zola; Thomas Mann) - but, compared with the writers on my list, they seem to lack a certain “voice”.  

Initially I thought I had identified three features of these writers – range of experience; breadth of insight; and literary capacity. The first group of names all had the harrowing experiences of war; the last group the privileges of access to academic sources about 20^th century European savagery and, in Garton Ash’s case, more direct sources about post-war European change and conflicts. Some writers not on my list (such as Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dervla Murphy and Jan Morris) of course give a terrific sense of place and time - Naples; central Europe in the 1930s and 90s. And Diane Athill is one of several European women I wrote about recently whose diaries give an excellent sense of zeitgeist (Simone de Beauvoir is perhaps the supreme example). Diaries and travelogues, however, always run the risk of self-centredness. In that sense I have a preference for the more detailed analysis which Clive James gives in Cultural Amnesia.

At what point do individual memories become part of social – if not political - history? 
The painting is Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain II (1940-42)

Some great blogs

One of the things I look for in analytical writing is generous crediting of the ideas of others. It gives me more confidence in the writer and the article/book when I see such attributions. And I’m not talking of copious footnotes or these silly, academic referencing to entire books. Rather a sense that the writer is familiar with a body of literature and points us to that which (s)he finds most pertinent. Of course I realise that those who write and produce books need to pretend to originality but, for me, this comes as much from style, voice and clarity as from forced insights. One of the things which this blog tries to do is to identify and disseminate quality writing wherever I find it.

Few of us may need daily insights about political life in Hungary – but, if you want a sense of what is going on in contemporary Central Europe then the occasional dip into the Hungarian Spectrum blog is an absolute must. I know of no other blog in the English language (about any country) which paints such large and detailed canvasses.

And A Patriot’s Guide to Romania offers, every week or so, architectural and historical gems of…… Romania. A year ago I offered a guide to blogs about Romania in the English language.

And here’s the latest in the strangely-neglected story about how the Eurocrats are moving to steal our savings from us all.
The painting is by Hans Holbein