The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter Read online

  MATEI CALINESCU (1934–2009), born and educated in Romania, was one of the leading intellectuals of his generation. His novel The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter (published in Romanian in 1969) acquired cult status among generations of young people despite attempts by Romanian authorities to expunge Calinescu’s name and works from cultural memory. He emigrated to America in 1973 and established himself in his new homeland as a literary scholar, publishing his two major works, Five Faces of Modernity (1977; ultimately translated into eight languages) and Rereading (1993), and teaching in the Comparative Literature Department at Indiana University. After the collapse of Ceauşescu’s national-Communist dictatorship in 1989, Calinescu was welcomed once more in his home country. In a poll of literary critics conducted there in 2001, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter was ranked among the top ten Romanian prose works of the twentieth century. A sixteen-volume edition of his selected literary and scholarly works is currently in progress.

  ADRIANA CALINESCU is the Thomas T. Solley curator emerita of ancient art at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art. She has written widely on the subject of ancient art and is the editor of the scholarly work Ancient Jewelry and Archaeology. She has translated works from English into Romanian, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is the standard text in Romania.

  BREON MITCHELL is a professor emeritus of Germanic studies and comparative literature at Indiana University. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, he has received numerous national awards for literary translations, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize from the British Society of Authors. His translations from the German include Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, as well as works by Heinrich Böll, Siegfried Lenz, Uwe Timm, and Marcel Beyer.

  NORMAN MANEA has written numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The Hooligan’s Return and the novel The Lair. He has been awarded several literary prizes, including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guadalajara International Book Fair’s (FIL) 2016 Literature in Romance Languages Award, and the Prix Médicis étranger. He is a professor emeritus and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

  THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF ZACHARIAS LICHTER

  MATEI CALINESCU

  Translated from the Romanian by

  ADRIANA CALINESCU and

  BREON MITCHELL

  Introduction by

  NORMAN MANEA

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1969 by Matei Calinescu

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Norman Manea

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Nathan Oliveira, Spring Nude, 1962; © Oliveira Art, LLC; collection of the Oakland Museum of California, gift of the artist in memory of Edna Stoddard Siegriest

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Calinescu, Matei author. | Calinescu, Adriana, 1941– translator | Mitchell, Breon translator

  Title: The life and opinions of Zacharias Lichter / Matei Calinescu ; translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell ; introduction by Norman Manea.

  Other titles: Viața și opiniile lui Zacharias Lichter. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017048228 (print) | LCCN 2017046079 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681371955 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681371962 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Romanians—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Jewish. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction | Historical fiction Classification: LCC PC840.13.A39 V5313 2018 (ebook) | LCC PC840.13.A39 (print) | DDC 859/.334—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048228

  ISBN 978-1-68137-196-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF ZACHARIAS LICHTER

  Portrait

  On God’s Flame

  On the Stages of the Spiritual

  From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter

  On the Book of Job

  On Courage

  On the Realm of Stupidity

  Begging

  Existence and Possession

  Regarding the Devil

  De Amicitia

  From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter

  On Women

  The Revelations of Begging

  On Children

  On Poetry

  Responsibility and Freedom

  On One Form of Divine Wrath

  On Travel

  From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter

  The Crime of “Analysis”

  On Suicide

  On Comfort

  On Mathematical Language

  A Poem Tossed into the Trash Bin of a Public Garden by Zacharias Lichter and Retrieved by His Biographer

  On Old People

  On Saying and Writing

  On the Meaning of Love

  The Wandering Jew

  The Metaphysics of Laughter

  Legends

  On Reticence

  Again on “Analysis”

  The Significance of the Mask

  On Haste

  From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter

  On Illness

  On Mirrors

  Innocence and Guilt

  On Self-Indulgence

  On Lying

  Eulogy of the Question

  On Imagination

  The Moral Law

  From the Poems of Zacharias Lichter

  Epilogue: Zacharias Lichter and His Biographer

  INTRODUCTION

  THE LIFE and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter was first published in Communist Romania in 1969. It was surprising that such an unusual book should have come out at all under the repressive Ceauşescu regime, but then the late 1960s saw a brief period of relative liberalization, and the book, not obviously political, appears to have confused the vigilance of the censors. Four years later, in 1973, as the Ceauşescu dictatorship reverted to brutal totalitarian form, the book’s author, Matei Calinescu, left for America on a Fulbright Fellowship, abandoning his homeland and his career there as a university professor and a well-regarded man of letters (besides Zacharias Lichter, he was the author of several books of criticism and poetry). He settled with his family in Bloomington, Indiana, and was appointed a professor of comparative literature at Indiana University. After Calinescu went into exile, Zacharias Lichter disappeared from sight in Romania, circulating only in samizdat, now taken to be, as Professor Liviu Papadima has written in a 2013 festschrift for the author, “a highly subversive work,” and indeed in his view, the regime was not entirely wrong. Papadima sees the book as “an uncanny apparition, a direct response to the political situation in Romania.”

  Another Romanian, the famous nihilist and exile Emil Cioran, has by contrast described The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter rather differently, as “a Baal Shem Tov imagined by Sterne.” That’s another way to look at this refined and challenging book, whose title does
of course invite comparison to Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

  Who is Zacharias Lichter, that he inspires such complex, changing, and contradictory responses? A peaceful, mystical iconoclast, religious, it seems, but with no religious affiliation, who is also a curious and skeptical observer of the human spectacle of Bucharest, where he lives. Zacharias comes from a Jewish family; his father, Moses, is the owner of a small shop on Philanthropy Boulevard, on the outskirts of the capital. As a child, Zacharias was sent out with his brothers and sisters to peddle odds and ends on the street, until one evening, finding himself “enveloped by a divine flame,” he hands out all his petty wares to passersby for free. His family is too shocked to know what to do, though they do relieve Zacharias of further chores. Later, while studying at the university (Zacharias is an excellent student and even submits a dissertation on Plotinus, though he neglects to pick up his diploma), he cuts off ties to his family altogether. Utterly rejecting the world of work, the ugly, ragged Zacharias leads a vagrant life and begs for a living. He writes poems but throws them away. He gives voice to cryptic aphorisms and cutting ironies. He clowns around. He is a kind of burlesque star of the vagabonds.

  Zacharias has a number of companions. There is Leopold Nacht, Poldy, his “only true friend,” a terminal alcoholic who “does not say a word” and whom Lichter considers “one of the great philosophers of contemporary Europe,” an exponent of “a philosophy of designification” in which “the world . . . must be emptied of sense, [since] only then will it become one with Being.” Then there is another drunk, “who displays all the features of an aggressive thug,” known in the bars as the Poet, and who is in fact a prolific author of pornographic verse. Zacharias respects him as “the annihilator of myths.” Other characters include the ever reticent G., an intransigent moralist, expositor of the dialectics of “suavizare,” and Doctor S., a psychiatrist, whose attentions fill Lichter with terror.

  These figures, and others, alongside Lichter himself, come and go throughout the pages of Calinescu’s book. Perhaps more important than any of them, however, is “humanity’s first tragic hero,” the biblical Job, credited with discovering the absurd and that “without God the absurd cannot exist.” Lichter may seem a poor lonely wandering oddball, but he is also said to be a prophet, even if he hardly prophesizes. And bear in mind that Matei Calinescu has written elsewhere that “prophetic utterance comes into being via negation: it is knowledge induced by ashes. . . . Prophets feel the ashes of the world on their tongue.”

  The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter is set in the 1930s, a significant and troubled period in modern Romanian history. Both nationalist extremism and anti-Semitism were growing, and the Iron Guard, a fanatical Christian-Orthodox movement that promoted a suprematist vision of a pure and glorious Romanian ethnicity and faith, was a powerful and terrorizing presence. The Iron Guard incited pogroms and sought to promulgate racial laws, paving the way for the country’s later military alliance with Nazi Germany. They acted under the banner of what they called hooliganism, an ideology claimed to have been taken from the work of Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889), the greatest of Romanian poets and, in the Iron Guard’s view, the patron saint of hooligans.

  And indeed the literary world was involved in the political developments of the time. Many important intellectuals and writers actively supported or were at least sympathetic to the extreme right. Mircea Eliade, not yet famous as a historian of religion, is a notorious example. In Eliade’s novel Huliganii (The Hooligans, 1935) a character who is evidently the author’s mouthpiece lauds “the hooliganic experience. Don’t respect anything, don’t believe in anything except your youth, your biology. . . . Who doesn’t start like this, toward himself and toward the world—will not create anything. To forget all the truths, to have such vitality in yourself as to be immune from and not intimidated by truth,—this is, in fact, the calling for a hooligan.”

  Eliade sets up the hooligan as the exemplary opponent of a despised “bourgeois morality,” a dreamer and a willing martyr devoted to the great sacred cause of purifying the homeland of foreigners and freethinkers, allowing it at last to stand “as clear as the moon in the sky.”

  The year before Eliade’s novel came out, the Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian, until recently his friend, published a novel of his own, For Two Thousand Years, which described from a personal point of view the growth of Romanian anti-Semitism. Sebastian asked Nae Ionescu, a former professor and mentor at the university, to write a preface to the book, and Ionescu, having become a fanatical right-wing Christian nationalist ideologue in the interim, responded with a harshly polemical and defamatory text that Sebastian nonetheless felt obliged to publish. The book and the preface provoked a huge political and literary scandal. Sebastian was attacked by both the right and the left; in the Jewish community he was accused of duplicity and even complicity with his adversaries. To all this Sebastian responded with a brilliant essay entitled “How I Became a Hooligan,” in which he envisions a very different kind of hooligan from Eliade. Sebastian’s hooligan is a solitary outsider, always “a dissident, never a partisan,” “a man in a jacket, not a uniform,” no militant but a skeptic and an independent thinker, believing not in the collective but only in the individual.

  Zacharias Lichter may be said to be a hooligan in this sense, but also in another, distinctly political sense the word took on under Ceauşescu’s Communist dictatorship. In Ceauşescu’s brutal totalitarian state—with its generalized suspicion and ubiquitous surveillance and mandatory demonstrations of obedience, with its endless cynical and demagogic displays of phony patriotic euphoria, those parades and political meetings full of childish songs and slogans—anybody who lacked an ID and work papers was legally designated a hooligan and as such was subject to persecution and even arrest. And soon, as I have described in my book The Hooligan’s Return (2003), this poisonous state-imposed “identity” was broadened to include a host of undesirables, rootless cosmopolitans, religious believers, former owners of factories, banks, of land, citizens of “suspect” ethnicity, people in touch with Western relatives or journalists, independent thinkers, and needless to say any open adversaries of the system. Certainly Zacharias Lichter would have been among them.

  When a third edition of Zacharias Lichter was published in 1995, after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, Calinescu added a preface in which he discussed his reason for setting the book in the 1930s. It was, he admits, a dodge to mislead the censors, and he speaks with shame and guilt about having had to censor himself; one of the main reasons for his difficult decision to choose exile was to escape that burden. And yet Calinescu’s comments on his own book are nuanced:

  If this book is a historical document, then it is not only by what it’s saying but also by what it’s not saying, I would like to believe, by its eloquent silence, by what is absent in the furious speeches of this prophet, by his silent revolt, no less intense than his ardent words; not only is he asocial but he sees in his choice an expression of a moral revolt and a way of salvation.

  In the book, Calinescu emphasizes that Lichter’s God is one of nonexistence, his theology one of apophasis, in which the divine is manifested only through negation. The end of religion, he affirms, is nothing less than perplexity. Not far from a spiritual hooligan, we may say.

  Some of Lichter’s sayings, in the excellent translation by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell:

  I may be afraid of dogs and butterflies, but I would throw myself on the pyre at any time for an idea.

  Acrobats have replaced saints.

  Modern civilization [is] a vast extension of the Realm of Stupidity. . . sure of itself, economical, [with] wide-spreading technological tentacles . . . the domain of stupidity is progress itself. . . .

  [M]oney. . . must be given to real beggars, to cripples dragging themselves along the street, to old vagabonds, to the blind, to gypsies.

  [The] strident trumpets of clowns unleash the apocalypse . . .work
becomes one of the ways by which the category of to have absorbs that of to be.... [The] prophet . . . expounded on his grand concept of social utopia: the overthrow of the capitalist system through the conversion of millions of workers to begging and the founding of a new society, religious and anarchic, where ownership, though not banned by law, would become a form of alienation, a shameful illness . . . (. . . quarantined in luxurious leper-hospitals. . . .)

  Blessed be the flame that is ravaging my being, the flame that ignites my dry words, the flame that ignites even my perishable shadow, the flame of anguish and joy, the terrible flame of God.

  I, the prophet-clown; I, the beggar . . . I myself have been chosen—God chose me—to answer for all the mistakes, past, present, and future, of my fellow creatures.

  That this hooligan and provocateur should attract the attention of the secret police, be they those of the reactionary 1930s or of Ceauşescu’s Securitate, is hardly surprising.

  Zacharias Lichter is, in his peaceful way, the enemy of any social consensus, of any given social order. Calinescu’s book has survived thanks to its ambiguities and its refined and clear style, which stands in drastic contrast to the “wooden language” of the official press of his day. It survives too because the things it describes survive. Aren’t we witnessing nowadays the systematization and spreading of countless modes of lying?

  Though the bleak bloody parody may appear to be unending, Lichter remains a disciple of Spinoza. Salvation is to be found not thanks to some faraway god or in the afterlife but in the here and now, in human beings and the vitality of nature.

  —NORMAN MANEA

  THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF ZACHARIAS LICHTER

  PORTRAIT

  MANY WHO chance to see him now and then, if only in passing, recognize him at once from the briefest of descriptions: a strange creature, so ludicrously ugly he produces a strong impression on even the indifferent observer—leaving behind one of those liminal but nagging memories that remain concealed in the shadows, only to surge forth from time to time with incredible freshness and precision.