Romania Quotes
and Bibliography
Out of Romania
Dan Antal
1994, Faber & Faber, Limited
P. 124
"Romania itself was never short of petrol, oil, coal or wood, though it seemed that these were always destined for other countries rather than for us. Before the Second World War, big American, French and English companies bought our oil for peanuts; during the war, the Germans took it for free; and after the war the Russians continued the tradition, even during the time when Ceausescu seemed to turn his back on the Soviet Union.
"On the international stage, Ceausescu struck an anti-Soviet attitude. That made a good impression on the West. At home, hidden pipes under the sea and long trains of tankers were secretly carrying our oil to the big, bottomless belly of the Soviet empire."
The Hole in the Flag
Andrei Codrescu
1991, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York
P. 165
"Situated at the very center of the ancient spice routes of the Orient, Romania was the golden apple that made everyone's mouth water, and consequently, everyone, the Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Slavs, Austrians and Soviets, tried to swallow it whole. Amazingly enough, it survive the battering rams of a ceaselessly hostile history for hundreds of years until the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu began accomplishing in a few years what the combined horrors of numberless invaders were unable to...The once-lively peasant villages of the Carpathians became heaps of rubble. 'Little Paris,' as Bucharest was once called, became 'Ceauswitz'."
P. 238
"Time had stood still in Romania. Until recently. A revolution did take place in December (1989) and then in June. It was not the revolution that we saw on television and that was most likely a play scripted by the KGB and acted by the Army and Securitate with the innocent help of a cast of millions. It was a revolution in people's souls when they suddenly felt no more fear. This revolution is going on still. Whoever let the tiger out of its cage is in no position to put it back again."
D. R. Popescu
THE ROYAL HUNT
(Vinatoarea Regala)
J. E. Cottrell and M. Bogdan, translators
"--What glory remains on earth unchanged, what creature with breath, what high majesty? And what worldly joy does not fall into sorrow?"
The opening lines of this beautifully-crafted novel give the merest hint of the devastation waiting inside.
I was not prepared to like this book so much. First, although the book jacket said that Popescu was the best-known contemporary Romanian writer, I wondered how a writer working under the oppressive Ceausescu regime could be anything but a partyline yeasayer. Second, the book starts slow. It is the story of madness and mayhem sweeping through a small town, as told by a man who observed the events as a young adolescent.
Later, reading the introduction, I saw that this book came out of a period of challenge and innovation by young intellectuals in the late '60s and early '70s, part of the worldwide uprising and cry for freedom and justice. And I thought the comparisons to William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were appropriate.
It's a great book. I had it from the library and wanted to buy a copy. Sadly, it is out of print. I hope the English translation will be reissued soon. This is a book that deserves a lasting place in world literature. -pr
Petru Popescu
The Return
Grove Press, New York, 1997
p. 132:
"Thus, in August 1968 (after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia), Ceausescu won the gamble of rekindling nationalism and sticking it into Russia's face. From then on, an unofficial ally of the West, he received lavish praise from U.S. presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. Carter called him a freedom fighter. At home, the freedom fighter tightened the screws, in the name of Romania's survival. The Securitate had carte blanche to inforce control any way it saw fit, because we were free! Free of the Russians, and that we were. But free of our fellow Romanians who had learned at the Soviet school we were not. Ceausescu's home rule was even less relaxed and enlightened than the Soviets'."
Article 23, 1991 Romanian Constitution
"Libertatea individuala si siguranta persoanei sunt inviolabile."
"We do not understand democracy in its bourgeois meaning--of babbling, lack of discipline, anarchy. We understand democracy as the active participation of the citizens in formulating and implementing the Party's policy."
--Nicolae Ceausescu, 1968
quoted in
Nations in Transition--Romania
Mark Sanborne
1996, Facts on File, Inc.
P. 33:
"The peasant revolt that erupted in Moldavia in March of that year (1907) began as an anti-Semitic pogrom, or organized massacre, with mobs attacking Jewish middlemen. It rapidly spread through much of the country and took on the characteristics of full-fledged class warfare as the enraged peasantry sacked large rural estates, burned the mansions of the rich, and finally tried to march on Bucharest. The government declared a state of siege and brought out the army, which suppressed the revold with brutal efficiency...at least 11,000 peasants were killed."
Dracula
Bram Stoker
1897
I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country,
just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina,
in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known
portions of Europe....
I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into
the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort
of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting.
(Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)
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