A cultural event took place here in Brussels on Friday; I have sent an email to the Embassy of the Republic of Moldova requesting access. I was answered very quickly, professionally (“Dear Mr. Buzea, we are waiting for you on March 24 at 5:00 p.m. for a meeting with Tetiana Tibuliak, which will take place at the Embassy of the Republic of Moldova in the Kingdom of Belgium (avenue Franklin Roosevelt 57.1050 Brussels. Sincerely, the Embassy of the Republic Moldova in the Kingdom of Belgium”), so I settled there, guided, as usual, by my own interests: at the end of April I had a literary seminar that will take place in Eindhoven, and I also have a lot to learn. And if there is still something to learn, at least learn from the best. And Tetiana Tibulyak is the best. For some time she has a book launch all over Europe (it is about translations of her novels), she has seen a lot and everything in these travels, she is a role model for the attendance of a literary event.

Although those who were in the embassy mobilized with all their might, they still did not have enough chairs; the audience was more than they expected, so some of us stood, and those who came later did not even fit in the hall, they watched the event from the hall, through the open door. But I’ll come back to the audience later, now it’s time to explain what I learned from Tatiana. If I understand something, others will too. Who knows? Maybe someday it will come in handy!

Body posture. It seems like just sitting on a chair in front of an audience, but it’s not. Looking at her, I realized that this is often not the case: either the speaker wants to create the impression that he has no emotions, that he is relaxed and in a good mood. ease, and then entertainment; or he wants to give the impression of maximum seriousness and then sits down, letting people know he can’t wait to get out of there and take his shoes off. Tatyana was direct, without exaggerating anything. He gave the impression that he respected his audience as much as he respected himself. I would like to learn this art myself.

Answers to questions. The host of the event, Ms. Chibotaru, asked Tetyana long-thought-out questions (it became known), not being able to formulate them succinctly. In short, the questions were too long. Tatiana answered the question exactly every time (and not something else, as is often the case, especially with Romanians: I ask you what time it is, and you explain to me how you invested in Bitcoin!), but the answers were better than the questions. The average response time was 110 seconds (I recorded the time with my phone). The structure of each answer was as follows: specifying one’s own opinion with concrete examples. Here is an example: Ms. Chibotaru asked whether the author’s life (non-literary actions) mattered for a literary work or not. Tatyana noted that until last year her opinion would have been “No”, but now it is definitely “Yes”. And he cited the example of film director Nikita Mikhalkov. He clearly and confidently stated his point of view, then remained silent and waited for the next question.

Video intervention. From the Bucharest North Railway Station, Mrs. Nina Korczynski intervened in the event, which is not very easy to do from a technical point of view (the picture was acceptable, but the sound was bad). What struck me about Tatyana was that she took this video intervention for what it was: an intervention video. That is, he did not interrupt Ms. Korchynska’s speech, as if she was in the hall! He listened quietly, like the rest of us, and only after the intervention did he express his agreement and disagreement with what was presented. Too many times I have seen people, enraptured by their own “righteousness”, rush to the other person to explain to him that he is wrong, forgetting that the other person is three thousand kilometers away. And there is a lesson to be learned. Proximity matters.

Cultural barrier. Two novels were discussed at the event: The Summer My Mother Saw Green Eyes and The Glass Garden. I will immediately return to the first, now about this Garden: Ms. Chibotaru said that reading the book felt like walking among extremely familiar personalities, even if they were literary characters rather than people with verifiable biographies. And he cited the example of the War Veteran, a kind of institution-character of the Soviet Union, known (in hundreds of thousands of “variations”) to every Soviet child of the 80s. I don’t remember the question anymore, but in her answer Tatiana wanted to clarify that the figure of the War Veteran is very difficult to “translate”, because in other cultures it is almost unknown, or at least not part of the “package of memories” of those who grew up not in the Soviet Union. I was amazed at the accuracy of the observation. So when you address an audience, think about what kind of childhood the people in that audience had! I will give a personal example: during the presentation of the book, I mentioned the “hunger, cold and darkness” of the terrible years 1982-1989 in Romania, and a good friend from the audience sharply contradicted me, for him it was the golden age of his life. life. Yes… he lived then in a large, non-cooperative commune of Bukovyna, and for him “hunger, cold, and darkness” were the banes. He had everything and was extremely happy in those years, which he will remember all his life with love, tenderness and melancholy. Remember!

Interaction with the public. Well, if I can say that Tatiana’s interaction with Ms. Chibotaru was good to very good, I can’t say the same about Tatiana’s interaction with the audience. Which was neither good nor bad; it was not at all. As long as I stayed at the event (not until the end, because my daughter wanted me to go home – “Mom, where’s dad? Why isn’t dad with us?”), the audience didn’t ask a single question. None! I couldn’t believe it. People just stared at her, absorbing her words and taking pictures of her on their phones. It’s as if you’ve come to a museum, not a literary event! I kept thinking (maybe I’m missing something!) and I think the explanation lies in a very subtle cultural difference between those who grew up and were educated in the Republic of Moldova compared to their relatives in Romania: according to Prut, school (education, in the general sense ) was taken much more seriously than in the future. Teachers were feared and respected, and society as a whole, I think (I assume!) was much more mentally “militarized” than society in Romania. That is, where the Romanians had fun, the Moldovans from the Republic had a hard time. Maybe I’m wrong, I can’t know. But that’s the only explanation I could find. A similar event, organized in Romania or with a predominantly Romanian audience, would be fireworks, and Tatiana would be bombarded with questions of all kinds, ranging from monetary (“How much money did you make on Summer?”), to envious-prophylactic ones (“What novel are you working on now?”) and to really strict ones (“Wasn’t it a shame to kill Marichytsa?”). But the questions, although raised, were completely lacking. My surprise was great, but I remained silent. To find out, I started with an elegant but flawed assumption: the questions existed and were interesting, but they came at the very end, when Ms. Chibotaru announced to the audience that the question session could begin. Discipline, not a joke! Well done Moldovans! This format would never work for the Romanians.

Success. If Tatyana ever runs out of money, I suggest that she write a guide “Managing Success” and I will put everything into publishing it! I will talk separately* about my own contact with Tatiana’s novels, now I just want to say Summer it was and still is a miracle of Romanian literature; never, since Romanians have been writing books, has a debut novel had such a fate. Never! It appeared, brooded for a while, then exploded with dozens of translations and hundreds of reviews, of course, not in MD (even there people are not bigger than in RO when it comes to pism), but in EU countries and some outside the EU . It was like the prairie was on fire! I used this image for a reason: all of us, Tatyana’s competitors, were coyotes who ran around, squealing, here and there, because you don’t talk. Tatyana is asked about this phenomenal success over and over and over again, that few things are as fascinating as success, and she answers patiently each time, without getting upset or showing signs of nervous fatigue: “I was pleased to write this story, which is not mine, and I did not even expect such consequences. Of course, I am extremely happy that my novel has received so many readers, how can I not be happy!”. I keep trying to find another writer I know who could keep my sanity after such a debut. I can’t find any. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro