Number Dilemmawhich brings the case of Eugène Barba back to the forefront of the literary debate has, as expected, provoked heated debate. Many of us were particularly shocked by the name of the band “La centenary”, completely uninspired and really insulting to the recent history and proximity of Monica Lovinescu’s centenary. But I will not discuss here either the framework in which positions were taken on the Barbu case, nor the obvious disparity between them (it is enough to read in parallel the chronicle of Bohdan Krets, where critical spirit and professionalism set the tone, as well as Dumitra Alexander, a simple hagiographic work), nor further (otherwise desirable) resolution of dilemmas. I would just like to add a few nuances to outline the portrait of this character, who here has awakened so many literary critics who seek to reevaluate the literature of the communist period.

Then let’s reevaluate it!

With hatred and indignation!

In 1983, Michel Polak’s show “Droit de réponse” discussed the then very famous Homme-Tenasse case. Ceausescu ordered a spy named Hajduk to kill these two. Fortunately, the spy failed, the French secret services staged a diversion to cover him up, and thus an international scandal ensued. In addition to this case, other attacks on exiles who criticized the communist regime in Romania were discussed in the Western press. Monica Lovinescu was also invited to the show, who spoke about the attempt on her in 1977, the first customer of the communist regime abroad. The description of the facts, the testimony of the victims and witnesses were intended to illustrate the extreme aggressiveness of the Bucharest regime. What was no less shocking to everyone present on the set was the aggressiveness of the language that writers loyal to the authorities in Bucharest, including Eugene Barba, used as a weapon to fight journalists and collaborators of Free Europe. With the amount of hatred and violence conveyed in the foulest language, the so-called Eugène Barbeau brand of journalism in Paris rightly equates to the attacks the regime used to eliminate its opponents. Monica Lovinescu recalls this moment in the volume By the water of Babylon:

“Then they were summoned [la Paris] Yevgeny Barbu and other proto-chroniclers, stringing anathemas and thick curses on us, are almost inaudible to a Western ear, let alone a journalist. Polach read them like pearls of disgust.”

With lies in Paris

Especially since Eugène Barbeau is not the first to shock the Parisian media. In 1965, when he came there to launch his French translation of the novel Pit, he blithely stated that the first edition of the book was banned and withdrawn from circulation in the country because of… priests who found it immoral. In fact, the ban had an ideological character, more precisely, the novel’s inconsistency with the realist-socialist scheme (there were no party figures in the novel). In other words, if you follow the words of Eugene Barbu, wrote Monica Lovinescu, “in Bucharest, the power was not held by the Communist Party, but by the Church!” Of course, with this big lie, he paid for his rise in the power structures of the party.

Guerrilla journalism

After the July 1971 theses, when Ceausescu wanted to carry out a cultural revolution along the lines of the Chinese, Eugène Barbou felt that his time had come. Ceausescu’s nationalism inspires him to unite with protochronistic ideas, from which he will create a doctrine designed to ensure the position of power in the cultural market. So he plans a kind of civil war in the literary world, which he will tell on the pages week and later Lucheafaru On the other hand, around Literary Romanians, first of all, the other camp, the resistance due to culture, will gather, much weaker. Thus, the intellectual world in Romania is polarized and the tension is almost constant. Writers who sought to preserve a minimum of creative freedom will have to fight for almost two decades not only with communist ideology, or rather with the censorship and self-censorship imposed by it, but also with the group neo-prolet cultists, as Monica Lovinescu called them. All the energy that could be gathered into the resistance movement and that would possibly lead to the collapse intelligentsia are able to oppose the regime with more courage and determination, as happened in other eastern countries (where there were movements like CHART ’77 from the Czech Republic or Solidarityin Poland) will be spent on guerrilla warfare with this group of objects, closely connected around Eugen Barbu.

From the security file

The fact that he will be able to reach the top of the pyramid of power is evidenced not only by his position as a member of the Central Committee of the PKR and a deputy of the Great National Assembly, but also by another episode in 1982, when on the pages of the magazine week I will publish it in a postcard Magazine Ion Karayon, whom he “donated” to Bezpeka in exchange for his passport. Thus Ion Carayon paid for his freedom, but he also revealed his invisible face, the face of the terrible lion Arthur. Barbu knew very well that the so-called diary entries, real “fictional delusions”, would be a great blow that he would deal to the exile, but especially to his great enemies, Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunci, for whom Carayon was until the publication Magazine, “their truncated brother.” Not to please him, Monica Lovinescu will write a “tactical” column in which he defends Carayon, saying that what Barba published will be a collection of journal entries containing statements taken under torture in a security investigation. But, of course, he understood very well that everything belonged to Karaion.

So Yevgeny Barbu had, so to speak, the keys to the Security files. And he took out from there what he wanted or what he was told to take out. In any case, he was one of the owners of the establishment. And then how to ask, as one of the literary experts who write on Dilemma, hard evidence from CNSAS as to Barbu’s informant quality? Is it naivety? Neuronal disorder? Bad faith? How can you ask that? an insider security?

We collate, not plagiarize

Plagiarism scandal from Incognito IIIfirst published by Marin Sorescu in the magazine branches, and then Virgil Yerunka in Free Europe (where samples of plagiarism were read “on rolls”), followed by a very bold for that time reaction of the Union of Writers, which in an official statement condemned this procedure, “contrary to professional and moral standards, incompatible with the principles of ethics and literary justice”, they seem slightly swayed the position. But the audacity that characterizes him makes him avoid accusations by using cheap excuses. It was not plagiarism, he said calmly, but an avant-garde literary technique, collages. Advanced exercises on how to copy anyone without quotes can be found at Princely notebooks.

This slight discomfort does not bother the owner too much weekwho, say the bad mouths, was somehow innocent, for he would not have plagiarized with his own hand, but through disappointed intermediaries, otherwise with serious readings, whom he would have employed as “blacksmiths” on his literary plantation.

Golem

Around the same time, he manages to construct his ideal golem in the form of Corneliu Vadym Tudor, who brings anti-Semitic and nationalist passions back into the literary press and transforms it into a style of journalism that will last long after 1989. These two lead seamlessly, even more aggressively, on the pages Great Romanians, a passion with devastating consequences for Romanian society after the fall of communism. Today’s aggressive and herd nationalism is a continuation of this discourse promoted by CV Tudor and Eugen Barbu in the early years after the revolution.

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So, we can justifiably ask what is the work of this writer, whose talent is mentioned here by literary critics. Objectively speaking, his real work, which is unwittingly confused with his life, is journalism. And his dominant stylistic feature, whether we like it or not, is only one: desecration of the word. About such writers, Monica Lovinescu said that they will have to give an account at the possible Last Judgment. At least not according to today’s critics. But instead of another conclusion, she said this:

“But in the totalitarianism of the 20th century, the writer was asked to sin by and with his creative medium: the word. The real sin – as well as the real responsibility – of the writer is committed against the word and in dependence on it. The writer was pushed (in the worst moments forced) to lie, to write what he did not believe in, to describe what he had not seen. To change reality, distorting and degrading it, through ideology. So many tons of lie-scratched books have been thrown into the crematorium of oblivion almost as soon as they were written that the writers, those determined to continue to cooperate with the lie, usually long after the periods of sheer terror have ended. , found another trick: to put the word lie especially in the newspaper, in the perishable, and not to accept the rule of this lie in the opera.-Read the whole article and comment Contributors.ro