liviu rebreanu: at the forefront of the modern romanian novel tradition
[My Introduction to Romanian writer Liviu Rebreanu’s 1927 novel Ciuleandra, translated by Gabi Reigh, and published by Cadmus Press, February 2021.]
Liviu Rebreanu (1885-1944) is one of the most important literary voices in Romania’s interwar period. Hailing from rural Transylvania, Rebreanu was a novelist and prose writer, a playwright and translator, an iconic figure in the world of letters and a member of the golden generation of modernist writers alongside Mihail Sadoveanu (1880-1961), Camil Petrescu (1894-1957), Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu (1876-1955), Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), Mateiu I. Caragiale (1885-1936), and Panait Istrati (1884-1935), a generation that shaped the evolution of Romanian literature well into the postwar period and beyond. Rebreanu’s early experimentation with various novelistic formats was crucial for the success of contemporary and subsequent writers alike and demonstrated the maturity of the modern Romanian language and national psyche to engage with the ample breadth of the architecture and style of the novel.
Liviu Rebreanu was born in the small Transylvanian village of Târlişua, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today in the county of Bistriţa Năsăud, in Romania. The eldest of fourteen siblings, Liviu was the son of Vasile (1863-1914), a rural elementary school teacher—and as such, a member of the village intelligentsia—and Ludovica (1865-1945), a talented amateur actress, well-known locally.
An ethnic Romanian, Rebreanu was educated in Hungarian and German, first in Transylvania, then in Hungary, and showed an excellent aptitude for the study of foreign languages and humanities. Although attracted by the study of medicine, he enrolled at the Ludoviceum Military Academy in Budapest in 1903. Upon graduation, he was dispatched as a young sublieutenant of the Austro-Hungarian military to Gyula, in Hungary. That is where he began to write seriously short stories and plays, all in Hungarian.
His debut in Romanian took place after his resignation from the military, in 1908, with the novella Codrea (Glasul inimii) (Codrea, The Voice of the Heart), published in the literary magazine Luceafărul from Sibiu. In 1909, by now an aspiring writer and well-known journalist, Rebreanu crossed the Carpathians into Romania and moved to Bucharest. At the request of the Austro-Hungarian authorities, however, he was arrested in 1910 and extradited back to Gyula where he served a short prison term on a charge of journalism activities contravening national interests. One of his major early novellas, Golanii (The Thugs, 1916) was completed in prison, as were a number of translations from the works of his good friend, Hungarian writer Szini Gyula (1876-1932), which would be published a few years later in Romanian literary magazines. Most of these writings are gathered in the prose volume Frământări (Anxieties, 1912), published by a small regional press.
The following years were full of troubles and financial concerns. Rebreanu tried various journalist positions and worked for theaters and literary magazines, always in pursuit of stable employment, always hoping for a breakthrough in the literary world. In 1912, he married Ştefana Rădulescu, an actress from the National Theater of Craiova in southern Romania, where he was working as the literary secretary. The couple moved to Bucharest that same year, and Rebreanu was finally accepted as a member of the Romanian Writers’ Society. While his wife found work immediately at the National Theater of Bucharest, Liviu was only able to become a reporter for the major daily, Adevărul, where he was retained only until Romania’s victory in the Second Balkan War of 1912-1913.
World War I brought more hardship to the Rebreanus. In December 1916, German troops occupied Bucharest, and the writer—as a former officer in the Austro-Hungarian army—found himself in danger of facing arrest again. He began to work frantically on his first novelistic masterpiece, the rural fresco novel, Ion (1920). He was arrested in 1918 but managed to escape and flee to the eastern province of Moldavia, where the Romanian government had found refuge and was organizing a counter-offensive against the occupation armies. Sadly, Rebreanu’s family had been hit with another personal tragedy the year before, when the writer’s younger brother, Emil, an officer himself in the Austro-Hungarian army and an ethnic Romanian, was accused of attempted desertion and espionage on behalf of the Romanians and executed. Emil’s fate and the tragedy of Romanian soldiers forced to fight a war against their own people found literary illustration in the 1922 novel Pădurea spânzuraţilor (The Forest of the Hanged).
With Ion and The Forest of the Hanged, Rebreanu entered a new stage in his creative maturity, his literary prowess now recognized at the national level. Moreover, the writer realized the need for a variety of narrative voices and experimentation with various writing methods. From 1920 to the end of his literary career, Rebreanu published nine novels, all different in theme and narrative approach. Ion and The Forest of the Hanged were followed by Adam şi Eva (Adam and Eve, 1925), Ciuleandra (Ciuleandra, 1927), Crăişorul (The Prince, 1929), Răscoala (The Uprising, 1932), Jar (Ambers, 1934), Gorila (The Gorilla, 1938), and Amândoi (Both, 1940).
These novels brought his name and artistry to the public’s attention, and some, such as The Forest of the Hanged, brought him national awards and medals. A public figure now, Rebreanu was appointed the Director of the National Theater of Bucharest, and served in governmental positions, such as manager of the People’s Education Secretariat in the Ministry of Education. Widely received and enjoyed by the readership of the time, Rebreanu’s novels were reviewed and discussed in literary and cultural magazines, with Ciuleandra—rendered in English in this volume—becoming the first book made into a movie with sound in Romanian, in 1930. Nominated by his fellow novelist, Mihail Sadoveanu, Rebreanu was elected in 1939 a member of the prestigious Romanian Academy.
Rebreanu had a final opportunity to represent Romanian culture worldwide through a series of lectures throughout Germany and the annexed Austria, Zagreb and Weimar in 1942, the last two trips on behalf of the Pan-European Culture Society. He then withdrew from public life, his health deteriorating. In April 1944, he left Bucharest for his countryside residence, never to return. His ravaged lungs gave out on September 1, 1944, in Valea Mare, in Argeş County, not far from where part of the plot in Ciuleandra unfolds and where he wrote his major 1932 work, The Uprising. Although initially buried there, his body was moved to Bucharest only a few months later and his remains interred in the Bellu Cemetery, where most major modern Romanian writers and artists rest.
Liviu Rebreanu’s literary work spans more than three decades and is usually associated with the Romanian literary inclination to focus on the life of the peasants, on the rural, and on the agrarian. No surprise there, of course, given the traditional occupations of the inhabitants of the lands north of the Danube River and nestled within the arch of the Carpathians. For millennia, Romanians, and the Dacians before them, have been farmers and shepherds. Raised in Transylvanian villages at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is no wonder that Rebreanu’s first inspiration and the strongest, most consistent thread of his literary work lies there, in the heart of a peasant geographical and human landscape. But, in the good spirit of the Narodnik literature of Russia’s second half of the nineteenth century, that same vein of literary inspiration that guided the works of Maksim Gorky and which in Romania materialized in the early-twentieth-century literary current of Sămănătorism (Sower-ism), Rebreanu was generally attracted by the people of the margins: the poor, the illiterate, the forgotten. They are famished and angry tenant farmers, members of the lumpenproletariat, violent suburban dwellers, village priests and dirty pub owners, lowly soldiers, all caught in the claws of modern life, subjugated by higher-ranking officers, tricked by those with more money and knowledge of life than themselves. As a result, they focus on almost grotesque amorous obsessions, are ready to jump into fistfights, beat their wives or mistresses, and even commit rape and otherwise let themselves be overwhelmed by raging violence.
When analyzing those early novellas and stories populated by characters very much aligned with and inspired by the rural world where the writer spent his childhood, literary critic G. Călinescu would rightfully note: “Focusing on servants, valets, petty thieves and petty bourgeois types, he (Rebreanu) focuses in fact on the obscure psychology of human beings dehumanized by poverty and longing, those who painstakingly save their meager income, and then burst out suddenly, disproportionately, in curses and fistfights.”1 These are indeed, as Călinescu added, the first of Rebreanu’s attempts at “psychological investigation” into the “dark, quasi-animalistic soul, one processing slowly and with much difficulty and exploding fiercely, with extraordinary violence.”2
Rebreanu’s later and more voluminous works, the nine novels, are usually classified into three different categories, based on their overarching themes. Four, Ion, The Prince, The Uprising, and The Gorilla, are focused on social issues; four, The Forest of the Hanged, Adam and Eve, Ciuleandra, and Ambers, on psychological trauma and the way individual characters deal with it, and one, Both, is a murder mystery.
Generally speaking, however, Rebreanu’s name and contribution to modern Romanian literature remains overwhelmingly associated with Ion and The Uprising as frescoes of the Romanian village at the beginning of the twentieth century, and with The Forest of the Hanged, as a psychological novel. The first, set in the village of Prislop, in Transylvania, is populated with several of the characters Rebreanu had developed previously in his short stories and novellas. The story focuses on the evolution of a peasant, Ion Pop al Glanetaşului, who will stop at nothing to gain the only fortune he can imagine, land. Cunning and relentless, he has been interpreted by Romanian literary critics either as the perfect parvenu, in the vein of Balzac’s nineteenth century series of Realist novels and novellas La comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), such as E. Lovinescu3, or as a “brute, for whom cunning replaces intelligence,” such as G. Călinescu4. More sympathetic critics of the postwar period, such as Al. Piru did feel the need to retort to this rather dismissive description of the character. In his 1965 work on Liviu Rebreanu, Al. Piru wrote: “Lovinescu’s characterization can lead to the wrong conclusion that Ion is nothing but a lifeless abstraction, the embodiment of a monomania, while that of Călinescu to the paradoxical conclusion that there can’t possibly be intelligent humans in the countryside.”5
Rather than following one individual and his obsessions (the ardent desire to possess, either land or, in the latter half of the novel, a woman), The Uprising tends to focus on the rural masses and was inspired by the 1907 violent tenant farmer uprising against poverty, famine, and misery at the hands of absentee landlords, a social movement ended in a bloodbath by the authorities of the time. The background is now eastern and southern Romanian villages, one that is less familiar to the writer. And, perhaps for that reason, he is best when it comes to describing masses. A psychological novel on its own, albeit one focused on the group, we find here one of the best exemplifications of what French psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) called “psychology of the masses.” The novel “marks the highest point in the development of the novelist” and it is where “the singularity of Rebreanu’s writings appears plainer within the context of world fiction of the thirties […].”6
Published in 1922, The Forest of the Hanged is a war novel inspired by the tragedy of Rebreanu’s own brother, sublieutenant Emil Rebreanu, who was executed in 1917 for trying to desert and join the Romanian army during World War I. In a world dominated by war, the main character, Apostol Bologa, a young Romanian officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, faces a moral dilemma when he is dispatched to the Romanian front where he must fight against fellow Romanians. Timid and predisposed to philosophical musings, Bologa struggles with the conflict between his duty as an officer and his belonging to the Romanian nation. The novel is equally interesting to critic Ion Bogdan Lefter “through the multiethnic subject matter.” Bologa’s situation is a “particular case of identity drama undergone then by Czech, German, Jewish and other soldiers alike.”7 An early premonitory scene in the novel depicts the execution of Czech officer Svoboda, in the same way the main character will be dispatched.
Most of Rebreanu’s work has been relatively well translated into a variety of languages, with some works, such as Ciuleandra, being translated immediately after publication in Romanian, a sign of the worldwide recognition the writer had come to enjoy. In addition to an early 1930s movie version of Ciuleandra, many other of Rebreanu’s novels were made into films: The Uprising and The Forest of the Hanged in 1965, Ion, with the title, Ion, Blestemul pământului, blestemul iubirii (Ion, The Curse of the Land, The Curse of Love), in 1979, a remake of Ciuleandra in 1985, and Adam and Eve in 1990, with the first two enjoying excellent public receptions.
The short novel Ciuleandra is singular within Rebreanu’s work as it delves deeper than anywhere else into the psyche of a character giving voice to his innermost thoughts and feelings. Set in the interwar period, the plot is centered on Puiu Faranga, a descendant of an old boyar (Romanian nobility) family. As such, he is the beneficiary of wealth, prestige, and the assurance of a safe and well-rewarded position within the political realm without needing to achieve much on his own. His father, Polycarp, already a prominent politician, is worried about the family genetics, which have been altered, he believes, by centuries of intermarriage. His decision to mitigate the danger he perceives in his only son ultimately leads to the tragic event that opens the story and Puiu’s light—a privilege due to his wealth and social status—incarceration in a mental asylum. Rebreanu’s intent with the novel was to capture the very essence of madness, by showing the thin line between normality and insanity, and how, in effect, any seemingly sane person can easily slide into insanity.
The pretext for this Dostoyevskian adventure is a crime, Puiu’s murder of his wife. In his own words, Rebreanu explained his intentions with Ciuleandra in his diary entry for August 8, 1927: “Ciuleandra is for me a work where I express and clarify a major mystery of the heart, in this case, the so-often invoked love that leads to murder. I tackled it simply, without complication, so it might not please all those who love complicated and twisted plots. But this is how I felt it […]. At any rate, what do I know? If it so happens that the book won’t find any success with the public, so be it. It will always be dear to me because I captured instincts in it.”8
While the psychological introspection exercise has its own positive aspects in Ciuleandra, where Rebreanu demonstrates his full literary genius is in the description of groups of people moving together, animated by unleashed energy, as if in full contact with the universe and capable of anything while acting as one. That is, in fact, the scene of the Ciuleandra dance, an ancient tradition from southern Romania, whose description represents a new height in Rebreanu’s artistic ability to depict mass movements. The Ciuleandra dance is reminiscent of circular pre-Christian sun-worshiping rituals present in all regions of Romania. Ciuleandra is a ritual rehearsal of the life cycle itself. The song starts very slowly, and the tempo increases gradually to end in a frenzy of life-affirming energy. As such, the dance is also a great opportunity for uninitiated youth to grasp the meaning of life, an occasion for young men and women to get together and let themselves become enraptured in an almost orgiastic pre-marital rite, and to prepare them for the fast pace of adult life.
Ciuleandra, the song and the dance, represent the perfect vehicle for the old Faranga boyar to find a commoner female partner for his son. Here is a brief fragment of Rebreanu’s description of the dance, in Gabi Reigh’s excellent translation into English:
The ring of dancers, daring themselves to defy and smother the music’s spell, charge at it, feet crushing into dirt, and the tornado of flesh twists into itself again, tighter, more stubborn, tightening and loosening, until, finally, the bodies melt into each other like a fallen harvest. There, fixed in that spot, for a few minutes, for an eternity, possessed by the same maniacal rhythm, the bodies of men and women knead into each other, quivering, thrumming. Once in a while the simmering passion is pierced by long shrieks, erupting as if from ancient depths, or by the startled cry of a girl whose breasts were clenched too tightly… And that’s how it would go on until each dancer’s soul melted into that all-encompassing flame of unbridled passion.
The ensuing tragedy however is more than anything a symbol of the inability of the noble class to adapt to the new reality that is taking over the world in the guise of modernity. Faranga’s attempt to ensure that his bloodline continues comes to an untimely end, and the attempt to maintain the status quo by inducting a peasant woman into the nobility fails miserably. There is no room in the Ciuleandra ritual and its world for those against whom the peasants symbolically direct the violence of their dance moves. Though they may try to invade it (as they do in the novel), the boyars will be quickly and unceremoniously expelled. The role played by the young doctor Ursu—whose very last name, meaning “bear”, is not only a marker of his peasant origin, but also carries totemic, apotropaic meanings—in Puiu Faranga’s ultimate slide into madness is not trifling. It is too late in history for robust peasant blood to save the nobility, which is forever stuck in feudal pretensions and fantasies of superiority. The Farangas, the old boyars, like the characters in another Romanian novel from the same period dealing with the decay of Romania’s old noble class, Mateiu I. Caragiale’s Craii de Curtea Veche (Rakes of the Old Court, 1929)9, are doomed in the face of modern society.
The social and political interpretation above for Ciuleandra is a new critical take on the novel. Other critics have said that the novel—locked as it normally was within the framework of a psychological introspection work—was lacking in various ways. Ion Simuţ wrote in his foreword to the 2014 edition: “The main flaw of the novel resides in the unbelievable rationality of adopting madness, although it could be said that the author takes that risk and embraces that paradox willingly.”10
In Ciuleandra, we probably see best what Mircea Zaciu once remarked about Rebreanu: “Rebreanu’s approach to life and art was the simple straightforward expression of truth which, while ‘rugged’ at times, is the most important thing.”11 Rebreanu was, for all intents and purposes, a modernist writer and a member of the European literary Realist movement in the tradition of Balzac, Flaubert and even Zola. But he was also aligned with the realities of early-twentieth-century Transylvanian emotions and with interwar Romanian society. Rebreanu was an impeccable portraitist who was at his best when it came to groups, and a fine observer of human nature. His main difficulties remained stylistic, evidence of the very incipient nature of the Romanian-language prose and novel construction of his time.
But, as Zaciu said, “Liviu Rebreanu ranks among the outstanding novelists of modern European realism that set forth the problems of the masses; and when he probes into the life of the individual (be that an intellectual, peasant, aristocrat, bourgeois or lumpen), he always does it from the standpoint of social destiny, integrated at times into a cosmic horizon. He thus stands as a forerunner of […] modernity…”12
The roads Liviu Rebreanu opened for Romanian modern prose-writing and novel architecture are still valid and relevant today, almost a century after the production of most of his work.
G. Călinescu (1982). Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent. Bucureşti: Minerva, 731.
Idem.
E. Lovinescu (1998). Istoria literaturii române contemporane. Chişinău: Litera, 219-220.
G. Călinescu (1982). Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent, 732.
Al. Piru (1965). Liviu Rebreanu. Bucureşti: Meridiane, XII.
Mircea Zaciu (1986). “Foreword” in Liviu Rebreanu, Adam and Eve. Translated from the Romanian by Mihail Bogdan. Bucharest: Minerva Publishing House, X.
Ion Bogdan Lefter (1999). A Guide to Romanian Literature: Novels, Experiment and The Postcommunist Book Industry. Piteşti: Paralela 45, 30.
Liviu Rebreanu (1968-1998). Opere, vol. 1-18. Bucureşti: Minerva, 17: 7. Vol. 17: Jurnal (1927-1944), critical edition by Niculae Gheran.
Mateiu I. Caragiale (2021). Rakes of the Old Court. Translated by Sean Cotter. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Ion Simuţ (2014). Foreword. In Liviu Rebreanu, Ciuleandra. Bucureşti: Cartex, VI.
Mircea Zaciu. Idem, VII.
Idem, XI.
(Text also available on Quotidian Wonders.)