In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov‘s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.
Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s captivation with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected.”His most vital scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs,and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,” he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.”
The enchantment with papilionoidean genitalia seems fitting. Blinding, Cărtărescu’s trilogy that critics voted Romania’s novel of the decade in 2010, is conceived as a butterfly in shape, with the first and third parts the wings and the middle book the body. In The Left Wing, the first volume which Penguin is publishing almost 30 years after it appeared in Romanian, there are butterflies fluttering on every othre page. But they are rarely ethereal beings.
Part memoir, part dreamscape, one characteristically surreal scene sees a group of medieval villagers discover a swarm of gigantic butterflies frozen under the ice of the Danube river like woolly mammoths, 20 paces long and 40 paces wide. They marvel at the insects’ beauty – and then proceed to hack away the ice and boil them like lobsters, for a sumptuous feast.
“Nabokov was a fine artist, but he had fewer connections with fantastical literature and surrealism than I have,” says Cărtărescu in a video call from his flat in Bucharest. “The image of the huge butterflies under the ice of the danube could have come from Salvador Dalí or from Giorgio de Chirico, artists with whose imagination I have always felt a kinship.”
The Blinding trilogy has been described as doing for bucharest what James Joyce’s Ulysses did for Dublin,turning the author’s home city into a character in its own right,but it’s the kind of character one might discover engaged in some unspeakable act in the corner of a Bruegel painting. From his fifth-floor apartment overlooking the Ştefan cel Mare boulevard, Cărtărescu’s narrator fantasises about the city’s green bronze statues descending from their plinths.Arczuk and Bulgaria’s Georgi Gospodinov are not just admired by critics but fervently read. “I think you can talk today of a sort of a boom of eastern writers, which I’m very proud to be part of,” Cărtărescu says. “You could compare it with what happened in the 1960s and 70s with writers from Latin America like García Márquez, Vargas Llosa or Borges.”
What makes eastern European writing so fresh? “Many are absolutely non-commercial writers,” he says. “They never thought of making money or getting prizes; they were people who really loved literature. They are totally devoted to their art.”
Though critically acclaimed,Cărtărescu has never been entirely embraced by the literary establishment: earlier this year,Cărtărescu was controversially denied membership of the Romanian Academy by a single vote in its general assembly. One of the Academy’s elderly members said his work simply wasn’t up to scratch: “In Dostoevsky there are dozens of characters, in Thomas Mann there are dozens of characters”, Nicolae Breban told Romanian media. “In Mircea Cărtărescu there are three characters: daddy,mommy and Mircea.” He insists he is emphatically unfussed by the snub. “I was rather relieved that I didn’t make it at the end. I think I’m not fit for it – there’s nothing academic in myself.”
Yet for all his outsider status,there are distinctly Romanian aspects to his books. Their treatment of religion, for one. Like elsewhere across the eastern bloc,church activity was suppressed in Romania during the communist period. “When I was a kid we never went to church and we didn’t have a Bible in our home,” he recalls. “Up to the age of 30 I thought that the Bible was just a collection of sermons.”
But if some regions east of the iron curtain are now the most secular parts of Europe, such as the former east Germany, the Czech Republic and some of the Baltics, in Romania the church has roared back to life: according to the 2021 census, more than 73% of the population here identify as Orthodox Christian. “When someone first gave me a Bible, I was reluctant to look thru it, but when I started reading I couldn’t stop. I noticed it wasn’t just a holy book but the greatest novel ever written. My whole mind w
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