Adrian Marino

This year has appeared “Viaţa unui om singur” (A lonely man’s life), the memories of Adrian Marino. This book has triggered a lot of fuzz in Romania’s literary circles, even if its author has been dead for years. In fact, it was his choice that this volume should be published only five years after his death, in order to put a distance between his personality (bitterly contested in Romania) and his literary legacy.

But who was Adrian Marino and why should anybody be interested in his legacy, literary or non-literary? Why his ideas about politics, history, literature, sociology, culture, would be a point of interest for a non-Romanian speaker?

The answer is simple: Adrian Marino was an European in the first place and a Romanian only in the second place. Moreover, he was an Eastern European, a keen observer and witness of what Eastern Europe is (and used to be). His life and work is a testimony of this very special part of the world: from Finland to Greece, from Germany to Romania, from Slovenia to Ukraine, Easterners consider themselves “European” – but nobody else thought they belong to “true” Europe. In the best case, we were seen as half-breed. In the worst, we were considered merely “Soviets”!

This was the tragedy lived by Adrian Marino and others (Adam Michnik, Lev Kopelev, Vaclav Hável): intellectuals whose “europenity” was denied in Western Europe and considered a guilt in their own countries (by communist authorities or – in respect of Greece – by religious authorities; Finland is a happy exception).

Adrian Marino’s life: born in Iaşi, incarcerated for 14 years by communists, forcibly relocated in Cluj, making his debut at 44, an active and very industrious scientist for the rest of his life, one of the best Romanian specialists in theory of literature, the most translated Romanian critic ever, a polyglot in control of 7 languages (French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Romanian), he used to write and publish in three of them (French, Romanian, English), a fierce autonomist who hated Bucharest (or what he used to call “Bucharest cultural mafia”) and supported the other cultural “powers” in Romania (Timişoara, Cluj, Iaşi), a staunch anti-communist and anti-fascist, a lucid mind who despised nationalism and chauvinism, both Romanian and Hungarian (the two main nationalisms in Romania), a lifelong friend of Poland and enemy of Russia, Adrian Marino was also the driving force of Cahiers roumains d’études littéraires, one of the few free literary magazines in East. Of course, this is just a sketch of this unique personality, which wouldn’t be objective without his (many, heavy) shortcomings.

He was an incredible difficult person. Extremely overconfident, moody, bad-tempered, touchy, vindictive, almost irrational in “disliking” of some people (Gabriel Liiceanu, for instance), ludicrously praising others (Sorin Antohi, Dan Pavel, Stelian Tănase) who didn’t deserve at all to be praised. Ungrateful to his former master (George Călinescu), to the point of unfairly attacking his origin (“bastard of a Gipsy illiterate home-servant”), resentful to all the other who mean something in Romanian culture, no matter of their real or imaginary value (Constantin Noica, Mircea Eliade, Eugen Lovinescu, Andrei Pleşu, Paul Goma, Emil Cioran, Marin Preda, Nichita Stănescu, Marin Sorescu, and the list could go on indefinitely – it is enless!). He also had more than a grudge against some personalities from other cultural spaces (Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean Starobinski, Claude Karnouth, Rita Schober, Jean Rousset, René Étiemble, Guillermo Diaz-Plaja, Robert André and many, many others). To be fair, he hold in esteem a lesser number of “names”: Benedetto Croce, René Wellek, Claudio Guillén, Walter Sutton, Umberto Eco, Antonio Candido, Iordan Chimet (this last one is Romanian, but better known abroad than in his own country).

Yes, Adrian Marino was a great cultural figure. And, yes, he was a very lone man. But my feeling is that he loved to be alone. Maybe loneliness is a common fate for this kind of strong characters.

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