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Shaping the Canon. The International Profile of Viața Românească (1906-1916)

Daiana Gârdan

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The first half of the XXth century in Romania was a time dominated by strong projects of nation building that manifested through two major poles of cultural power: the “traditionalists” and the modernists. Following the European model and aiming to build an independent nation that would somehow surpass its peripheral status, both the factions strived to deliver national cultural, artistic, and literary content that could permeate the international market, and while this goal was a common one, the means of reaching it were quite complementary. In this regard, each of them negotiated the national (in terms of literary plot, settings and themes) and the foreign input (through imitation and mostly in terms of literary formula and textual architecture) in creating a desirably exportable literature. Although the consensus that prevails in every critical analysis of these projects is generally dichotomous, the actual dynamic may reveal a rather grey panorama, with modernists displaying at times toxic conventional or prejudiced perspectives or, au contraire, “traditionalists” showing internationalist and progressive views. My paper targets one of the many locations of international dialogue pertaining to the so-called “traditionalist” faction surrounding Viața Românească (The Romanian Life), a literary journal that fostered a populist movement in the aforementioned timeframe. Aiming to challenge a persistent cliché in the historiographical discourse, the present research employs quantitative and digital resources on a particular column of Viața Românească’s issue, namely Revista Revistelor (The Review of Reviews), in the first decade of the journal’s life (between 1906 and 1916). My main ambition is to contribute to a series of reconsiderations on the role of this group in the evolution and modernization of Romanian literary production, proving once again 1. that the “traditionalist” party contributed to Romanian’s cultural international dialogue and 2. that when it comes to Romanian modern literary theory and criticism, ideology and state politics were by far the principal power sources that alimented and orientated the machinery.

Three are the premises from which this inquiry departs, and they are anything but new in the domain of literary studies when addressing pre or interwar criticism. The first one revolves around the merger between political and literary ideologies[1], which was of course the case of the poporanism (from “popor”, meaning “people”[2]) professed by the editorial board of Viața Românească (The Romanian Life), the object of the present paper. The second one relates to the presumably harmful relation between national (or nationalist) critics and the foreign input in our culture in terms of both literary formula and theoretical debates. In this very sense, the fiercest of biases concerning the pre- and interwar Romanian cultural field is the sharp separation between what we call the “traditionalists” (represented by ideologists such as those who activated at Viața Românească or Sămănătorul[3]), who pleaded for a national ethos, and the modernists (represented by the majority of the members of Sburătorul literary group), who engaged in synchronization projects with the western literary and cultural modernity. The third premise is based around the very nature of periodical life in the first half of the twentieth century. As editorial projects were the domain of the academe, and since university professors were also active members of the Romanian periodical community, cultural magazines were the main venue for the discussion of literary theory and criticism in the period.

            Viața Românească is active in the first half of the XXth century from March 1906, with a brief hiatus between 1917 and 1919, due to the historical context of the First World War. The focus of this particular research are the first 10 years of activity, the prewar era of the periodical, from March 1906, the first issue, to July 1916, the last issue before Romania joined the war. At this point, another set of premises form the background of my research: Viața Românească represents a power pole of tremendous dimensions in the economy of Romanian culture and literary studies in this first half of century. The periodical also constitutes the location of the Romanian “poporanist” movement, a populist ideology that has proven to have a significant impact for the evolution of Romanian literature and culture as well[4]. Because of these ideological stances, the magazine garnered quite a reputation in the cultural field, often seen as guilty for sabotaging the modernization of Romanian literature[5]. I will not dwell on the impact and role of Viața Românească inside the Romanian culture, these aspects having been the concern of Romanian critics such as Zigu Ornea, Dumitru Micu or Ștefania Mihăilescu. What seems to be a sub-documented aspect is, however, the international profile of this periodical, the availability of its editorial board in terms of dialogue with foreign cultures. The only Romanian critic that has actually integrated in his extended research on Romanian modernity this very aspect is Sorin Alexandrescu, whose contributions on the subject are further completed only by Cosmin Borza in one of his recent academic papers, “Translating against Colonization. Romanian Populists’ Plea for Peripheral Literatures (1890-1916)”, dedicated to the habits of translations and the choices that these ideologists made regarding the means of transplanting foreign literature in the Romanian space. Both Sorin Alexandrescu and Cosmin Borza argue in favour of a different perspective when analysing the “poporanist” movement, one that surpasses the common bias that contemporary Romanian literary studies have inherited from the modernist agenda: “traditionalist” ideologies, such as “poporanism” had a rather negative input in the evolution of Romanian modern literature. In order to dismantle this very reductionist conception, Sorin Alexandru retraces “poporanism”’s origins in an effort to demonstrate that it has a more complex weave of political fundaments, criteria, and ultimately, more complex aims and goals than “narodnicism” – the Russian populist doctrine “poporanism” is supposed to imitate, to transplant in the Romanian space[6]. Drawing on Alexandrescu’s work, Cosmin Borza’s inquiry, besides breaking up with the general cliché concerning “poporanism” and “sămănătorism”, sheds light on the internationalist profile of the aforementioned cultural phenomena which manifested itself as a departure from canonical Western models and a heightened interest for minor literatures[7]. What both these national-orientated movements sought to obtain, claims the author, was a sort of counter canon, an alternative cultural affinity meant to “counterbalance the colonizing influence of the West, and French culture in particular” in order to “resist colonization and establish relations with other socially, economically, and culturally colonized countries[8]” (38).

            Garabet Ibrăileanu, the leading figure of the poporanist movement, gained a more favourable reputation among the younger generation of contemporary scholars in the past years, due to its sometimes-progressive views[9]. Under his administration, Viața Românească forms and sustains over the years a very enthusiastic dialogue not only with European cultures, but with the globe. Such assertion can only be sustained with data. Thus, the following part of my paper engages a simple quantitative analysis. The following map is a direct result of this endeavour, constituting a visual representation of the spread of the international dialogue sustained by the crew surrounding Viața Românească.

 

1. Locations of international literary journals debated in Viața Românească’s Revista Revistelor column.

 

The data gathered for this map is collected from the international news section entitled The Review of Reviews, a section that has a 100% presence in the targeted 10 years. The content of this column, active in each number of the journal, addresses the content of Romanian and foreign periodicals. The authors discuss the content of a certain revue, a certain article, resume events presented in the foreign journals, or engage in rather judicious polemics with certain authors or entire editorial boards. Thus, on this map we can observe where and how far this editorial interest has reached. To understand better these coordinates, besides their location, I shall further explain the code: the colour of each territory contains information about the frequency of those national journals. The red colour means almost 100% frequency, while yellow means around 50% frequency, and beige is a much-reduced frequency. Therefore, even if there are only four Italian journals, fewer than the British ones for instance, they have a 90% presence, and at least two of these four journals are addressed in every number of Viața Românească, while the British have a rather reduced presence. We can already extrapolate some results from here, concerning the general orientation of Viața Românească. Firstly, we can confirm Zigu Ornea’s assumption that this journal was among the very few journals with a strong affinity towards the German culture, while most of the journals at the time owed more to the French space and had an utter disregard for German culture (Ornea 144). The strong presence of the French periodicals however is a testimony for the main orientation of the periodical. The journal’s welcoming nature and overall interest for the global space is visible, because unlike other contemporary periodicals, Viața Românească also discusses Japanese, North American, or Australian journals[10]. The central and eastern European space is rather poorly represented[11].

 

2. Distribution of literary journals debated in Viața Românească’s Revista Revistelor column, between 1906 and 1916

 

As this graph shows, Viața Românească starts to index and discuss Eastern and Central European journals only by the end of the period. As we can see, even if this column begins in 1906 with an effervescent dialogue with autochthonous journals, this habit wanes over the years and the profile of the column is becoming more international by the 1916, and more mature in their content. I restate the fact that these statistics only account for journals with literary or cultural profile, not engaging the few titles of economic or strictly philosophic or politic profile. Concerning the very first premise of my presentation, the impact of the populist ideology on the way of thinking the national literary production and its relation to the global culture is quite visible. The inexistence of a populist literature was pointed out and explained already by the aforementioned critics, as well as the inconsistency of the populist agenda and the apparent contradictions between what Viața Românească, through the voice of its director and ideologist, Constantin Stere, proposed in terms of politic directives and the actual literature published in the journal: a diverse literary spectrum, gathering various formulas and topics, from expats of the Sămănătorul journal, administered by Nicolae Iorga, to symbolist. A continuous conflict at the very core of the group between their social stakes and their way of understanding literature maintained however a professional climate: Viața Românească is one of the most mature and well-adjusted journals at the time.

 

3. Network of Romanian literary journals and foreign novelists, ranked by frequency

            For a better understanding of the place of this periodical in the Romanian cultural scene I chose to represent the dynamics of the theoretical discussions, cultural polemics and literary translations of the period in the form of a network. This particular network requires a great degree of interpretation, providing this particular rendition can only be two-dimensional. The main database used was the Bibliography of the relations between Romanian literature and foreign literature in periodicals (1859-1918), an exhaustive project that indexes, along with a short description, articles dedicated to literary or cultural subjects, or to certain authors, and, not at the least, translations (Beiu-Paladi et al). What we can see right now is a selection of the most culturally visible foreign novelists in Romanian periodicals, along with the journals that have written about them or have hosted texts by them, in translation. A series of preliminary interpretations is therefore in order. Firstly, it should be noted that the very number of periodicals that engaged actively in the evolution of Romanian literature and criticism is, in itself, important – a rather large number, considering that ours is a minor culture. This can constitute another argument that the shaping of literary production occurred in the first half of the XXth century mostly in the publishing area. This network renders visible the core, the power nucleus, which has at its centre the figure of Tolstoy.

            For simplifying purposes, the novelists are coloured not individually, but by their culture of origin[12]. I also mention that the software I used, namely Gephi, usually generates networks that, while organized by frequency, imply a certain degree of arbitrariness, misleading aspects can be therefore present. However, the degree of adequacy to the numbers is high enough, meaning its possible interpretations should all lead to pretty much the same conclusions. The central position of Viața Românească is quickly noticeable. The maturity of this journal from its very first issue, as already noticed by Zigu Ornea, is outstanding. Viața Românească has been the home of numerous articles dedicated to these novelists, engaging in the shaping of modern autochthonous literature, orienting our culture towards the international scene. Another important aspect that is quite visible here is the profile of the international canon as perceived by the Romanian space. Aesthetically oriented, this canon pertains to the realists, having at its core the triad Tolstoy – Zola – Gorki. Although Zola has received a fair amount of criticism – mostly for being considered obscene – he nevertheless created a sustained conversation about his literary formula. The common trait of these novelists is, obviously, the depiction of societal structures and social tension. It is necessary to readdress here the main concerns of the populists in respect with literature: they were ferocious supporters of social literature, of tendentious art. In this respect, Ibrăileanu himself noted in one of his articles addressing Tolstoy’s novel that this is “the most powerful novel of our times, due to its social, evangelical, political, and sometimes revolutionary nature” (Ibrăileanu 139). It is important to point out the fact that while the “poporanists” made the peasant and the rural scenery their main preoccupation in the literature they promoted, the literature they were welcoming was not especially a rural one, but one that tackled rurality and its problems differently from the way both writers at Sămănătorul and the modernists did, aspiring to a dignified view of this social class. “By asking for kindness in regard to the peasant class, notes D. Micu in his Populism and The Romanian Life, Ibrăileanu was, in fact, recommending objectivity and impartiality” (Micu 157). It would not be far-fetched to state, in the light of this information, that the journals with a socialist agenda or at least general orientation, Viața Românească being one of the, have a resonant input. In this sense, Cosmin Borza notes in the aforementioned article, the fact that

 

It is hardly surprising the ‘poporanists’ also attempted to divert interest towards other movements in major literatures that co-existed with the dominant trends. In lieu of the French symbolists, ‘poporanist’ magazines proposed French naturalists Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, with Ibrăileanu producing, in 1896, the first Romanian translation of the latter is Bel-Ami. Of English writers, they particularly promoted Charles Dickens’s realism, as for Russian literature, they popularized, apart from Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol, authors such as ‘norodnicist’ Nikolay Chernyshevsky and socialist realism precursor Maxim Gorki, whose complete novels were translated and published in 1894, and 1905 respectively (37).

 

Sure, not all of these names are visible or even relevant while working with “big numbers”, that is to say at a macro level, unless not in my chosen timeframe. This, however, does not affect my general conclusion: populists shaped the “translationscape”[13] and had their fair share of contribution in the “making” of the foreign canon, the image of the world’s literature in Romania. A testimony for this judgment is the location of Russian realists, forming the very core of this network. What seems to be yet infirmed is populists’ tendency towards peripheral models, at least in terms of novelistic production. Only polish author Henry Sienkiewicz is enjoying the attention among the otherwise western canon in the first decade of Viața Românească’ activity.

            Two of the many hypothesis of the critical establishment remain unbroken. Firstly, the fact that the dawn of Romanian modernity had realism at its core, imported mainly from canonical or famous authors and/or from western, central, cultures. Secondly, that political ideology can be held responsible for the shaping of the literary modernity, both in terms of autochthonous production and transnational dialogue, I. e. chosen resources. One of the issues worth being further investigated, drawing on this data, is related to the absence, in the interwar period, of debates surrounding the Russian formalism. This preliminary set of data, especially the network, targets the tensions existing in the prewar period, and they can testify, for instance, for the fact that tendentious art and social art constitutes the establishment and the targeted goal. This fact confirms, at some level, the same intuitions specified by Adriana Stan in her volume, that the battle between these ideologies, powered and driven by projects of nation building, were so overpowering on the cultural arena, that it was impossible for literary theory, with its apolitical character, to find its place there[14]. This issue, however, would need a larger and broader research, especially in terms of data.  

            These assumptions are obviously just the tip of the iceberg. By further developing, completing and re-interpreting these statistics in a bigger configuration, they could generate a far larger debate that could engage the dynamics of political, cultural and literary ideologies of the pre-war Romanian space. My ambition was to deliver a set of quantitative information to a still sub-documented topic of research regarding the Romanian modernity. Measuring the impact of an author, a (sub)genre, or, in this case, a cultural movement or group requires, rather than an ample project aiming exhaustiveness, a set of multi-layered, multilateral, mixed in terms of perspectives and methods, specialized projects, each adding something to the big picture. The present paper aimed to be such a contribution.

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-2690, within PNCDI-III.

 

 

 

 

References:

Alexandrescu, Sorin, Privind înapoi, modernitatea, Univers, 1999.

Beiu-Paladi, Luminița, Brezuleanu, Ana-Maria, Lupu, Ioan, Ștefănescu, Cornelia, Pleșu, Catrinel, Bibliografia relațiilor literaturii române cu literaturile străine în periodice (1859-1918), vol I-III, Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1985.

Borza, Cosmin, “Translating Against Colonization. Romanian Populists’ Plea for Peripheral Literatures (1890-1916)”, in Maria Sass, Ștefan Baghiu, Vlad Pojoga (eds.), The Culture of Translation in Romania, Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 31-43.

---, “How to Populate a Country: A Quantitative Analysis of the Rural Novel from Romania (1900-2000)”, in Ștefan Baghiu, Vlad Pojoga, Maria Sass (eds.), Ruralism and Literature in Romania, Peter Lang, 2019, pp. 21-40.

Dumitru, Teodora, Modernitatea politică și literară în gândirea lui E. Lovinescu, Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2016.

Gârdan, Daiana, “Dinamica ideologiilor literare în modernitatea românească. Recitiri contemporane”, in Transilvania, no. 7/2019, pp. 5-12.

Goldiș, Alex, “Beyond Nation Building: Literary History as Transnational Geolocation” in Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, Andrei Terian, (eds.), Romanian Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 95-114.

Ibrăileanu, Garabet, Note și impresii, Viața Românească, 1920.

Micu, Dumitru, Poporanismul și „Viața Românească”, Editura pentru literatură, 1961.

Mihăilescu, Ștefania, Poporanismul și mișcarea socialistă în România, Editura politică, 1988.

Modoc, Emanuel, Internaționala periferiilor. Rețeaua avangardelor din Europa Centrală și de Est, Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2020.

Ornea, Zigu, Poporanismul, Minerva, 1972.

Soare, Oana, Ceilalți moderni. Antimodernii. Cazul românesc, Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2017.

Stan, Adriana, Bastionul lingvistic. O istorie comparată a structuralismului în România, Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2017.