WORLD-LITERATURE AND THE BESSARABIAN LITERARY SYSTEM. COMBINED AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT IN THE SEMIPERIPHERY

: This essay proposes a theory of interperipheral relations in Eastern Europe, starting from the cases of Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The aim is to affirm a more materialistic interpretation of world-literature studies, starting from the thesis of separation and inequality between the two Romanian-language literary systems. Thus, the essay starts from a critique of several directions of world literature and postcolonialism, returning to the method of world-systems analysis (as conceived by Immanuel Wallerstein and his followers). Another method is that of the Warwick Research Collective, which conceives global literature as defined by the Marxist theory of combined and uneven development. Romania, being in a geopolitical position that is closer to the neoliberal ideologies of “civilizational progress” and “artistic modernity”, represents Moldova's access point to the transnational market. The cases exemplified in the second part of the essay highlight the way in which a series of Bessarabian authors use and recontextualize some narrative forms specific to post-communist Romanian literature. The authors brought into discussion are the Fracturists Dumitru Crudu and Alexandru Vakulovski, the journalist Vasile Ernu, the anthropologist Dinu Guțu, the Bessarabian novelists Iulian Ciocan and Liliana Corobca, and the émigré writer Tatiana Țîbuleac.

while Romania is undergoing a process of synchronization with the Western capitalist world, Bessarabian literature is still referring to Romania's cultural sphere, which mediates Moldova's access to the transnational literary system. The motif of identity -or the lack of it -plays an important role in these Romanian-Bessarabian literary works.

Towards a Theory of Interperipheral Relations a) Against World Literature
It is very possible that, in spite of the optimists who consider 'Bessarabian' literature an integral part of Romanian literature, literary relations between Romania and Moldova will become in the not too distant future -if they had not already become -similar to those between Germany and Austria, i.e. two countries that speak the same language, but constitute distinct literary systems 1 (Terian 297), 1 "E foarte posibil ca, în pofida optimiștilor care consideră literatura «basarabeană» o parte integrantă a literaturii române, raporturile literare dintre România și Moldova să devină în viitorul nu foarte îndepărtat -dacă nu cumva au devenit deja -asemănătoare acelora dintre Germania și Austria, i.e. două țări care vorbesc aceeași limbă, dar constituie sisteme literare distincte" (My translation). discuss national literatures from a monolithic point of view. Metaphors of interconnectivity are ubiquitous in new literary studies, and the boundaries of literary systems are becoming increasingly difficult to trace and conceive. However, sometimes they are necessary -not for ideological reasons, but rather pragmatic ones. Therefore, the previous idea is rectified as follows: behind a literary system there is a socio-political and material-historical formation. This critique of world literature studies can also be found in the position of Warwick Research Collective: [A] premature dismissal of the material effectivity of the nation paves the way, in some contemporary criticism, for the adoption of an even less plausible analytical framework: a militantly idealist transcendentalism that glories in literature for its civilisational (that is to say, community-building) capabilities, across, athwart and, indeed, in defiance of the boundaries (historical as well as geographical) of any actually existing social order. Often encountered in such contemporary slogans as 'planetarity' and 'epochal time', this new form of transcendentalism avows to release literary and cultural studies from concerns about not simply nation-statism, but capitalist modernity also (WReC 42). This dematerialization of literary systems has taken many forms. Pascale Casanova stated that, "freed from its former condition of political dependence, literature found itself at last in a position to assert its own autonomy" (Casanova 37) -in other words, that the international literary (meta)system would represent an institutional field independent of the material and geopolitical world-system. In an even more radical way in the sense of dematerialization, David Damrosch insisted on the definition of world literature as "literature in translation" and as "a mode of reading" (Damrosch, 281): The great conversation of world literature takes place on two very different levels: among authors who know and react to one another's work, and in the mind of the reader, where works meet and interact in ways that may have little to do with cultural and historical proximity (Damrosch 298).
Such literature-centric perspectives avoid taking into account the central point of any larger critique of world-literature: the concrete inequality between literatures.
Franco Moretti observes this problematic relationship by using Immanuel Wallerstein's theory of the center-semiperiphery-periphery triad: "movement from the periphery to the center is less rare, but still quite unusual, while that from the center to the periphery is by far most frequent" (Moretti 115). What Moretti imports from Wallerstein is the critical dimension that challenges the developmentalist theory: that which divides the world into three distinct worlds, each one on different thresholds of development, by promoting progress and" [putting] forth a very optimistic view of the future of those states that were still poor and struggling" (Wallerstein, World-System, 3). The current world-system does not allow the transgression of structural inequality between the powers of the globe. Literature can only play inside this limited "chessboard". For Moretti, "comparative literature is a mirror of how we see the world" (Moretti, 119). And the world is one and unequal.  within the very same semiperiphery. Nancy Condee wonders whether, depending on the level of development of the area in question, one can speak of both "occupation" (in the Czech Republic) and "colonization" (in the Uzbek Republic). Harsha Ram states an internal contradiction of the expansionist policies of the Soviet Union, as "[it was] denying the autonomy of its constituent peoples while retaining a federal structure that would nonetheless allow an elaborate discourse of local specificity" (Spivak et al. 832). In his 2011 study Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience, Aleksandr Etkind even states that the Soviet Union began a process of colonization within its own borders. In other words, Soviet colonization is supposed to have been relative, paradoxical and gradual. If the imposition of Russian culture and language in any of the ex-Soviet spaces is taken into account, then a new distance would be established between Romania and the Republic of Moldova, which would demonstrate the thesis of the separation of the above literary systems: that of the degree of "colonization" by the Soviet Union, in which Bessarabia would certainly be "more" postcolonial than Romania.

b) The Postcolonial Insolvency
However, such discussions are problematic. In a 2014 article, Vitaly Chernetsky finds it unfortunate that cultural studies in the former Soviet Union have not been influenced or affected by postcolonial discourse. Moreover, Chernetsky criticizes Edward Said for forgetting to add Russian / Soviet imperialism to his critical works: "While it is understandable that these studies could not possibly have been all-encompassing, the addition of the Russian empire and eastern and southeastern Europe to Said's overall scheme challenges the otherwise dangerously looming binarization in a profound way" (Chernertsky 32). However, putting Russian imperialism on the same political level as Western imperialism only continues, in an uncritical and reductionist way, the anti-communist ideology that has dominated the Eastern European space (including Romania and the Republic of There are two issues with this perspective. First, if each geopolitical empire (whether Soviet or Western) is located on the same level in terms of its colonial nature, this would mean that the Cold War's universe had been divided into two different world-systems, and the moment of 1991 would be the democratic "reunification" of the two global systems. For Wallerstein, who insists on the singularity of the capitalist world-system, this would be impossible to conceive. We will return to this later. Secondly, if the postcolonial discourse applies to both cases, it means that we can speak of a process of decolonization in the case of Eastern after 1991 an overcoming of the Soviet colonialism? Were they recolonized by the West? Or was it a form of self-colonization, according to Kiossef's terminology? Does this mean that, in this part of the world, decolonization coincides, paradoxically, with recolonization? Or that there are two (or even three) successive layers of colonization in this area? Is there a pre-capitalist identity where Russia and Eastern Europe can return by decolonializing themselves? The answer is still confusing and cannot be otherwise. What is important to note is that the situation of the post-Soviet states can hardly be explained by the postcolonialist grid, whether we use it against 2 "The worth and function of the different ideological discourses is not inherent and absolute, nor does is it depend on synchronization with a supposedly universal calendar of progress-rather they are the outcome of being situated in the particular historical and cultural context of their own evolution. This is why Marxism and liberalism may acquire similar emancipatory values in the circumstances provided by postcolonialism and postcommunism, respectively. One may, therefore, recognize a similar structure and situational value in the relationship between the two ideological discourses and the contexts of their occurrence" (Ștefănescu 40). communism or against capitalism. (At best, it would be more functional for the situation of the indigenous peoples of Eastern Russia.)

c) Back to Wallerstein
The reason for the failure of the postcolonial grid is also given by WReC: from Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, "the tendency to essentialize «the west» has become a staple ingredient, across the range of literary scholarship, of much of the work that (…) has been directed to «unthinking Eurocentrism»" (WReC 31-32). This "substitute[s] the civilisational category of 'the west' for the category of capitalist modernity as the object of their analysis -a substitution that has the inevitable effect of dematerialisation" (WReC, 29). Soviet imperialism is seen as the source of this economic, cultural, and literary backwardness, when, in fact, "the USSR had proposed an alternative model to capitalism, not to imperialism -and it had lost the ideological battle for structuring society" (Haskell & Mamlyuk 13). Indeed, inequality has always been at the heart of the capitalist world-system, whose geographical position is, for the time being, the West (or the Global North, according to other thinkers). World-literature works according to this economic adjustment. The literary systems in Romania and/or the Republic of Moldova do not belong to some proper former colonies, one in a more backward position than the other, but to two states that aspire to the same center. The only difference is that the access of the Bessarabian literary system to this center is made through the Romanian one.
For the Eastern postcolonial discourse (or, at least, for Bogdan Ștefănescu), the fragmentation of the USSR in the early 1990s represented the fall of an empire; thus, the transition -which is "not actually a temporal construct, but an ideological one" (Poenaru 11) 3 -consisted in the gradual return to "normality", i.e., capitalism.
The inherent effect of such a transition is the economic, cultural and, in particular, literary drawback of Eastern countries. The location of the Republic of Moldova closer to the irradiation center of Russian imperialism was thought to be the reason for it being one step behind Romania in cultural international competition. This essay seeks to change the perspective by returning to Wallerstein's original theory of the capitalist world-system. The most important nuance of the argument is that "progress" (in economics and literature) is also an ideological construct to which we should not attribute positive or negative values. The reason why the literary system of the Republic of Moldova is seen as "delayed" compared to that of Romania is given by the structure of global capitalism during the years 1990-2020. The same structure that enables the hierarchy between the center and the peripheries also grades the level of "development" of the semi-peripheries. Within the Eastern European semiperiphery, the chance of the literary system from the Republic of Moldova to impose itself on the planetary level consisted in its relative attachment to the Romanian system. We will return to the literary effects in the second part of this essay. As for the postcommunist situation, Wallerstein's 1993 opinion was as follows: The collapse of the Communist bloc is thus a double setback for the world-system.
For the USA, it is a geopolitical catastrophe, as it eliminates the only ideological weapon USA had to restrain the EC and Japan from pursuing their self-defined objectives. For the capitalist world-economy as an historical system, it marks the onset of an acute crisis, since it lifts the Leninist justification of the status quo without replacing it with any viable substitute (Wallerstein, Cold War 4).
History has proved that this impression was false: capitalism has passed the test. The

The Theme of Identity in Bessarabian Prose
This part of the essay refers to the prose of the Bessarabian authors written at the beginning of the millennium which has also circulated inside the Romanian literary system. An analysis of the editorial relationships between the two literary systems is still to be made; but, until a more in-depth study on this issue is realized, some general ideas can be stated, starting from the thesis of the structural distinction between the two Romanian-language literary systems. First of all, there are few Bessarabian publishing houses that have managed to "send" their writers beyond the Prut; the case of Cartier is the only one discussed below. Instead, Romanian publishing houses such as Polirom, Aula or Casa de Pariuri Literare (to mention only those that appear in this article, to which we can add Humanitas, Rao, Nemira, Trei and so on) have distributed books in both national systems. Secondly, the relationship of distinction and inequality between the two literary systems proposes a rethinking of the status of the authors who left the Republic of Moldova to move to Romania -therefore, they acquire the ambiguous status of emigrant writers, and their analysis as such is necessary and fruitful for future studies. It can be seen that the "transplant" often takes place from the Moldovan to the Romanian semiperiphery. Reverse cases are extremely rare (an example could be the poet Moni Stănilă from Timișoara). Thirdly, the central institutions of the two literary systems, which have existed since the communist period, are separate -i.e., the Writers'

Union of Romania and the Writers' Union of Moldova.
The analysis of the writings themselves starts from the central idea of WReC's fabulous study: the group of researchers claims that modernity (as a global trend towards artistic 'progress') is both singular and simultaneous. In the same way that world-capitalism sets an economic trend, world-literature points to an aesthetic direction: modernity -throughout history, we can identify a number of such global directions, such as realism, modernism, postmodernism and so on. By applying the Marxist theory of uneven and combined development, it can be observed that, especially in the peripheries of the world-system, modern literary genres coexist with archaic local forms. Thus, Moretti's theory of "foreign form, local material-and local form" (Moretti 57) is recontextualized as such: if we put various (semi-)peripheral European works (…) into conversation with one another and read them together without ignoring what we might call their nonsimultaneous simultaneity, we begin to discern the ways in which they typically register the 'local' and 'global' aspects of modernity as at one and the same time traumatic, destructive, stimulating and profoundly transformative (WReC 127).
The thesis of the present paper presupposes a less spectacular case: that of the relations between a couple of semi-peripheries that are in different stages of 'development'. The contrasts are less obvious: they are not to be conceived between exuberantly modern and exotically archaic forms. In any case, the subchapter on postcolonialism suggests that there is no stable identity or cultural background originating in Eastern Europe: the East has always been on the fringes of global capitalism, and their search for folkloric forms is a modern acquisition. However, Bessarabian literature is a case of "combined and uneven development" in which heterogeneity is less noticeable, since the stages of development are structurally closer. After the 2000s, Bessarabian authors have referred to Romania as the local center of modernity. All the authors used the narrative forms of the Romanian literary system to promote themselves beyond the Moldovan market. A peculiar case is that of Tatiana Țîbuleac, which we shall discuss in the last part of the article.

a.2. Memoirs. Ethnographic Realism
In the Romanian prose written after the 1990s, there was a revival of memoirs: In terms of nonfiction competition, the book market is dominated in the first postcommunist decade by a testimonial literature documenting a wide range of experiences, especially experiences of non-adherence and trauma in relation to communism (Iovănel 348) 12 .
In general, these are "prison memoirs" (Iovănel 349), which paint the prerevolutionary era in an antagonistic way. In a system dominated by such a quasifictional genre in the first decade of the transition, the volume Născut în URSS by Vasile Ernu is quite strange, as it resumes the memoirs' formula about communism and rewrites it with a nostalgic twist. The volume recreates Ernu's childhood in Odessa. The USSR does not appear as a fragmented formation, but as a social, political and ontological universe in itself, in which "geography and history make an inseparable tandem" (Ernu 139). The Bessarabian author's premise is that, "with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and communism, something was lost" (Ernu,9): whether this is about living together in a Soviet commune or it refers to the fetishist quality that certain products gained (from jeans to music) in a state economy, the writer revisits the post-Stalinist era before perestroika with a very specific candor.
The inclusion of Vasile Ernu in the Romanian literary system had the effect of transplanting content from another semi-periphery (the exotic perspective of the Moldovan-Ukrainian Ostalgie) through the prism of a Romanian literary form (90s' anticommunist memoirs). The same assertion strategy in the field is to be found in the 2021 volume Sălbaticii copii dingo. This time, the plot revolves around the actual period of perestroika in the city of Chișinău. It outlines a plausible sociography of the Moldovan capital during Gorbachev's regime, with gopniks, rockers and proletarians from ucilișce (Soviet neighborhoods). In this world, three main elements stand out: communism (which leaves a strong ideological imprint), the USSR (which centralizes all ethnic pluralism in the Russian area), and the middle class (which eventually takes over the narrator). However, in 2021, the Romanian literary system has dramatically changed, and the formula has become quite obsolete.
Another relevant literary trend in the Romanian space is that of ethnographic realism 13 . This 'subgenre' involves combining anthropological documentation with fictional inquiry. The authors are interested in representing marginal social milieus.
We can find a thematic correspondent for this genre in the "local-color fiction" of the

b) The Prose of Collective Memory
Within the Moldovan literary system, it can be seen that the tendency to fictionalize is still intact. Moreover, the authors often repeat the formula of the so-called novel of "collective memory", which was an important narrative form in post-communist "Something serious is happening to the young generation. They're impertinent, lazy, they lack ideals. Don't you know that all teenagers listen to western music? Which one of them still reads Marx or Lenin in his spare time?" (Ciocan 124) 14 . Another major conflict is between the dominant discourse of the time (which promulgates a false and idealized image of the socio-political situation) and the material reality. The latter is reflected by two characters. The first is the worker Vladimir Vladimirovich, who lives in a komunalka portrayed in completely different colors than the nostalgic ones of Vasile Ernu: "The common washbasin, with the painted glass window sill covered in cigarette buts and burnt matches, and the common kitchen, where day and night soups and teapots were boiling for the simple reason that the greasy stove had only two burners" (Ciocan 44) 15 . The second is Grişa Furdui, a poor peasant for whom the komunalka is actually an unattainable ideal. The conflict between discourse and reality highlights the discrepancies between living standards within the very same Republic, where only Feofanovici has a good position; however, this 14 "Se întâmplă ceva grav cu generația tânără. E impertinentă, leneșă, fără idealuri. Nu știți că toți adolescenții ascultă muzică occidentală? Care dintre ei îl citește pe Marx sau pe Lenin în timpul liber?" (My translation). 15 "Lavaboul comun, cu pervazul geamului vopsit acoperit de chiștoace și chibrituri arse, și bucătăria comună, în care zi și noapte dădeau în foc ciorbe și fierbeau ceainice din simplul motiv că aragazul slinos avea numai două arzătoare" (My translation). position will be shaken by post-Stalinist liberalization. Created inside the Bessarabian space and transplanted into the Romanian literary system, Ciocan's novel seeks to consolidate the anti-communist imaginary, but also to present the fluctuating identity of the Soviet man.
An interesting case is that of the novel Kinderland (2015), by Liliana Corobca.
This time, the diegesis is that of the post-communist rural world, which is affected by two phenomena: once, the precariousness in which the Moldovan space ended up after 1991, and, secondly, migration. It is impressive how this closed universe is described: the narratological perspective is that of a young girl who stays home to raise her brothers by herself, while her parents are working abroad. For this reason, it seems that the whole map to which the novel has access is extremely limited.
Romania does not even appear as a geographical reference point. Instead, there are the two major areas of emigration for the parents: on the one hand, the West (where the mother works), and on the other, the Yakutia region of Siberia (where the father emigrated). The two destinations (Italy and Russia) are in balance: between West and East lies Moldova, a country dominated by uncertainty and poverty. The narrator's projections of other social realities are alienating: "Is it true that there, in very rich and developed countries, children are no good? (…) With fathers, mothers, nannies, teachers, and they are rude and stupid, they let themselves be washed, fed, dressed, put to sleep, educated" (Corobca 61) 16 . Thus, there is an imagology of the abandoned child, whose identity is unimportant, as he lives in a closed universe, devoid of horizons, dominated by injustice.

c) The case of Tatiana Țîbuleac
What is surprising in Tatiana Țîbuleac's biographical journey is that she is a Moldovan author who emigrated to the West: the author was born in the Republic of Moldova, has lived in Paris since 2008 and published her two novels -Vara în care mama a avut ochii verzi [The Summer when My Mother's Eyes Were Green] (2017) and Grădina de sticlă (2019) -at the publishing house of Cartier, which has already been stated to be a "binational" publishing house, with consistent distribution in both Romanian-language literary systems. She is also the most prestigious author, being translated into languages such as Serbian, Polish, German, Bulgarian, Albanian or Macedonian, and also the winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019. This complex back-and-forth movement -from the Moldovan semi-periphery to the center, from the center to the Romanian semi-periphery, and vice versa -is of real interest for this article. Considering the theory of distinction and inequality between the two literary systems, we notice that the tendency of the Bessarabian authors is to approximate the formulas that circulate inside the West-Romanian space. But in the case of Țîbuleac, the formula is exotic for both literary systems: due to her affinity for lyricism and the refinement of the ellipse, the author is closer to the communist and postcommunist Russian literary system. This fact is also reflected in the content of the plot itself: the main character is a Moldovan orphan girl, adopted by a wealthy woman of Russian origin; the attempt of the adoptive mother to "teach" the girl to forget about her Romanian identity and original language is the main thread of the novel. If the first part of the book is situated in an unhistorical communist age in a multicultural Chișinău, the second part portrays the fall of socialism in the Eastern bloc and the 'loss' of the Russophile landmarks on which the protagonist's life was previously built. Her subsequently moving to Bucharest only deepens the drama regarding one's identity and language.
Tatiana Țîbuleac's case raises many issues: of course, we are dealing with a foreign form (Russian) and a local content (Moldovan); at the same time, both are alienated by the sounding board in which they were exported (Romania and Western Europe).
Tatiana Țîbuleac's literary success can be seen as an effect of some kind of exoticism: she creates a Slavic and Soviet artistic language by means of a literature that has access to the center of world-literature.

Conclusion
The present essay proposes a theory of (semi)peripheral interferences starting from the cases of Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The aim was to propose a materialistic picture of the economic, cultural and literary relations between the two countries. For this reason, viewing the literatures of the two countries as being different literary systems is useful, as it highlights the inequality between the semiperipheries of Eastern Europe. This theory of distinction and inequality does not abandon the international grid of recent literary studies (such as world literature and