“I took literary revenge on the people who stole my youth”: Romanian writer Mircea Certarescu | imaginary

IIn 2014, while traveling around the United States on a book tour, Mircea Certarescu was able to fulfill a lifelong dream: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s Butterfly Collection. An ardent admirer of the Russian-American author, Kirtarescu shares a literary career that bridges Western and Eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history in which he was touted as a laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature but never won it.

Above all, it shares the Roman poet and novelist Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he dreamed of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was given access to Nabokov’s former office and admired the specimens collected by the St. Petersburg-born author. “His most important scientific work was on the sexual organs of butterflies, and I saw these tiny little vials inside them,” he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was so beautiful.”

The magic of papillary genitals seems appropriate. Blinding, Cărtărescu’s trilogy that critics voted Romania’s Novel of the Decade in 2010, was conceived as a butterfly in shape, with the first and third parts having wings and the middle book a body. In The Left Wing, the first volume published by Penguin nearly 30 years after it appeared in Roman, there are butterflies fluttering on every other page. But they are rarely ethereal beings.

Part memoir, part dreamscape, the distinctively surreal scene sees a group of medieval villagers discover a swarm of giant butterflies frozen beneath the ice of the Danube like a woolly mammoth, 20 paces long and 40 wide. They marvel at the beauty of the insects – and then proceed to defrost and boil them like lobsters, for a lavish feast.

“Nabokov was a good artist, but he had less contact with fantasy literature and surrealism than I did,” Kertarescu says in a video call from his apartment in Bucharest. “The image of huge butterflies under the ice of the Danube could have come from Salvador Dali 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 native city into a character in its own right, but the kind of character one might discover engaged in some heinous act in the corner of a Bruegel painting. From his fifth-floor apartment overlooking Ştefan cel Mare Street, Cărtărescu’s narrator imagines the city’s green bronze statues descending from their bases to mate with limestone gorgons. His constellation in the Strada Uranus appears to him as “the phallus of the city, red and erect.” These books are not love letters to his hometown. “I took stylistic and literary revenge on the people who stole my youth.”

forCertarescu grew up on June 1, 1956, in a communist state within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, even if Romania’s status as a satellite state was untenable. His father, the subject of Blinding’s third Swiftian film, played an active if minor role in running the communist regime, and was devastated when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. After hearing news that President Nicolae Ceausescu had fled the country in a helicopter with his wife, Kertarescu recalls: “He went into the kitchen and set fire to his party’s red book. He was crying all the time because he believed in communism and now he does.” And I saw that everything was a lie.

Cărtărescu Junior felt differently. As a young man, he was already a key figure in the beatnik-influenced cultural movement known as the “blue jeans generation,” who listened to Beatles records bootlegged in India and knew Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” by heart. “It was a sarcastic term: We were all wearing blue jeans, not the original Wrangler jeans, but primitive blue jeans made in some cloth mill in Romania.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union was for him liberation. “After the revolution, I became a citizen of this universe,” he recalls. Although he now resides in Romania again, by his own estimates he spent a third of his post-Cold War life abroad, and only wrote the first few pages of his Blinding trilogy in Bucharest. The rest of the 1,400-page work was completed over 14 years in Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest and Stuttgart. He told me that his favorite butterfly is the monarch butterfly, because it migrates thousands of kilometers every year.

In recent years, his books have begun to achieve the international status that the author aspires to. His novel Solenoid was longlisted for the International Booker Prize this year; German news magazine Der Spiegel included The Left Wing on its list of the 100 best books in the world; A new translation of the work was also published in France this year.

The fact that he has been considered a serious contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature for the past ten years may be a factor behind this revival: in 2023 and 2025, his odds with the bookies are 11/1, as promising as the odds of one of his other great idols, Thomas Pynchon. Are you tired of waiting for the call from the Swedish Academy?

“I never waited for a call,” he says. “I am grateful to the people who consider me worthy of it, because to be seen as worthy of a Nobel Prize, even if it is just a rumor, is an absolute honor.”

The victory of Laszlo Krasznahorkai, from neighboring Hungary, this year may have somewhat dampened his chances: there may be a huge appetite among the academy for another Eastern European player with a taste for the apocalypse and the traveling circus. On the other hand, literature flourishes from the borderlands between Eastern and Western Europe. Polish Olga Tokarczuk and Bulgarian Georgi Gospodinov are not only admired by critics, but are read with enthusiasm. “I think today you can talk about a kind of boom that Eastern writers have experienced, and I am very proud to be part of it,” Cartarescu says. “You can compare it to what happened in the 1960s and 1970s with Latin American writers like García Márquez, Vargas Llosa or Borges.”

What makes Eastern European writing so modern? “Many of them are completely non-commercial writers,” he says. “They never thought about making money or getting awards; they were people who really loved literature. They are completely devoted to their art.”

TDespite critical acclaim, Cărtărescu has not been fully 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 elderly member of the academy said his work was simply not up to scratch: “In Dostoyevsky there are dozens of characters, in Thomas Mann there are dozens of characters,” Nikolai Priban told Romanian media. “In Mircea Cărtărescu there are three characters: father, mother and Mircea.” He insists he is categorically unfazed by the snub. “I was relieved that I couldn’t make it to the end. I guess I’m not cut out for it – there’s nothing academic about me.”

However, despite his outsider status, there are distinctly Roman aspects to his books. Their treatment of religion, for example. As elsewhere across the Eastern Bloc, church activity in Romania was suppressed during the communist period. “When I was a kid, we never went to church and we didn’t have a Bible in our house,” he recalls. “Until I was 30 I thought the Bible was just a collection of sermons.”

But if some areas east of the Iron Curtain are now the most secular parts of Europe, such as the former East Germany, the Czech Republic and some Baltic states, in Romania the church has come back to life: according to the 2021 census, more than 73% of the population here identify as Orthodox Christians. “When someone first gave me the Bible, I was reluctant to look at it, but when I started reading I couldn’t stop. I noticed that it was not just a Bible but the greatest novel ever written. My whole mind was saturated with the expression of the text, with the wonderful poetry of the prophets and the extraordinary parables of Jesus.”

One of the most striking scenes in The Left Wing is an epic, Avengers-like battle between an army of rapier-wielding angels and a horde of horned, winged “cacodemons,” with the monsters eventually banished into darkness by angelic flutes. Cartarescu wrote: “Religions are madness, and yet they are the only way, because they are the only way out of our world that the mind can imagine.” Cărtărescu’s ambivalent relationship with his homeland may be what distinguishes him most from Romania. Romania has the largest diaspora community in the EU, with 3.1 million Romanian citizens registered as living in other EU countries in 2024. However, in the country’s tense presidential election rerun in May this year, a clear majority of these diaspora voted for an anti-immigrant candidate.

“For a while, the expatriates were the most democratic and progressive people, but to our great surprise, they turned against that completely,” he says. “They started to envy Romanians living in Romania when they started earning more money than they did abroad. They actually started to hate their country so much that they wanted to destroy it.”

However, he insists that Romanians have always been European and will continue to be so. “The date on which these movements became members of the European Union in 2007 was perhaps the most important day in our history. Even if these fascist or extremist movements are very strong in Romania now, we hope that they will diminish.”