Roxana Mirtea and Alec Iatan - Photographing the quiet beauty of coming-of-age in Transylvania

Transylvania continues to demonstrate its potential for photographers in a project described by Zoe Whitfield’s short article for i-D, posted on 16 December 2022.  Roxana Mirtea and Alec Iatan, who were born in Romania but currently live in Paris, decided to return to the country after a nine-year gap to photograph young people living in the rural parts of Transylvania.  This was a contrast to their previous work together on fashion shoots.

The series has the working title Transylvania Youth, and its aim is to show what it is like growing up in the region’s villages, and also to address a certain ambivalence about Romania by the pair, allowing them to reconnect with their homeland after years away.  It was not an entirely arbitrary location to choose; Iatan has relatives there and they had both visited previously, but they do bring an outsider’s eye to bear.

Shot using a mixture of colour and black-and-white, the subjects, found through vigorous networking, are posed in natural surroundings wearing everyday clothing, with no sign of ethnic costume and no attempt to show them in an unduly impoverished setting.  They are teenagers who happen to be living in the countryside.  It seems from Whitfield’s interview that Mirtea and Iatan concentrated on the Saxon villages, so it is unclear to what extent their portraits are representative of Transylvania more generally.

The background in fashion photography is noticeable, and the images are attractively presented, but we get little sense from these samples of how the young people live.  The article’s title hints at kinship with Margaret Mead’s book on Samoa, but on the evidence so far this is not going to be an ethnographic treatment of Transylvanian adolescence.

Having spent a month moving around during the first leg of the project, Mirtea and Iatan intend to continue it and eventually produce a book.  Perhaps that will broaden the scope to provide context and explore how it feels to grow up and reach adulthood in a place with fewer opportunities than elsewhere.

During the interview, Iatan indicates a fracture: ‘There was an interesting connection between people and the environment when I was growing up, but it’s disappearing.  In another five years, things will change more….’  If the timescale is correct, their work will take on an historical significance sooner rather than later, but they will need to move away from a fashion aesthetic if they want to explore that evolution in any depth.

 

Zoe Whitfield. ‘Photographing the quiet beauty of coming-of-age in Transylvania’, i-D, 16 December 2022:

https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/bvmkaa/photographing-coming-of-age-in-transylvania

 

 

Operation Bucharest, by Jack Chick

American evangelist Jack Chick produced a lengthy series of cartoon booklets promoting his brand of Christianity, of which Operation Bucharest (No. 1 in the Crusaders series, 1974) was the first to be printed in full colour.  Produced during the Cold War, its stereotyped depiction of the communist authorities’ attitude to Christianity might have felt plausible to its intended audience.  The success of the series in promoting Christianity among the young has been attested to, however crude the message to a more dispassionate eye.

In winter-bound Romania, the ideological climate as cold as the weather, a group of Christians meet in secret to avoid persecution by the state, which is well aware of the massive impact Christianity will have on their godless creed if people are able to hear about it.  They appear to be Protestants, much like Chick, rather than the Orthodox Christians one would expect to find in Romania.

Unfortunately, they have been betrayed by a Judas.  They are arrested and brutalised, and the last Bible in the area is seized.  The remaining Christians need another copy, but someone has to get it to them.  A couple of American Christians, dubbed The Crusaders, are enlisted in the US to smuggle a microfilm of the holy book, translated into Romanian, into the country where it will be used to print more copies at a secret location.

Timothy Clark and James Carter are the unlikely partners.  Timothy is a white multilingual ex-Green Beret; James is black and streetwise, a former drug dealer and militant (as if the two are synonymous) who saw the light in about ten seconds when he met an elderly preacher who was not scared of him – it is noteworthy how quickly a conversion can be effected in the most unlikely of circumstances once the truth, of which the hearer had been unaware, is revealed.

James and Timothy are the epitome of muscular Christianity, blending piety with an ability to get out of trouble, as well as walking examples of the power of Christ to reach any heart, however unlikely.  Aside from the piety, they put me in mind of The Pretenders, the TV series starring the odd couple pairing of Roger Moore and Tony Curtis which aired in 1971.  The choice of James Carter may have been judged unfortunate when Jimmy Carter became president in 1977.

Timothy happens to be the nephew of the American ambassador in Paris, and Colonel Cherkov (which probably isn’t a play on words) of the KGB, learning of the trip but not realising the purpose – taking their stated reason as going on holiday at face value – hatches a plan to ensnare him in a honey trap by deploying the beautiful agent Sofia, then embarrass his uncle by making it look as though it was the uncle, not Timothy, who had committed the indiscretion.

In terms of politics, the Russian KGB is firmly in charge in Romania.  There is no mention of Ceaușescu or the Securitate and at one point Sofia says ‘What do you think of our Russian soldiers?’  One gets the impression Chick thought Romania was in the Soviet Union, but it is reasonable to assume he did little background research.  Why he chose Romania rather than another Eastern Bloc country is unclear, as Christians might have been depicted as having a hard time in any of them.  Perhaps he considered it to have a particularly brutal image.

The duo fly out to Paris and then travel on to Bucharest by train with their precious microfilm.  En route, Cherkov’s goons try to attack James to get him out of the way, but come off worse from their encounter with the brother.  Meanwhile, the talented Sofia goes to work on Timothy, but while he clearly likes her, to Cherkov’s increasing frustration he is disinclined to do anything that could be turned into a scandal.

Worse, during one of these trysts Sofia listens to Timothy quote scripture and she is promptly converted, along with the cameraman who was set to record the grand seduction.  Cherkov and his subordinate hear the conversation recorded on film, but they are beyond redemption it seems, and are not themselves converted.  The colonel is naturally furious at the failure of his plans; he would have been even more so had he known about the microfilm.

Sofia is carted off to the Gulag (no news of the cameraman), though as Chick tells us at the end, she may suffer now, but she will be Saved, unlike the communists.  The film is safely delivered, and the Romanian Christians can print their Bibles, a press and paper apparently not being an issue.  They only have to wait 15 years for the regime to disappear, and they can read it to their heart’s content without fear of the door being kicked in.

 

For more on the Chick Tracts, see Peter Laws’ article ‘The Terrifying World of Jack Chick’, Fortean Times, issue 389, February 2020, pp. 32-39.

Nicholas J R White: Carpathia

The cover of the April 2019 issue of the Royal Photographic Society’s Journal advertises ‘Nicholas J R White: A journey into the Romanian Wilderness’.  The article (pp. 250-56) is an interview with Tom Seymour about White’s Carpathia, documenting the efforts to develop a wilderness reserve in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains.

To enable him to undertake the project, in 2017 he was awarded an RPS/The Photographic Angle Environmental Awareness Bursary.  An enthusiast for the concept of rewilding, he worked with the Foundation Conservation Carpathia (FCC), a group of dedicated rangers who are attempting to undo the deleterious effects of logging and hunting to create a rich habitat for wildlife.

Patrols to deter illegal hunting and logging go hand-in-hand with the restoration of the landscape, constituting the largest rewilding undertaking in Europe.  To understand how the rangers work he visited them a number of times, including in winter, and built a strong relationship.

He recorded them with a large-format camera as they went about their daily activities, careful not to disrupt their routine even when he was unclear precisely what they were doing.  As well as accompanying the rangers, he used motion-sensor cameras to capture nocturnal images of the wildlife.

White says the rangers were pleased he was not there to record traces of the country’s turbulent past but wanted to convey a positive image highlighting the country’s beauty.  He notes that rewilding is not merely about the love of the outdoors: there are economic implications, with agriculture and construction dependent on a sustainable ecosystem.

We hear much about the despoliation of the Carpathian forests, less about the endeavours of groups like the FCC to combat it in the face of difficult odds.  White’s admiration for their dedication is clear.  Their work deserves to be better known, and he has done a valuable job in promoting it.

More information on White’s Carpathia can be found on his website:

https://www.nicholasjrwhite.co.uk/work/carpathia

An article on White’s project appeared in the New York Times, 15 March 2021, ‘The Making of a “European Yellowstone”’.

Greuceanu, by Stelian Ţurlea

Greuceanu: Novel with a Policeman (Greuceanu, roman cu un politist, 2007), by Stelian Țurlea, is a melding of Petre Ispirescu’s nineteenth-century fairy-tale with a modern crime novel.  Set in a provincial Romanian town, Greuceanu, the titular policeman, takes on the local gang bosses, their wives and foot soldiers.  They are thriving through intimidation and bribery, aided by police indifference and judicial and political corruption.  Their magnificent houses and lavish lifestyles are in marked contrast to the standard of living experienced by most people.

Greuceanu is a lowly member of the force who spends most of his time working in the archives.  This gives him an understanding of the way the town works, and he can see how the tentacles of criminality can be found anywhere there is money to be made.  He stumbles on an illegal gem-polishing operation that has severe consequences for the health of those who are employed in it.  Inspired by the new mayor and his lovely daughter, who have a genuine desire to clean up the town and are not afraid to put their personal safety on the line, he decides to look into it.

The trail leads to an unpleasant trio, the Matache brothers, and their wives, who collectively control the town, having taken advantage of the post-1989 freedoms to build up a criminal empire, such that there are those citizens who pine for the good old days, when social order prevailed.  Greuceanu goes head-to-head with the hoodlums, and as his successes gradually accumulate, he builds a reputation for his ability to get things done, despite the adversity he regularly faces.  Having dealt with the diamond polishing, Greuceanu uncovers a pyramid scheme, and slowly he dismantles the organisation.

Although he is likeable and honest, our hero is by no means possessed of great strength or, according to his own account, supernormal intelligence.  He is an ordinary chap, but he is marked out from his colleagues by being tenacious, resourceful, loyal to the town, possessed of a strong sense of right and wrong, and with the support of friends, and to an extent his immediate boss, who help him achieve his goals.  He also has, it must be said, quite a lot of luck.

As a result of his labours, involving significant personal risk, he emerges, as in all good fairy stories, triumphant – good having vanquished evil – and with the love of the fair maiden, in this case the mayor’s brave and beautiful daughter.  The implication, though, is that while the Matache extended family may have been vanquished, there will be other villains to take their place while existing civic structures are inadequate to contain them.  A just society requires more than the occasional star crime-fighter to keep at bay those who would exploit the system for their own benefit.

The 2015 Profusion translation has a brief introduction by Mike Phillips.  He draws out the parallels between the fairy story and Țurlea’s novel, particularly the zmei, ogres and witches faced by the original Greuceanu, and the mobsters in modern-day Romania.  They have in common a grasping nature which seeks to possess at the expense of the wider society.  In both stories they are overcome, and a happy ending ensues.  In dark times, it is always nice to see the good guys win.

My Tired Father, by Gellu Naum

Surrealist Gellu Naum’s My Tired Father was published in Romanian in 1972 and translated into English in 1999.  Cryptically fragmentary and dreamlike, it is a free-flowing impressionistic series of sentences which seem to settle briefly on a meaning before whirling away again, leaving the reader trying to establish connections and find a through-line.  The title suggests it is about the author’s father, but it is rather the narrator’s story and his relationship with an actress called Catherine Mahoney.  Another character, Dr Abend (evening?) pops up from time to time, but his connection is hazy.  The narrator, a professional musician, marries Catherine and they live together for over a decade and have a child, until he leaves and she suddenly dies.

It is prefaced by an alleged interview conducted by the translator James Brook, though as he admits Naum was not available for a conversation, it would appear he made it up, claiming to have obtained Naum’s ‘telepathic consent’ for the exercise to be conducted over ‘the ether’.  Why he didn’t just call it an introduction and include Naum’s pretend responses as his own insights is a puzzle.  The result is informative, but it is a laborious conceit, and even ‘Naum’ becomes irritated with Brook’s questions.  What the author (who died in 2001) thought of having words put in his mouth is not recorded.  Perhaps Brook thought he was being appropriately surrealist, but it misfires.

Cast as a ‘pohem’, there is little poetic about My Tired Father, and it might as readily be called prohse.  One approaches a surrealist work with the expectation it will not make obvious sense (or if one is less charitably inclined that it will be unnecessarily obscure), and this one can feel self-indulgent.  But it is short, pithy, and the narrative flows smoothly, carrying the reader along.  One puts the book down with an intuition that some insight into the narrator’s life has been revealed, even if it is not clear what it is, and leaving traces which stick in the mind.  Given the time and place of its creation, it is probably a miracle it exists at all.

Romanian photographs in the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society

Saveta feeds the pig, but not in the Guardian
(Judy Ford)

The September/October 2022 issue of the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society has a section looking at newly-minted Fellows of the Society, with examples of their work.  One of these is a double-page spread of photographs taken in Romania by Paul Hassell FRPS, submitted in the travel photography category (pp. 534-5).  Although it is hard to judge on the basis of the 20 images making up his Fellowship portfolio (which can be found on the RPS website), including three in the magazine plus the cover, and accompanied by an introduction and a statement of intent, I found Hassell’s images problematic.

His statement of intent is couched in pessimistic terms:

‘These are pictures taken in the remoter villages in Romania. They hope to illustrate the challenge of everyday life in such an environment. …Time stands still here, the change comes only from the gradual moving away of the young to work in bigger towns and cities and abandon their roots. The older residents struggle to survive, living from hand to mouth with their traditions, their beliefs and history. These are photographs that aim to depict survival, each one being a window on how everyday life unfolds…’

We do not learn whereabouts in Romania these ‘remoter villages’ are, implying all remote areas are much alike, as opposed to having strong regional identities.  The stress is on stasis and survival, and tending towards poverty porn.  Most of the photographs show elderly individuals in a bleak snowy rural landscape, indicating the desertion of the communities by younger people.  Even the young man in the photograph captioned ‘Boy with horse’ isn’t particularly boyish.

In fact, the other two captions are very odd as well, and indicate a misplaced sense of irony trading on stereotypes of deprivation.  ‘Romanian market’ shows an elderly man standing in from of a lorry with a cow inside and a pile of felled trees behind him; not much of a market one might think.  ‘Local off licence’ features an old woman sitting in a ramshackle hut with what looks like a home-made still making illicit alcohol.

Hassell’s subjects are passive; his statement of intent concludes: ‘...engagement allowed a relation of character and community, but also circumstance, which is sadly based on their inability to change.’  Perhaps the problem is not their inability to change, but an economic system that depopulates the countryside because, with occasional exceptions, there is a lack of will to provide local opportunities to allow communities to prosper.  Hinting at a lack of insight, he mentions walking in the snow and hearing the sound of chainsaws, assuming it is the locals preparing for ‘the long winter ahead’, when it could as easily have been illegal loggers at work, unfortunately a thriving occupation.

The introduction notes that having made several trips to Romania, he knew ‘there was a narrative to be told’, as if somehow these issues had not been noticed before.  Hardly anyone smiles in the 20 photographs of the Fellowship submission because it would not fit the narrative of isolated hardship.  How this project was considered worthy of a Fellowship is something of a mystery because there is nothing new here, merely portraits betraying a voyeuristic, privileged perspective, for all the talk of the generous warmth of the people he met.

 

A much better example of how to photograph in Romania was actually provided in the May/June 2022 issue of the RPS Journal, in which Judy Ford LRPS has a much longer spread (pp. 290-301), a project supported by the 2020 Joan Wakelin Bursary.  Also focusing on rural communities, while not airbrushing the problems she goes deeper than Hassell to show a more rounded picture of life in the Romanian countryside.  For a start we are told this is a specific region – Maramureș – as opposed to Hassell’s generic ‘remoter villages’, and it is obviously not populated solely by old people and sheep, plus the odd horse, pig, chicken and cow.

Ford’s accompanying essay sets the rhythms of life in this region in a wider context: the price of milk is so low it is fed to pigs to fatten them; sheep are risky because of the depredations of bears, wolves and wild boar.  She mentions issues of deforestation, depopulation, and the encroachment of unsympathetic dwellings made from concrete which are generally funded by the middle generation who have worked in western Europe, and are often left unfinished.

Her primary interest is the generations of women, particularly the older ones, who are mostly widows, and how they manage with little state support and inadequate healthcare.  It is by no means a sanitised view.  With families gone to larger cities or abroad, many of whom do not return, loneliness and poverty are significant problems.  The middle generation of women face their own problems, juggling what few local employment opportunities are available with working abroad for part of the year, while bringing up families.

For the middle and younger generations, caught between the traditions of their forebears and a broader European perspective, exposure to western European fashions and goods tends to undermine the values espoused by the older generation.  There is a neat photograph of young girls at a religious event focusing on their footwear, with a pair of strappy heeled shoes among the opinci.  This is not a static world, but one where custom and modernity mingle in not always obvious ways.  Theirs is a difficult choice, to stay or seek wider horizons elsewhere, especially for those who would like a professional career.

Ford notes that in some respects society has gone backwards since 1989.  This is not only in terms of mass migration, but also because under Ceaușescu there was investment in rural infrastructure.  With his fall much of that was swept away in a tide of privatisation, and large companies squeezed out small agricultural producers.  Schools closed, reducing educational, and therefore career, opportunities.  Over 30 years on, the legacy remains, and the future is uncertain.

However, despite these problems, the local economy and society still function, underpinned in Ford’s view by three characteristics: ‘a strong connection with land and animals, a rich traditional culture and deep-rooted faith.’  One might add a toughness of character.  The photographs accompany text which is balanced, Ford having achieved a connection with her subjects far removed from Hassell’s uniformly dreary view of stoical individuals in a grimy landscape.

The most significant difference with Hassell’s photographs is that whereas his subjects are anonymous, the captions describing the situation and reinforcing the sense of stagnation, Ford nearly always provides the names of the individuals she photographs, suggesting a greater degree of empathy with them.  One ends up feeling that whereas for Ford the emphasis is on those she photographs, for Hassell it is rather about his progression as a photographer.

 

The Joan Wakelin Bursary is jointly administered by the RPS and the Guardian, and a heavily abbreviated version of Ford’s RPS article appeared in the newspaper on 9 May 2022.  Its editorial choices compare unfavourably to the tone of the RPS Journal article and it substitutes a pessimistic slant undercutting her concluding sentiment: ‘For those of us aiming to live more quietly and sustainably on this planet, there is wisdom to be found here.  My journey in Romania has been one of self-discovery – of unearthing values buried by the noise of our frantic world.’  The Guardian does have several of the same images, or similar, but omits some showing women being active, like Saveta feeding her pig, and adds a number not in the RPS article aligning more with Hassell’s approach than Ford’s supportive message.

To begin with, the title – ‘There is wisdom here’: Romania’s last peasant women – a photo essay’ – indicates the sub-editor has decided this is a dying way of life.  To reinforce this impression, there is a photograph taken in an abandoned house, another of an oil lamp, the caption referring to the lack of electricity and running water in many older dwellings.  A couple of posed portraits of wizened elderly women, one wearing traditional dress, in this context symbolise the ‘last peasant women.’  A blouse hanging from the ceiling, photographed through reflections, takes on a ghostlike transparency, as if its owner had simply vanished.  None of these images appears in the RPS article.

The photograph of the girls’ footwear at church has been omitted; instead there is a shot of a different group of children at a religious festival, wearing traditional costume.  Ford’s subtle point about old and new coexisting has been replaced by an image of a cultural practice that can be read as quaintly exotic, and sure to disintegrate under the pressure of external influences.

The sense of a couple of Ford’s sentences have been changed as well.  Where she says some teenagers and young women, ‘have older sisters already working in western Europe and are happy to work on the family homestead while other family members are abroad,’ the Guardian version says they ‘had older sisters already working in western Europe and were likely to follow the same path,’ the opposite of what Ford had written, as if young people cannot wait to flee the countryside for a better life abroad.

The other major change relates to a reference to Ceaușescu.  While conceding life in rural communities had been hard under the communist regime, Ford points out that there were positive aspects.  Keen not to say anything good about the pre-1989 period, the Guardian sub-editor has substituted: ‘Their culture survived because the communities were too small and remote for the traditions to be eradicated by Gheorghiu-Dej [not mentioned by Ford in the RPS version] and Ceaușescu under communism.’  While it is nice to have a spread in a major daily, Ford might be forgiven for being annoyed at the cavalier manner in which her analysis has been distorted to suit the Guardian’s agenda.

Și scrisorile lui/And his Letters, directed by Tudor Pojnicsan

Tudor Pojnicsan’s 2021 short film has a cast of two, Carla Graur and Dragoș Pleșa, though Pleșa carries the bulk of the action.  It is completely without dialogue, and the viewer’s inability to penetrate further than the images in attempting to probe their ambiguities fuels a sense of unease.

A young man is out in the woods taking photographs, the sound of birds filling the air.  A smooth transition to the lobby of his block is accompanied by an electronic score which becomes increasingly unsettling.  In his flat he drinks a glass of milk and examines the images on a laptop.  He clearly lives alone, and the flat is sparsely-furnished.  Economically, Pojnicsan has established the man’s isolation and focus on photography.

As part of his routine, he checks his mailbox in the lobby on his return.  One day he finds a letter, and the camera lingers on the boxes, suggesting they will play a significant role.  The man glances at the letter, but is more interested in studying the photographs on his computer.

Another day a second letter arrives but he does not immediately open it, instead looking thoughtful while drinking milk, before turning to his photographs.  A series of letters arrive; they are unsealed and we see they have no address, so presumably are hand-delivered.  He tries to ignore the box, but is drawn in the night to see if there is a letter, which there is.  After lying in bed reading it, he holds it against his chest.

One day as he checks his box a woman comes down the stairs and goes to hers a little way along the row.  We remember we saw her doing the same the first time he looked in his box – when there was no letter present.  She hands him a letter, and in the next scene we see them in bed together.  We assume they were love letters and have served their purpose.

But while he is asleep she looks at them, not something one would expect if she had written them herself.  When he comes into the block there is no letter in the box, and he is withdrawn as the pair eat, shaking her hand off as she touches him.  Are the letters after all from someone else?  He continues to look for letters in the box as he comes into the block, appearing anxious.

Now he is eating on his own, so it seems she has left him.  He breaks his glass, and for the only time, apart from in the wood, we hear diegetic sound as it smashes.  Then he trashes the flat before lying on the floor clutching the letters.  Recovering, he gets on with life.  But on his way out he finds a letter in the box, this time with a stamp.

He takes it to the woods where a woman is standing in the distance.  Resealing the letter, he walks towards the spot where she had been (when the camera indicates his point of view, she is no longer visible).  Is it the woman with whom he slept, and is it she who wrote the letters?  We have no insight into his interior life, and can only guess at what might happen next.  Whatever it is will happen out of sight.

Yet as he disappears into the distant trees, a hint that the resolution, whatever form it takes, will be positive is provided by the score.  Birdsong and the electronic music coexist briefly in the wood before the latter fades out and we are left with only natural sounds.  Real life trumps the artificial; direct experience is better than the mediated.

The film is available on the Cinepub YouTube platform:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eewKj_VmMMo

Moldova in the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest

The Eurovision Song Contest is not something I would normally pay attention to, but these are not normal times.  This year the money was always on Ukraine to win, and rightly so.  A surprise was the UK coming second after a disastrous run in recent years (a positive result possibly also partially connected, albeit obliquely, with the situation in Ukraine).  However, another song caught my eye, and while it was not the Romanian one, there is a clear connection to Romania.

Zdob şi Zdub and the Advahov Brothers performed the Moldovan entry Trenulețul (The Train).  It was not written for the contest but was originally released in December 2021 as a promotion to celebrate the reopening of the rail connection between Chișinău and Bucharest.  Ostensibly about connecting people, which is entirely within the Eurovision ethos, it is also about the link between Moldova and Romania.  Roman Iagupov, the lead singer of Zdob şi Zdub, has denied any overt political intent, maintaining it is about the musician’s life, but it is difficult not to read a broader significance into the lyrics:

Merge trenul, parcă zboară
Dintr-o țară-n altă țară
Merge și nu poate pricepe
Care țară? Unde-ncepe?
Țară veche, țară nouă
Parcă-i una, parcă-s două
Ba aparte, ba-mpreună
Parcă-s două, parcă-i una

The train’s going, it’s like it’s flying
From one country to another
It is going but can’t understand
Which country? Where do you start?
Old country, new country
It’s like one, it’s like two
Separately, together
It’s like two, it’s like one

It isn’t only the train that finds the border arbitrary.  Despite Iagupov’s assertion to the contrary, perhaps made in order not to fall foul of the ostensible Eurovision ban on political content, the song can clearly be seen to emphasise the common heritage of Romania and Moldova, symbolised both by the railway and by the amusing appearance in the promotional video of a carpet featuring the portrait of Stephen the Great, a hero in both countries.  It also combines past and present musically in its style and with the refrain – sung in English – of ‘Hey ho! Let’s go! Folklore and Rock’n’roll’, emphasising both local tradition and a western-leaning (in these times meaning anti-Russian) focus; as the words say, ‘the train’s route is East to West.’

Jauntily upbeat and very funny as it is, it takes little effort to see that the Moldovan song reflects unhappiness with Russia’s behaviour, especially as there have been hints Moldova might be in its sights, after the possible annexation of the pro-Russian breakaway region of Transnistria to create a new front from which to attack Odesa.  Russian propaganda, not noted for its subtlety, has been making the preposterous claim that Moldova, Ukraine and Romania are planning to invade Transnistria, as if those countries haven’t got enough to think about.  There have been false flag explosions in Transnistria (which hosts Russian ‘peacekeepers’) blamed by Tiraspol on Ukraine.  Meanwhile, the Kremlin has trotted out the familiar line about the Russian population in Moldova being ‘oppressed’, an assertion previously used as a pretext for interference.  Any timetable to take over Transnistria and then possibly Moldova has been slowed, if not derailed, by the mixture of Ukrainian fortitude and Russian ineptitude witnessed in recent months, but the danger has not completely receded and there are still concerns in Moldova about Russia’s intentions.

So what of the Romanian effort in this year’s contest?  Performed by someone who goes by the corporate-sounding name WRS, it’s enjoyably light and poppy, and will certainly get the guests out on the dancefloor at a wedding.  But it is bland, with no national character I could detect, and is mostly sung in English, with a chorus in Spanish for some reason.  Trenulețul, by contrast full of character, is actually more Romanian than the Romanian one, which says much about Moldovan identity and aspirations.

In the event, Moldova finished a respectable seventh, with 253 points, reflecting Zdob şi Zdub and the Advahov Brothers’ ability to combine a serious theme with entertainingly energetic music (Romania came in eighteenth, with 65 points).  It may be that an unintended consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, among a number, will be unification between Romania and Moldova: if the Moldovan Eurovision song is anything to go by, the train has already left the station.

The Accident, by Mihail Sebastian

The Accident (Accidentul, 1940) was Mihail Sebastian’s final work published under his own name.  Its elegiac tone belies the author’s personal turmoil and the extraordinary political situation through which he was living as a Jew in an increasingly authoritarian anti-Semitic state.  Its production was even more traumatic for him as he lost the original manuscript and had to rewrite it.  Although it was the fourth (and last) of his novels, it was the first to be published in English, in 2011.

The accident in question happens to Nora, a 34-year-old teacher of French.  On the 18th of December, 1934, she jumps off a Bucharest tram as it is still moving, slips, and falls over on the pavement, briefly stunning herself and hurting her knee.  A crowd gathers, out of which a man picks her up and unenthusiastically helps her to her apartment.  He is Paul, a lawyer, who is still in shock from the end of an intense relationship with Ann, a rising artist and a manipulative and unfaithful lover.  The breakup has left him obsessing about her and feeling apathetic about life.

Meeting in such unusual circumstances will have implications for both Nora and Paul.  Nora is an independent spirit, sensitive to others, and relaxed where Paul is tightly-wound.  After Paul helps her, then abruptly leaves her flat, Nora seeks him out.  She learns it is his 30th birthday, not an event he was planning to mark, and she decides to organise a surprise celebration for him.  They sleep together, but still he is emotionally absent.  She is concerned that his disengagement, marked by an annoying habit of shrugging his shoulders, hints at a suicidal impulse, but she also finds something worthwhile in him.  It is obvious she is far better for him than Ann was, if he could only see it.

Despite having known him for such a short time, she makes it her goal to rescue him from his depression, and the obvious way is to teach him to ski, something he had never done before.  Overcoming his ambivalence, she kits him out and takes him to the mountains near Brașov in Transylvania for the Christmas holiday.  It is a popular winter sports region and they find it difficult to secure accommodation.  They finally board with a Saxon pair who have a troubled family history, a young boy, Gunther Grodeck, and his gruff older companion, Hagen.

As the four become closer the story expands, with Nora extending her calming influence to Gunther as the four (and dog) absorb the peaceful atmosphere of the mountains and develop an affection for each other.  Initially resistant to instruction, Paul gradually learns to ski, and in its freedom is able to let go of his personal obsessions by rejecting his isolation.  Then, under Nora’s tutelage, he has to learn self-discipline, and to temper his wild feeling of freedom with the skills necessary to ski safely.  He has to learn balance.

So, after a few hiccups and some backsliding, with Nora frequently convinced Paul is going to leave, and Paul not sure whether to stay either, putting them into a state that is ‘together, yet alone’, the therapy proves successful.  Paul is seduced by the pleasure of skiing, an antidote to his unhealthy self-absorption and city-bred ennui.  He has learned to live in the present and not be weighed down by the past. 

At the end of the holiday, a chance meeting with Ann in a Brașov cafe demonstrates to all concerned that he has been cured of his obsession, now appreciating the difference between self-centred and deep selfless love.  The novel ends on an optimistic note with Paul purified by his time in the clean mountain air (it is no accident Nora’s surname is Munteanu, containing munte – mountain) and free of Ann’s unhealthy influence.  At the dawn of the new year, Paul and Nora are able to look to the future, not realising how few years of peace are left to them.

Stephen Henighan, who translated the novel, supplies an afterword outlining the cultural and political environment, and the trajectory of Sebastian’s career, as the context for a discussion of The Accident.  He points to a subtle hint of the coming conflict at the end of the novel when Paul does not appreciate that a bland headline in a Hungarian-language newspaper is a harbinger of the political deterioration during the rest of the decade.  It was the beginning of a period that was to end in tragedy for Sebastian; after the privations he had experienced during the war, the loss of his livelihood and the betrayals of friends. he died in a traffic accident, in 1945, aged 37.

In contrast to the impending catastrophe, as well as the romantic story of Nora and Paul, Sebastian depicts Romania at peace, before war and dictatorships blighted it for half a century.  It is a place where Romanians and Saxons live side by side, while maintaining their ethnic identities.  Bucharest, ‘the Paris of the East’, is thriving and cosmopolitan, full of life, like any other European capital.  Skiing and the mountains of Romania were important for Sebastian, becoming more so as his personal situation worsened, and he transmits this love through the story of Nora saving Paul from himself.

Although I have never tried it. I’ve always thought skiing possibly one of the dullest sports one can engage in, but having read Sebastian’s exuberant descriptions of skiing as a social activity I can now see its merits.  Not enough to want to strap on a pair of skis, admittedly, but I understand why Nora thought it would be good for Paul: vigorous activity can be an antidote to a feeling of dejection, distracting the sufferer and encouraging a positive attitude.  Paul was lucky to meet Nora in his hour of need, and even luckier that she possessed the cure for what ailed him.