Andi Mihalache

“A.D.Xenopol” Institute of History, Iaşi, Romania

andiadx@yahoo.com

 

 

Escaping from the Communist Public Life: Objects, Décors, Recollections

 

 

Abstract: The baroque and the rococo are no longer mere artistic trends, they have survived their epochs as timeless states of mind, etiquettes, and generally as cultural habits. Consequently, in communist Romania, the private rococo was a failed attempt at the re-personalization of the individual. Crushed by the gigantism of the public baroque, the human being tried to escape, reconstructing a private universe, easy to control, though, because it was an imitational one. One could see it in every house one entered, its presence reinforcing each time the certitude that it stayed in fashion. The bibelot became, in this context, a family member.

Keywords: Romania; Communist Regime; Evasion; Social Bovarism; Nostalgia; Self-narrative; Heritage.

 

 

Alternative biographies

 

Writing down some memories, it seems to us that their time does not leave us, and remain ready at hand, in the proximity of immediate history. Hence, the evoked events simply return to life and continue in reality. They bring the narrative back to the present and postpone its dénouement. Too many memories from communist times invade today the neighbouring epochs, unknowing when exactly an unpleasant fact had happened: under that regime or when did we apprehend its installation? The communists’ arrival to power interrupted continuities, relating most of the recollections, in a mandatory way, to the 1944-1948 period. However, some of the events occurred during the “democrat-popular” regime, and not because of it. The important thing yet is what interval of time the memories cover, the more crowded temporal segments – like the transition periods – usually being oversignified[1]. The memories and diaries written and printed before 1989 regard the interwar period as a remote time, a nobody’s time. The ones published after 1989 make us feel that there is a continuity of the self, undisturbed by communism. The difficulty of the approach results from the fact that the subjects recollect an unfinished yet history, the collapse of communism bringing no notable resolution. They do not judge their biography according to the year 1989, but according to everyone’s situation at the moment of the recollection[2].

Throughout our lives, we are surrounded by a multitude of objects that we choose to ignore. The routine of daily life renders them anonymous and we do not pay them any attention until we are separated from them or they are stolen from us[3]. That was the case of many of Victoria Dragu Dimitriu’s interlocutors, who changed their former home designs with things expropriated by the communists or sold by the necessitous owners. Only after communism collapsed, when they had the occasion to tell their story, did these persons decide to conjugate their past with the memory of those objects. The above-mentioned interviewees could not write their autobiography unless they mentioned the old paintings, statuettes, porcelains. Recollecting the objects they had owned, their face could return into the mirror. The classic, rustic or modern décor codified not only some stylistic differences, but also methods of administering the past. Their stability supported the self-recollections, the conservation of the self-perception and the resistance of the social self[4].

As the narration allowed for a discourse of self-avoidance and self-conciliation, divagation and talking about the other made the accounts attractive. Life histories recovered events lost in anonymity, the witness filling with his own words the vacant places in the collective memory. It is as if the characters in the paintings of a museum broke out of the frames to participate in the stories of the neighbouring paintings. Theoretically, these are narratives that do not contradict the reality, that do not challenge it. They lead us into a different reality, withdrawn from the social time of communism and immune to the rhetoric of the future.

The objects’ migration

 

Recollecting the beginning of his activity under the young communist regime, engineer Duiliu Constantin Zamfirescu wrote about the bourgeois aspect of a dwelling in Galaţi, where he lived in lodgings: “…a beautiful bedroom with well-polished Biedermaier furniture, with windows covered by long velvet curtains, down to the ground, adumbrating the room. A large wardrobe with a mirror on its door, a bureau covered with red leather, two imposing armchairs together with bed tables next to each bed were the furniture of our new home…”[5]. In his memoirs, published in 2005, Zamfirescu recollected that all those pieces of furniture that had impressed him at first view were then burnt[6], at a party activist’s disposal, in the name of the fight against the bourgeoisie: “’Don’t look at this awful old furniture,’ she would have said. ‘I have already ordered plastic furniture and metallic cupboards from the factory’ …”[7].

The enthusiastic representatives of the proletkult destroyed the decors, but stole the jewellery. Then, the flea markets demonstrated that the reminiscences of the bourgeois life were in actual demand and had a new public: under the communists, those goods changed their owners, but not their significance value. Old things fascinate because they create the illusion of ageless objects, untouched by history. Due to their imperturbable longevity, people take cognizance of the way in which duration affects them. With the specification that with each recollection, the same thing offers them different facet. Unfortunately, people are aware of the relation between the things around them and of the time of their biography only when the latter leave them. Deprived of these objects, they cannot find a present of their own any longer. They live in simultaneous durations, concomitantly navigating in rival temporalities. Their memories come from everywhere, the intervals in which they live come out indiscriminately from a clock without a minute hand. This is why they enjoy placing their lifetime self in the company of posthumous objects. The self seems more stable if they reiterate it periodically, starting from the reference points that have meanwhile disappeared: they thus find out what they can still count on. Tell me what you would want to steal, and I will tell you what you envy. Far from undoing material deprivation, communist theft has more to do with social bovarism than with egalitarian phantasms. Communists did not steal to do justice, to redistribute fortunes, but to attain, symbolically, at least, the injured party’s status.

The bourgeois porcelains contained much past time, or knew how to create this appearance. After 1948, their owners lost them, together with their present at the time, and were abolished forever. In her memoirs (2008), Adina Nanu recollects the Stalinist context in which she had married. For us, the interesting thing is that she reconstructs that present time which got out of control because of the objects that were leaving her: “I was acutely feeling the ‘passing-by moment’, a moment which, for moment, existed. […] I knew that it could not last any more, that the walls around were not ours any more. Every day, the ‘people’ took away something else: the big ceramic pot in the middle of the lawn, so that they could take it to the park, or the table and the chairs from the garden. […] We were living the end of a dream from which we knew we were going to wake up. Meantime, everything seemed real because we could still feel the furniture (the unsold one), the starched embroidered tablecloths, the Rosenthal plates with brambleberries and the silver forks and spoons […]. We were still in our world, in which the purpose of life was to enjoy what you were doing and to be nice to everybody else, not to fight tooth and nail and to tear everything you could from the others, in the name of the ‘class struggle’…”[8].

These were habits around which people constructed normality, a certain predictability of life, without pretending to defy thus the new regime. They rather evaded it, asking the objects around to conserve that “other time” they hoped to extend into a “democrat-popular” present. Writing to her sister-in-law, Pia Pillat Edwards, Nelli Filipescu talked, on 28 August 1961, about her daily life trying to skirt round the absence of the other, her husband, who was in the communist prisons: “Since morning, when I got up, I have been looking forward to writing to you. I have cleaned the rooms, I have arranged our old objects and bibelots and I have placed the last roses from our garden in the crystal jar. On the radio there was Concerto in D major by Brahms, with Oistrakh, and I felt my soul suspended for a while, though I was holding the broom in my hand. I have fixed up, pasting, the nicked pots and bowls and I have sent the unwoven carpets to be mended. The yellow carpet with thorns, so interlaced, is still so beautiful…”[9]. The addressee of the letter was in exile, and the addresser’s husband was in prison. In this context, the bibelot does not have a present time of its own, its role being that of allowing the owner to remain in a past conserved as the only desirable present time. The bibelots preserve a small stable world, as a reaction to the generalized dislocation.

Some people’s biography includes much past, but since it is the result of a trauma, this past appears, all of a sudden, to be vacant. They do not have many facts to fill it with, and objects start replacing the facts. On 5 August 1963, Maria Pillat wrote to her daughter, Pia, in exile: “I feel as if this was not me, but another person who lived in that past! Those croquet balls that instantly brought back to you the image of Miorcani and the atmosphere of the time – an essentially Proustian theme – [which] I will never get to live again! It is as if a thick curtain has fallen between the past and the present – hiding from me that dear past – maybe in order to help me bear the present?”[10]. As an effect, these families – destroyed by the imprisonments of the Stalinist period – start to believe that they only live in the present time. In the same letter, Maria Pillat admitted: “I don’t know why it happens very rarely for me to live in the past – could this be because I am so much caught in the present – obsessed and preoccupied by the daily life?”[11] At first, we believe that the words might help us capture those pasts passing by us. But as the narration goes on, we can notice that what is going to happen in X’s story has already occurred in Y’s story. In many cases, the flats are emptied of objects, then of people, the disappearance of the former announcing that of the latter.

Natalia Manoilescu-Dinu described the end of 1948 with the preparations of that year’s Christmas: “…as Christmas was approaching, and I needed money, I advertised that we had several valuable things to sell: silverware, porcelains, statues, paintings, vases and I arranged them like in an exhibition in Mihai’s office”[12]. But her time stopped shortly after that moment, on the day of her husband’s arrest. She lived all the rest of her biography in the consequences of this separation: “On 10 December 1948 our common life stopped for a long period of time. How his life was, I do not know and I do not want to think of, so that I can keep my mind and soul sound. But my life ended that day. Not my physical existence, which went on, relatively, as I am chair-ridden, but my former life, which was completed by Mihai’s presence”[13]. Besides recollections focused on a certain person, evocations constructed on a situation support our assertions. None of the life stages has preliminary conclusions, the latest present time bearing their cumulated consequences. Many of them are misunderstood or insufficiently experienced facts. And however many memories we might now send to retrieve them, nothing convinces them to come back. It is not easy to turn our back on these deliberate oblivions, we always desert them with difficulty.

The period between the two world wars was discretely reimagined in the interviews of the ‘80s and got in fashion again after Ceauşescu’s fall. The old people’s memories renew the past, but increase the gap between it and our time. We go back several times to a fact that occurred once, but we never find it the same. Moreover, our tellers have experienced several epochs. Which might, however, be their latest past? It could be a golden age, with no relation to the present time or a closer period, seen as an antecedent of the present. For instance, in the interviews taken by Stelian Tănase in 1988-1989 and then published in 1996, Alexandru Paleologu insists on his recent memories, from the communist years. We deduce from them that Romanians turned back to the interwar past more and more often, but they did it because the communist regime had appeared and had put an end to it. A memory poured into words is, according to them, a wasted past. It looks like a story that is told too late. The interviewees before 1989 remembered, repeatedly, the bourgeois homes, full of valuable paintings, furniture and porcelains. They returned obsessively to this kind of verbal inventorying, as if they, the people, were the remains of those things: “–… the European style was gone. Some of us persisted in displaying it, but we were rather paradoxical wearing those hats and coats. – The hat and the overcoat were like a stigma, like a David star in the ‘40s, they revealed who you were immediately. – I could never put on a loden and a cap. So I still wore that hat. I also had other grey or brown hats, but they were usual bourgeois objects. I remember that at Câmpulung, in Gică Ştefănescu’s former house, a political leader from Muscel, there was a museum. In this museum, among the exhibits, there were: a travel bag, a hard felt hat – a bowler –, some cuff links under which it was mentioned: ‘common objects at the time of the bourgeois-capitalist regime’. So these objects had gone out of use, but I did not have the feeling that my life had ended, because I continued living it at a sentimental and mundane level, somehow”[14].

As the ‘80s resuscitated the memory of the ‘50s, the old objects were kept as an identity ingredient even when reference was made to their absence. In another dialogue, with Filip Lucian Iorga, from 2000-2004, Paleologu changes emphasis, bringing closer quite remote, interwar segments of his life: “There were many places where one could find good things. For instance, Dragomir Niculescu’s grocery in Bucharest, where we bought oysters, and that of the Smirnoff brothers, in Iaşi; or Erbakoff’s. There were also good tailors, trained in Vienna or Paris. Jewels, carpets, furniture, bibelots could be found at Jaburoff’s”[15]. But the emblems of that rococo time probably are the “bronze bibelots for ink pots”[16] that Alexandru Paleologu mentions when outlining the geography of a home from the time of his childhood: objects generated other objects, their proliferation indicating the supremacy of the décor over the decorated thing.

Fragments of real life generated famous samples of fiction, the fashionable novels contributing thus to the oversignification of the past. Paradoxically, we recollect an epoch better when we succeed in fictionalizing it. If a historical fact – like the communist daily life – becomes a literary motif, its chances to be remembered as a memorable fact, sensibly rise. We think of George Călinescu’s novel, Scrinul negru (“The Black Chest of Drawers”), because it has preserved in the Romanians’ cultural memory that object migration in the Stalinist years: “The Flea market was, until recently, a free market, sprung after the fall of the bourgeois regime, in a large pit formerly exploited for clay for the brickyards, which lay at the end of Colentina highroad…”[17]. Enjoying a certain notoriousness, the book “intervened” then as a common place, in the memoir writings: “People had started to get rid of their useless clothes or of their valuable furniture, their expensive objects or jewellery so that they could save some sweet money for days that turned out to be more and more bitter and bitter. Thus appeared the Flea Market. In the Colentina neighbourhood, at the beginning, where the sellers’ stalls were growing more and more numerous, the buyers of the new society having the possibility to get here valuable things in exchange for a song”[18].

Common noun are written with capitals, just like in the above-mentioned novel and the phenomenon it refers to is obviously located in the same place. A social reality, the destruction of the old elites, was convincingly aestheticized, encouraging its retransposition in post-communist recollections. A historical phenomenon first became an aesthetic ingredient and only then a memorable fact. Our suspicion is that the memoirists built their narratives in accordance to literary suggestions, and not to their personal experiences. In their stories, one cannot easily feel the present time: the past always arrives on time to break the deadlock, to make it forgotten. The interviewees want to look like “characters”, their recollections being some small enactments. They feel what the public wants and adapt themselves to these expectations, and those who talk to them “collaborate”.

For instance, two of the interviews published in the volume edited by Rostas described the interlocutor in a similar manner, through the home environment. The first is the interview taken by Roxana Pelin to Catherina Iernici, the second resulted from Sandra Scarlat’s conversation with Elena Eckardt. Both interviewees were 95, presenting themselves in similar décors[19]. Catherina Iernici received her guest “in a large, dark room, on the ground floor of a building on Labirint street, surrounded by grandfather clocks, Sèvres porcelains, Persian vases and many other considerably antique things …”[20]. As for Elena Eckardt, almost the same things are told: “I was invited to the living room and she started telling me where the furniture had been bought from: the coffee table in solid wood was brought from Switzerland; another small bar with a mirror, made in light-coloured wood with decorations was received from some local acquaintances. Right in front of the mirror, she had placed a clock in solid bronze, richly decorated, a real bargain from Switzerland, she said, bought for only 1000 francs, while it deserved at least 7000… The coach and the armchair had been bought two months earlier, at an incredibly small price, she says”[21].

 

“I was drawing stories…”[22]

 

We meet people who define themselves through the past of some objects. In an interview from 2005, when she was asked about her family’s patrimony, Dorli Blaga alluded to the daily life in the ‘50s: “Some pieces of clothing, I gave them to the same Museum of Literature, I mean some extreme clothing pieces: a dress-coat, that he used to put on at diplomatic occasions, and a robe de chamber, made of a thick, beautiful cloth, like men used to wear, at that time, instead of a dressing gown. It is a short coat, worn out, that is it illustrates his material difficulties during his last years. And also, I think, a gown belonging to my mother… – How are they kept there? – I gave them together with a chest, in which they are kept. – And home? It is impossible for you not to have other things as well. – There are other objects. I live in them. I mean, furniture and some paintings”[23]. Afterwards, the owner’s posterity maintains the individuality of the orphan objects. Their age explains the present of the person, and that person’s memory subsequently defends the things’ past.

Reconstructing the personality of the piano player Aurelia Cionca, her niece, Nina Cionca, recollected her via the things in the house: “…what image of Aurelia Cionca, in her house, seems emblematical to you? On the threshold? At the piano? – At the piano, I almost see her for real. On the threshold she always welcomed us with love. But she was very, I don’t now, delicate in gestures, and one could see that in the way she arranged her flowers […]. – Which were her favourite flowers? – Irises, fleurs-de-lis […]. She put them in the blue ceramic vase, that one, near the piano. […] You saw her drawing above, with irises. She loved them very much. She loved beautiful things, and I can still see her dusting them, because there were objects that she dusted herself, she wouldn’t let anyone else. There is here a small sanctuary, in this library, where there are some small photographs, with her husband as a young man. How could a servant have touched such a dear picture? She took care of it. Or her favourite scores, they aren’t here any more, I keep them in the cupboard. Nobody was allowed to dust them, she was the only one to take care of them, even all that music bookcase in German, beautiful, great quality books, she took good care of them, everything was cherished by her hands”[24].

For those with a “bourgeois” biography, the bibelots are memories that come back too late. They do not grant continuity to history, they do not trigger connected reveries. They are closed forever in those “former times” and have nothing to say to the present. They only agglomerate some pasts that the tellers have nothing more to do with. People mention them, but they do not fit into a biographic puzzle. Everything is lost. This is why they give us their past without suggesting that this could sometime become our present. Their retrospections do not have a “thesis”, they lead nowhere, these people’s memories appearing as, at most, grimaces of the time. And although the stages of one biography are not similar to those of another, at the time of recollections ages overlap. Thus, we are offered the feeling that the tellers’ thinking, now aged, for instance, 60, seems to have been active since they were adolescents. It is a reflex folding, easy to understand: we combat the flagrant changes in life by protecting ourselves from the most obvious recurrences.

The dialogues do not inventory the present of the interviewee, but they rather take into account the other people’s past. This is a kind of self-protection, visible in Victoria Dragu’s conversations with Nicolina Fianu, where the interviewee’s biography is very little focused on. She recollects with much accuracy, but through third persons and with the help of the objects still surrounding them in the ‘50s. Here is how Nicolina Fianu remembers three sisters, Elena, Niculina and Virginia Mărculescu: ‘They had exceptional things. Patrimony furniture, well-known brands of bibelots, things inherited or bought from here and abroad. Old books, art albums, bronzes, statuettes, all of them well-kept and cherished. Not with avarice, but the way children were once educated: to take care of their clothes, toys and things in the house”[25].

The infantilization of objects, surrounded with an attention that personalized them was one of the rococo culture reflexes. With this phrase, we are actually thinking of a mini-regime of historicity, of a ludic withdrawal into the universe of the small things that need us: “…they were happy to show me what they had, knowing that I was not in need of beautiful things, those I still had after repeated sales. […] At that time, but now too, I was not interested in how much each thing was worth, nothing astounded me. I looked at everything with pure pleasure, I liked expensive trinkets, porcelains, silvery…”[26].

Reading this fragment, we can understand where the fierceness of the Marxist-Leninist aesthetes was coming from: from the fact that “popular-democracies” wanted to impose a different manner of administering duration, inconsistent with the loisir of the “bourgeoisie and landowners”. But what exactly made them persecute the siesta? Descending from the aristocratic rococo, the bourgeois apartment was a world that would not let itself be taken by surprise. It conserved itself automatically, because it explained itself very easily: the people inherited both the objects in the house, and the stories about them.

Their aesthetic dimension was also a result of the playful manner in which they had been acquired or were looked at: “The evening, the sun shone in the room until sunset – after many rainy days,’ Cornelia Blaga-Brediceanu wrote on 15 June 1959. ‘It lighted Ladea’s statuette and Pătraşcu’s painting, underlining all their beauty. The caravel’s sails drew precise shadows on the India carpet. The lustre of the bureau reflected the sun on the face of who was sitting on the coach near the radio, enjoying the eyeful’”[27]. In this quotation, the important thing for us is that bibelot-caravel, about which we get further information from the editor of the diary, Dorli Blaga, the diarist’s daughter. The history of that object started, somehow, at the end of the ‘30s, and is still waiting for an end: “’The ‘caravel’ has a story,’ Dorli Blaga mentions in a footnote. ‘There were such caravels in Portugal, mother wanted enormously to buy one, but we left in a hurry and she only kept her wish. In 1955, when Faust was published and father came to Bucharest to take his money, he saw in an antiquity shop a caravel just like the ones mother had wanted. He bought it immediately and this was the most beautiful gift he could have ever given to her. My son, Tudorel, until he was ten, spent his summers at mother’s house. He liked playing with the caravel. At a certain moment, we had to bring most of the things from Cluj to our house in Bucharest. When he got married, he asked me to give it to him. At the time, ‘memorial houses’ were forbidden. Now it is resting on my grandmother’s furniture, which is his. Since Blaga doesn’t, even now, […] have a ‘memorial house’, I hope that at least ‘our descendants’ descendants’ will take care of the ‘caravel’ and put it in its proper place. Father even dedicated the caravel a poem”[28].

The rococo supposed a climax of the self-contained moment, non-submitted to the durations coming from behind, to confer it meaning. The present of the rococo was not too conformist. It did not request to be historicized, narrated, or explained to others. It was self-contained. The same diary of Cornelia Blaga suggests to us that the bourgeois dwellings aimed at a certain staging of things, intending to sketch, for the owners’ comfort, a kind of “interior scenery”: “Ms. Gurănescu brought furniture of bourgeois taste, which she placed ‘schief’, to make it look ‘malerisch’ ”[29]. As for her own living room, the diarist mentioned: “…an Empire suite from a palace from Steyr, which I found in an antiquity shop… I had it covered in ‘champagne’ cloth, to fit my already existing curtains…”[30]. The individual discretely retreated from the flux of hours and days, allowing himself to embark on a reverie or its recollection. Everything depended on the house’s interior schedule, on the owners’ daily routine. The homes thus organized rallied the social precipitation, by creating a space of postponement, of dalliance and delays. It was a totally proscribed life style in the chronophagous communist era, when individual time had suddenly become a collective property.

 

All that we lost

 

When we can no longer represent a certain epoch in self-referential terms, we start talking about the objects it left behind or made disappear[31]. Or, to suggest the severe change brought by communism, the memoirists often replace the reconstruction of the facts with the detailed description of certain things: stolen, confiscated, abandoned, stored up in the attic, hidden at the relatives’ houses or even sold by the owners at the market for food. In the self-recovery scenario, these objects are “semiophores” (K. Pomian), allegorizing either the end of the old world, or the inadequacy to the new one. Memoirists do not mention them so frequently, due to their material value. Their purpose is different: to illustrate a temporal rupture on which their biography feels somehow dependent. The inventory of the former dwellings contributes to a small historicization of the important moments in life. It helps them go somehow over the events occurring after 1948, to integrate them narratively and accommodate the three layers of past: interwar, communist, post-December 1989. We must specify that in our accounts, the three phases do not respect the chronological order, the succession of facts being interchangeable. Sometimes, the installation of the “democrat-popular” regime helps to better envisage the preceding epoch. At other times, the post-communist segment is the one insistently related to the interwar period, the four decades of communism seeming not to explain anything any more. If at a concrete level, politics deeply affects human lives, at the level of recollection, the great public events are not the ones that structure the narration. More important are the days when our tellers had to face a change that regarded them exclusively: the arrest of one’s husband, evacuation from one’s home, losing one’s job, the confiscation of goods. An interesting thing is that as time passes by, the turning points do not remain the same, memory keeps on modifying the list of key-moments in one’s personal biography. The continuous return to well-chosen samples from the past is doubled by the preoccupation to always find them different.

The bigger the number of those who recollect recent history, the more quickly the past changes, and the more difficult it is for us to keep up with it. That is why the period between the two world wars does not represent a temporal segment from which the Romanians would have many direct memories. Most of them are inherited from the previous generation. The interwar period is today an operator, a passe-partout of recollection. It is brought forth as an instrument by which we could differentiate the communist period from the epochs framing it. We thus find out that the frontier between “what was” and “what is” has not been definitively adjudicated. We would not write history if we did not believe that we could modify it a little: we are accustomed to resuscitating events consumed long ago, in order to put them at the origins of others, which have only recently ended. And the interviewed persons have the tendency to refer rather to other persons than to themselves, because the absence of the present urges the individual to allow himself to be inhabited by the others’ pasts. The interwar period returns thus, in a superficial way, since it is the convenient, recent history. It is considered only in terms of its mores and worldly events. It tolerates excess patrimonializations, becoming the past above all, becoming more and more detemporalized. Consequently, it is urgently reinvested in a postcommunist present time, and grows increasingly estranged from the 1989 moment. The “grafting” is successful, as the recent upstarts find all kinds of genealogies and continuities with the years 1918-1940.

 

Translated by Evagrina Dârţu

 

 

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Notes