Ruxandra Cesereanu
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
RuxCes@yahoo.com
Representations of the Gulag in the Romanian Detention Memoirs
Abstract: The present study is an introduction to the Romanian detention memoirs (a body of works that totals over 100 published volumes published during the next 15 years ensuing the demise of the communist regime in Romania). This essay seeks to contribute a minimal and useful classification of the attempts at testamentary records coming out since 1990. It is premised on the assumption that, if the western reader is well acquainted with this type of literature, the Eastern European reader in general and the Romanian reader in particular, had to catch up with an ethical-moral delay that can be explained politically. The thrust of my argument here is that post-1989, after the fall of communism, readers in Romania experienced an abrupt turn from the hypocritical literature to the literature of infernal truth.
Keywords: Romania; Communism; Gulag; detention memoirs; memory; testimony.
The vast majority of the Romanian detention memoirs on the autochthonous Gulag (and sometimes on the Soviet one as well) would like to be, partially or totally, anatomies of power and of totalitarianism. Some of them are written in a reporting style, whereas others, most of them, are written in the form of a confession, a revealing record of the how-I-suffered-back-then. Some of the authors call for understanding toward the ‘clumsy wording’, anticipating whatever possible remark on the plus or minus value of literariness the reader might have, claiming their writing is not literature, but true testimonies. If the western reader is acquainted with this type of literature, the Romanian reader in particular, and the Eastern European one in general, had to catch up with an ethical-moral delay that can be explained politically. Since 1990 (after the fall of communism) s/he switched directly from the hypocritical literature to the literature of infernal truth, and then to the monotony of terror, to getting used to the horror of the Gulag[1]. Something is certain: the memoirs on the communist detention have the same importance as the writings on the Holocaust: they represent the inferno that testifies, as André Glucksmann puts it. Referring to the survivors of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt notes that they write with a resigned doubt, as if they themselves could not believe anymore in the horrific story they tell, as if they expected the others not to believe it either. Is this exaggerated prudery or something that has to do with the victim’s mentality; a victim that finds him/herself humbled and diminished even while having survived the horror, constantly haunted by the ghost of an omniscient and omnipotent, torturer looming in the shadow? When it comes to the Romanian memories on the Gulag this question is seldom asked. However, the Romanian witnesses display, sometimes, two of the three forms of shame distinguished by Tzvetan Todorov. Along with the shame to have survived, the survivors from Piteşti (where programmatic torture was inflicted between 1949-1952 especially on the student inmates, forced, many of them, to become in their turn, torturers!), often feel the shame of the memory of having been tortured and having become torturers and the shame of being human beings.
Some of the detention memoirs were confiscated by the repression body, and thus, the authors had to start anew a second version of the ‘hostile’ manuscript. N. Steinhardt’s Jurnalul Fericirii (The Journal of Happiness) is a third version, revised, completed and corrected by the author based on the first two versions (the first version was confiscated by the authorities but, in the end, it was returned to its author). Similarly, Belu Zilber’s Monarhia de drept dialectic (The Monarchy of Dialectical Right), published in 1991, after the fall of communism, under the pseudonym Andrei Şerbulescu, was confiscated by the Securitate and then re-written unequally in a second version. In the ensuing years, the Humanitas Publishing House, which had published The Monarchy of Dialectical Right, recuperated the first version and printed it under the title Actor in Pătrăşcanu’s Trial, this time with the real name of the author on it, Herbert (Belu) Zilber’s name. It would be an interesting research topic, and not only for the literary historian, to see to what extent do the versions differ, not only in nuances and details, but also as a whole and in the writing style.
But for a few exceptions, the majority of this type of memories are written after the detention period. One such exception is the prison camp diary kept by Onisifor Ghibu and drawn up in jail. His diary owes its unique status to the fact that in 1945, at the time Onisifor Ghibu was serving time in the prison camp of Caracal, the Romanian Gulag was not properly conceived and organized. Thus, Onisifor Ghibu’s experience was more one of pre-Gulag confinement rather than of a Gulag proper. Another exception is the Greek-Catholic bishop Iuliu Hossu who succeeds in writing his memoirs while in a monastery arrest (paradoxically though, because in the period in which the bishop writes his memoirs, repression was at its peak in communist Romania). There are some cases when diaries on deportation were kept while in confinement.
Some testimonies on detention are disguised, but the concealment acts as a see-through mask. Theoretician Adrian Marino (who had a declared interest in detention memoirs, he himself having authored prison memoirs yet to see the light of print) distinguishes two essentials manners to approach detention as a literary topic: ‘through literaturization, stylization, the entire set of typical literary procedures, and through direct, documentary testimony, as objective as possible’[2]. The two approaches, however, (the latter in particular), do not represent standardized formulas that can be easily labeled, which is why, Marino goes on o identify a possible hybrid formula that ‘even this cold account changes and, in the end, and that can be recuperated as “literature”, that is, as another story.’[3] The same commentator will warn against three misleading aspects that are likely to alter the memories of communist detention, be these disguised or not: the author pretending to be a hero, emphatic embellishing and amateurish ‘literaturization’.[4] Marino carries out his enquiry by focusing attention on the ‘congenital defects’ of the detention testimonies. The commentator thus reproaches ‘the extremely annoying tendency of ostentatiously representing oneself at best advantage, of transforming oneself into a hero, of excessive moralization, aggressive resentments, conventional literaturization, and abundance of stereotypes’, as well as, the creation of the detention ‘mystique’[5].
Al. Mihalcea is apprehensive of the risk of embellishing the image of the Romanian political detainee, considering that an icon of the latter would equate the false image of the proletcultist hero. In my opinion, Mihalcea’s anxiety is purely iconoclastic. The intention of a witness like Ion Cârja is that his testimony should be an inspiration source for artists who could expressively immortalize the Romanian Gulag. In other words, Ion Cârja himself, even as a primary witness, considers his deposition more like a preparatory writing rather than an exemplary text. This self-depreciation pertains to the excessive modesty of a non-writer. An eye-witness like Paul Goma (in Gherla) will talk about the true-truth in this type of memoirs, and his intervention answers directly and a priori Marino’s apprehension, since Goma claims that, even if subjective, the memories of the detention period do not impair the accuracy of the narrated events. In other words, they are subjective, but honest, although only versions of the truth. On the other hand, Goma, in one of the characters of the novel Ostinato, envisions the construction of a certain brand of heroism of the political detention: “with them, with the political detainees, detention was… how should I put it? I’d dare say: fake – only there did the honest citizen X find out that he was a hero; until he got there, he, the poor guy, had no idea who he was: once he got there, he started making up, gradually, not only an appearance, but especially, the psychology of a hero (a political hero, obviously); as far as I know, there, those who had really handled guns, explosive, or…whatever, (as one would say “men of action”) were looked down upon, disdainfully, considered intruders by the “non-aggressive ones”: former dignitaries, “governists”, “agitators”; even the students who dropped like flies, not because they “had committed” something, but because it had been assumed that they, the students, might have had in mind to “commit”, even they believed themselves “above” these; from this point of view, Marian [another character, a former political detainee, that Ilarie Langa – the main character in Ostinato – refers to (my note)] is enviable: he had the chance to pass by that place where you’re up to your neck in ‘heroism’, where there were put, not those who represented a real danger for society, but common people, who only there, and from that moment, learnt to represent a risk for the society.’ I gave this ample quotation from Paul Goma, because I think that I should approach this topic without any taboos. If I rightly resort to the delicacy of some former detainees who do not want to have their heroism idealized, by no means will I resort to the discourse devoid of honesty of the former members of the repression body, since they deny any form of heroism and of suffering for those who got to know the Gulag.
There are also memories of detention that looks like novels, such as Marcel Petrişor’s memoirs or Costin Merişca’s Tărâmul Gheenei (The Land of Gehenna), and others. In the first case, Marcel Petrişor uses the third person narrative and changes cautiously, the names of the detainees who are still alive, keeping the real names only for the dead people. Costin Merişca also uses the third person narrative, changing only the name of the hero, who is himself.
From a stylistic, emotional and structural point of view, the memoirs on the Gulag make up a Tower of Babel. Gherla by Paul Goma is disguised in a pseudo dialogue that includes negative-Proustian fragments on detention. The specificity of Goma’s text also lies in his uneasy, radical style, specific to an author with the vocation of a pamphleteer, whose article of faith is live writing that captures suffering as lived, without resort to any form of embellishment.. Some memories of detention are written in a melodramatic style and convey the impression of fake, in the lack of interior pulse and through demagogy on detention (anti-concentration wooden language), others are passionate being marked by ‘the iron circle of hate’. Nicolae Mărgineanu’s case (in Amfiteatre şi închisori (Amphitheaters and Prisons)) is a very interesting one. His testimonies are explicitly selected, the author avoiding to transcribe the atrocities specific to his detention, out of patriotic embarrassment.
Similarly, Nicolae Mărgineanu draws the distinction between a personality’s memoirs and the humble and grey people’s testimonies. The author includes his writings, modestly, in the category of testimonies. A similar classification is advanced by Gabriel Bălănescu, who prefers the formula of abbreviated chronicles to the genre of memoirs (because he does not consider himself an exotic personality) or of memories (because these can only be sublime) Constantin Cesianu, a meticulous analyst of the Canal, also insists on the idea of testimony and experience, trying his hand at a theoretical delimitation. The author programmatically avoids all aestheticization, favoring a life-like approach: ‘it isn’t about a novel in here or about a literary essay. It’s about a testimony. I’m not looking for the sensational or for the entertaining. My rendering can often seem dull. It doesn’t matter. It tells the truth.’ The author specifies that his approach is selective and specialized in brief prison monographs, which run the risk of dry descriptions, but pertain to the truth. Ioan Victor Pica also pleads for the idea of testimony versus that of improvised literature, undertaking to write a ‘book of fire’ on the resistance in the mountains: ’Others will certainly write history, I have a much easier role, namely that of saying what I saw, heard and felt.’ Pica urges catalytically all the virtual testifiers of the Romanian Gulag: ‘The biggest guilt is not to say the truth, when you know it!’ Sometimes, upon the Gulag memoirs writer ‘a certain timidity of testifying’ works on. This timidity either originates in the person’s character or in the fact that he does not want to seem vindictive and inquisitorial. He hungers for the appropriate criterion, seen as an essential component of the testimony.
This self-same sense of historical accuracy prompts Constantin C. Giurescu to use the scholarly term ‘testimony’ (Ro. ‘testimoniu’)[6], in order to render more exact the sense of evidence and objective document. The author considers that he describes his prison memories without any hate or bias, only in a historical purpose. The political detainees are history, since they belong to history. He cherishes all the memories that acquire the role of a testimony. Generally, the imprisonment on political grounds acts like a generating matrix, an inner protection screen or, as Al. Mihalcea calls it, the ‘background canvass of thoughts’. For Ion D. Sîrbu, it is, par excellence, the miniature metaphor of the world, both during and after the detention period.[7]
There are also depositions that are, from the point of view of the technique, very smartly realized. It is the case of Maxim Holban’s epistolary testimony (he got to know Siberia in its extreme form, i.e. Kolima) embedded in his son’s (i.e. Ion Holban) commentary (Tata în cămaşă de oţel (Father in the Steel Shirt), in the book edited by Serafim Saka), or Doina Jela’s bildungsreportage on the Canal Dunăre – the Black Sea (Cazul Nichita Dumitru (Nichita Dumitru Case)) that uses various documentary sources to form a collage of unmasking meetings minutes, denouncements, fragments of diaries of the age, letters of the victims’ relatives, short interviews with the survivors from both sides, the marginal etc.
Some texts, such as Jurnalul fericirii (The Journal of Happiness) by N. Steinhardt, Drumul crucii (The Way of the Cross) by Aurel State who considers his testimony an instance of climbing/ an assent of Mount Tabor, perceiving the act of writing as a sacred gesture, or Jurnalul unui figurant (The Journal of an Extra) by George Tomaziu are written in an elaborated, almost baroque style, whereas others are written at a stretch. This is Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla’s case, whose primitive and naïve picturesque echoes Henri Rousseau’s paintings[8], only transposed in a Siberian landscape. Similarly, Elizabeta Rizea’s story, although alluvial (hers is a spoken book), has inventiveness and spontaneity. The testifier perceives her deposition as an animal ‘growl’, with cathartic effect and psychological function. She distinguishes between this ‘growl’ and the human cry or outcry, because only animals ‘growl’, and not a decorative cry, can still awaken the indoctrinated souls and minds: ‘Cause I wanna growl, not cry, ‘cause I can’t bear it anymore’ and ‘I’d like to moo like a cow because of all I’ve been through’ (The Story of Elizabeta Rizea from Nucşoara). Furthermore, in the book’s preface, Gabriel Liiceanu insists on the confession-like structure of Elizabeta Rizea’s testimony (as a way of lightening the soul’s burden), the depositions being meant to shock. And this is achieved not through a detached testimony, but through an outcry. The reader’s role is, then, according to the preface’s author, that of a good listener, and not that of a critical eye. Similarly, the dialogue between Oana Orlea and Mariana Marin is also intense (Ia-ţi boarfele şi mişcă! (Get Your Wretched Affairs and Move!)), since in order to render the prison atmosphere, the former political detainee, Oana Orlea, uses a rude language, which also evokes the Gulag linguistically. Totally different from Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla’s or Elizabeta Rizea’s, are Lena Constante’s refined (albeit cruel) memories. (Lena Constante considers her testimony to be only humane.) Between these two ends of the spectrum, there is Adriana Georgescu’s brief reportage. This does not result in a ‘moderation’ of the testimony; rather, Adriana Georgescu considers the figures of speech only rhetorical flowers of the actual testimony; or else, pain is just pain, that’s all there is to it, no metaphors. Yet, sometimes detention life also has a picturesque side; there is even an air of university or literary circle, each detainee taking at some point the role of a Scheherazade with an epical appetite, or, more rarely, that of a Magister. Whether blended in with the terrible and the appalling or the eccentric and the entertaining, terror always overtakes the picturesque.
I have purposefully saved the discussion of Ion Ioanid’s Închisoarea noastră cea de toate zilele (Our Daily Prison), for the end, as it is a work of singular status. In absence of a collective work, or treatise on the Romanian Gulag similar to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Ion Ioanid’s memories fulfil the role of a panoramic viewing of Romanian prisons realized with real finesse. The structure of his memory resembles that of an archive where each prison represents a book of life written under the sign of narrative calm and under the inquisitive lens of a magnifying glass. The ‘areas’ of each punitive space and especially the cell’s microcosm are described. According to Alex Ştefănescu, it is a memory that ‘represents in itself a heroic form of opposition against the communist regime’. Our Daily Prison represents a ‘report addressed to a supreme authority (God or humankind history or conscience)’. According to the same commentator, Ioanid’s memoirs succeed in creating a sense of ‘nostalgia for prison’, since they instill the sensation that ‘everything we read represents our own memories’[9]. Such memories record in slow motion the minute gestures, as Monica Lovinescu remarks: ‘Another characteristic of Ioanid’s writing is that the time of writing is that of prison; the never-ending day of suffering. And in order to make it bearable, it has to be fragmented in gestures and occupations. In such a time, there is place for all the details, for the remains of everyday life that most of us sift out from the essential, the event.’[10]
Ioanid’s text, it is worth noting, does not have a bland, dry style; on the contrary, it is captivating through its touch of a saga-novel and nuanced conciseness. The author also suggests the drawing up of a list of all the names of anticommunist political detainees in Romania. There are some other similar Sisyphus-like attempts, none of which however equals Ioanid’s in narrative excellence and panoramic range. Ion Pantazi, for instance, likens his memories to a ‘screen’ on which a concentrated film of detention is played out, the prisons being portrayed as existential halting places. Pantazi, too, considers drawing up a synthesis of the prison regime (in the last part of his memoirs), making classifications according to types of detention, age, social classes, elaborating hierarchies of portraits and behaviors, but his text is vulnerable due to exaltation and lack of serenity.
Generally speaking, the literary critics rarely tried their hand at identying a typology of the memoirs and of the literary texts on detention due to their uncommon variety. Nicolae Baltă distinguished a detached vision (C. Noica), a sarcastic-angry vision (P. Goma), an infernal-desperate vision (T. Mihadaş), a profoundly Christian vision (N. Steinhardt) and an objective and neutral one (I. Ioanid and Max Bănuş)[11].
It is not the attachment to the past that prompts the process of remembrance of the Gulag testifiers, in their case the nostalgic component or ‘the poetry of memory’ is missing. The one who got to know the Gulag transcribes his descent into the Inferno out of moral justice and depositional duty and only afterwards, out of necessity of cathartic release. The memory and the word are the spiritual patrons of the testifier, the process of recollection being a form of tardy and only partially recuperating revenge. This revenge is not typical for the Gulag memoirs writers; it is somehow specific to the Romanian literature marked by ‘testamentary’ obsessions. The precursors of the memoirs on detention genre in Romanian literary history are Ioan Slavici and Tudor Arghezi. Închisorile mele[12] (My Prisons) makes Slavici a notable precursor of the detention memoirs, despite the hybridity of his style, blending as it does the diary form, the pamphlet, the political commentary, and the testimony. Although the book was received with skepticism on account of its polemical character, the contemporary researcher finds it essential at least for two reasons: due to the realist-moralist view, specific to Slavici, and for the Dantean setting created by the author (the prison in Vaţ is a rigid, severe bolgia, but it is still moral, wonderful, as opposed to the Gehenna in Văcăreşti, where Slavici, to paraphrase Dante’s initiation, has a guide, an adaptation of Virgil). Arghezi describes in Poarta neagră[13] (The Black Gate) the same prison in Văcăreşti, but his style is grotesque-lyric, portraying the indecent scenes with cynicism and irony, stimulated by the prison picturesque, no matter how dehumanizing, being a prose version of the expressionist Flori de mucigai (Flowers of Mildew).
Although the memoirs novel În preajma revoluţiei (Near the Revolution) refers to the tsarist prisons, C. Stere[14] cannot be overlooked in this brief overview. At an early stage, his character, Vanea Răutu, only gets to know ‘Eden-like’ prisons, without torture and hunger, and where the cells only occasionally become hell. But then, on the road to Siberia, the final deporting destination, the prisons become really nightmarish. Through their description, Stere’s character draws a map of the criminals’ promiscuous world. Next to the inmates, the hero has the feeling of cavern, ‘morass’, ‘slough’ and experiences ‘abysmal visions’.
Among the prison memoirs writers before the communist regime, two authors distinguish themselves as relevant to our survey here, Mircea Damian and Zaharia Stancu. In Celula nr. 13 (Cell no.13), Damian[15] investigates the prison taking into account such criteria as social and age layers. He thus draws an inventory of Văcăreşti as if the prison were a social-administrative body, trying to make a synthesis of the abjection of detention. Written in the form of brief accounts, his testimony is lifelike and aspires to a literary physiology, dividing the world antithetically, into masters (guardians) and inmates. In Rogojina, The Rag, Damian[16] transcribes the recollection of his second detention term. The perspective is now internalized, and the writer partially surrenders the outside view; the second detention term acquires gloomy overtones as the author is subjected to ruthless, more brutal ‘treatments’. Stancu[17] writes his confessions about a concentration camp under Ion Antonescu’s dictatorship, in short, reportage-like sentences. The atmosphere here is relaxed (despite some infernal scenes and the precarious conditions) and it bears the print of a kind of dolce far niente as in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle.
Slavici and Arghezi, Stere (through his character Vanea Răutu), Damian, and Stancu belong to an epoch characterised by a romanticised image of the prison or else, to a romantic phase of detention. This is however to be followed by a neo–realistic one. The prison romanticism grants the memoirs writers from before the communist invasion a certain aura. Modern testifiers of the prison camps inferno, such as Steinhardt, Ioanid or warrior Gavrilă-Ogoranu retain something of this aura. Nevertheless, the prison romanticism pertains to the outside view, whereas the inferno belongs to the grim inside view.
Translated into English by Claudia Novosivschei
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah, Originile totalitarismului, traducere de Ion Dur and Mircea Ivănescu, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 1994.
Bălănescu, Gabriel, Din împărăţia morţii, Timişoara, Editura Gordian, 1994.
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Cârja, Ion, Canalul morţii, Bucureşti, Editura Cartea Românească, 1993.
Cesianu, Constantin, Salvat din infern, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 1992.
Constante, Lena, Evadarea tăcută. 3000 de zile singură în închisorile din România, translated into Romanian by the author, Bucureşti, EdituraHumanitas, 1992.
Constante, Lena, Evadarea imposibilă. Penitenciarul politic de femei Miercurea Ciuc 1957-1961, Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 1993.
Gavrilă-Ogoranu, Ion, Brazii se frîng, dar nu se îndoiesc. Rezistenţa anticomunistă în Munţii Făgăraşului, Timişoara, Editura Marineasa, vol. I, 1993 vol. II, 1995, vol. III, 1999 (în colaborare cu Lucia Baki Nicoară); vol. IV, Editura Mesagerul de Făgăraş, 2004
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Gheorghiţă, Viorel, Et ego Sărata Piteşti-Gherla-Aiud. Scurtă istorie a devenirii mele, Timişoara, Editura Marineasa, 1994.
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Giurescu, Constantin, C., Cinci ani şi două luni în penitenciarul de la Sighet (7 mai 1950-5 iulie 1955), introduction by Dinu C. Giurescu, edited by, annexes and indexes by Lia Ioana Ciplea, Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 1994.
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Mărgineanu, Nicolae, Amfiteatre şi închisori, Cluj, Editura Dacia, 1991 (taken over in Nicolae Mărgineanu, Mărturii asupra unui veac zbuciumat, preface by Mircea Miclea, edited by Daniela Ţăranu-Mărgineanu, Bucureşti, Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 2002).
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Notes
[5] Adrian Marino, the series “Represiune şi confesiune”, in Revista 22, starting with no. 28, 1996.
[6] Translator’s note: The author (Ruxandra Cesereanu) has used so far the Romanian term ‘mărturie’. Both ‘mărturie’ and ‘testimoniu’ translate into Englih with ‘testimony’. The latter, as one can easily see, is a borrowed word, and is perceived as formal in Romanian, whereas ‘marturie’ belongs to the standard style.
[7] Ion. D. Sîrbu, Jurnalul unui jurnalist fără jurnal, 2nd edition, edited by Toma Velici and Elena Ungureanu, preface by Ovidiu Ghidirmic, postface by Marin Sorescu, Craiova, Scrisul Românesc, 1996; volume II, p. 178.
[8] Monica Lovinescu sees in this naïve style ‘a language not tarnished by knowledge, that existed before the tree of good and evil. In fact, the language of Paradise’ (Insula Şerpilor. Unde scurte 6, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 1996, p. 303).
[12] Ioan Slavici, Închisorile mele. Scrisori adresate unui prieten din altă lume, Bucureşti, Viaţa Românească, 1921.
[14] C. Stere, În preajma revoluţiei, I-II, editor Z. Ornea, preface by Z. Ornea, Bucureşti, Editura Cartea Românească, 1991.