Eugen Ionesco – Fighting The Absurd With Its Own Weapons
When the horrors brought upon humankind by humans themselves in the XXth century transformed reality into an unbearable enviroment, many sought comfort in the realm of the absurd. Eugen Ionesco (1909 – 1994) was one of its masters.
“Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible”. – Eugen Ionesco
Eugen Ionesco was born in Slatina (Olt County) in 1909, although he often claimed that he was born in 1912, as he wanted to make a connection to the year of Ion Luca Caragiale’s death (1912), whose great admirer he was. Others consider that he made himself younger because he wanted to really fit a critic’s favorable opinion about some young writers, who included him and Samuel Beckett.
His mother had French citizenship and, when he was four, he was taken by his parents to Paris, where his father attended the Law University. When the First World War began, his father returned to Romania, while he, his mother and his younger sister, Marilina, remained in France. Those were happy times for young Ionesco, who even wrote a “heroic” play and a comic scenario, while he was in the countryside.
Unfortunately, his father was not very fond of his family. He was supposed to have died on the front, but he actually never fought, but, instead, he developed an ability to side with those who held the power, no matter the political regime. Through his influence, he got a divorce, remarried without his family in France not even knowing and obtained his children’s custody, Eugen and Marilina, who returned to Romania in 1922.
The relationship with his father and his new family were very bad and he moved from their house in 1926. Some say that this troubled period of his life decisively influenced his literary personality.
Ionesco attended the college Sfantul Sava in Bucharest, passed the graduation exam at the Secondary School in Craiova in 1928 and followed the courses of the Faculty of Letters from Bucharest, where he studied French Literature. That year also witnessed his literary debut, in Bilete de Papagal (Parrot Notes), a magazine famous for its tiny format. In 1934, his collection of articles entitled “Nu!” (“No!”), although very controversial through their iconoclast ideas and criticism of the established Romanian writers, gained him a prize from the Royal Foundations Publishing House. In 1935, he dared mocking Victor Hugo, in Hugoliade, a satirical biography of the great French writer. In 1936, he married Rodica Burileanu, who he had made acquaintance with in the early ‘30s, and worked as a French teacher in Cernavoda. In 1938, he earned a scholarship in France, but he was forced to return to Romania when the Second World War began.
Watch this interview with Eugen Ionesco in which he talks about his childhood, studies and personality among other facts:
The situation in his native country (the abdication of King Charles II, the crimes committed by the fascist movement of the Legionnaires) made him deeply regret not having stayed in France and, with the help of some influential friends, he was appointed cultural attaché of the Romanian embassy at Vichy in 1942. From that moment on, France became his adoptive country.
He had to face some financial problems in the beginning, but he joyfully received a new member in his family, as his daughter Marie-France, was born in 1944, and the situation improved as the war ended.
In 1948, he started writing on a play that would later be named “The Bald Prima Donna”, his first great absurd work, who was performed from the first time in 1950, at the Theatre des Noctambules, under the direction of Nicolas Bataille. The play wasn’t very successful, as many contemporaries didn’t understand it, provided there is something to understand in it, but, in time, the public ended up in enjoying this new kind of literature and, until today, it has remained one of those plays that can be performed over and over again and still preserve the fascination they exercise upon the audience.
To describe its action or to explain its meaning is an impossible task. It’s enough to say that, using subtle twists of language and situations, “The Bald Prima Donna” plays with the reader’s or viewer’s mind, revealing to him the degradation of human relationships, at an unconscious level.
Other famous absurd plays written by Eugen Ionesco are: “The Lesson”, “The Chairs”, “The Leader”, “Victims of Duty”, “The Future Is in Eggs ”,“ The Rhinoceros”,” Exit the King ”,“ Hunger and Thirst”.
In 1970, Eugen Ionesco was elected member of the French Academy and, the same year, he received the Great Austrian prize of European Literature; in 1985, he received the Monte-Carlo International Prize of Contemporary Art. Many other distinctions and awards followed throughout his life.
Author: Iulian Fira
Ana Aslan – The Fight Against Aging
Ana Aslan (1897 – 1988) was a Romanian scientist whose long and fruitful life was dedicated to the fight against aging. Her proposal of a cure that would slow down the aging process, Gerovital, became known throughout the world and it was used by famous and common people alike.
Ana Aslan was born in Braila in 1887, as the youngest of the four children of an intellectual family, Sofia and Margarit Aslan. She followed the Romascanu School in Braila and, after her father died when she was only 13 years old, she moved with her family to Bucharest. She graduated the Central School from Bucharest at 15 and, the next year, she fulfilled her dream of flying, using a small Bristol-Coanda aircraft. As her mother didn’t grant her permission to follow the courses of the Medicine University, she stayed in a hunger strike until she got the approval.
During the First World War, she activated in the military hospitals, taking care of the wounded soldiers. After she returned to Bucharest, she worked under the supervision of the famous neurologist Gheorghe Marinescu. In 1922, she graduated the Medicine and started working in a clinic from Bucharest, under the coordination of proffessor Daniel Danielopolu. In the following years she also activated as a cardiologist at CFR Hospital, department chief at the Universitary Clinic of Filantropia Hospital and in the Internal Medicine department at the main hospital in Timisoara.
While she was in Timisoara she used procaine, a local anesthetic (often referred to as Novocain) on a young man suffering from rheumatism. Noticing the results, she continued her research and applied it to old men from asylums, recording the positive effects this substance had on the development of distrophic problems, related to old age.
In 1952, she invented and patented the H3 vitamin, also known as Gerovital (a combination of the Greek word “gero”, meaning “old”, and the Latin word “vita”, meaning “life”), based upon Novocain. In 1956, she presented her invention at the European Gerontology Congress at Karlsruhe and at the European Gerontology Congress at Basel, but her innovations were received with skepticism. During the following two years, the product was tested upon thousands of people and the results were favorable – they indicated that the aging process was slowed down by 40%. However, there were and still are critics claiming that Gerovital is nothing but a drug and that there are dangerous side effects such as low blood pressure, respiratory difficulties and convulsions.
Overall, the launch of the product based upon the H3 vitamin was a complete international success. With the help of doctor Constantin Ion Parhon (1874-1969), chairman of the National Assembly, Ana Aslan founded the Geriatrics Institute from Bucharest in 1952, the first of its kind in the world, which later became the National Geriatrics and Gerontology Institute. The resort transformed into a place of hope for numerous personalities seeking never ending youth. Celebrities such as John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Iosip Broz Tito, Pablo Neruda, Charlie Chaplin, Salvador Dali, Indira Gandhi, Charles de Gaulle, Marlene Dietrich, Aristotel Onassis, Nikita Khruscev, Konrad Adenauer or Prince Ibn Saud were among those who used Gerovital treatments. She also treated many old men and women, with asking for money and the authorities charged her with the accumulated expenses, which reached the sum of 1 500 000 lei. The charges were withdrawn only a year before her death in 1988.In 1961, together with the chemist Elena Polovrageanu, she invented and patented a new product, Aslavital, which entered mass production in 1980 and which was used for prophylactic treatments of cerebral and cardiovascular aging processes, physical and psychic asthenia or memory losses.
Ana Aslan was a member of the New York Academy of Science, of the Prophylactic Medicine and Social Hygiene World Union, of the National Gerontology Society of Chile, honorary member of European Center for Applied Medical Research, member in the Board of International Gerontology Association and counselor at the World Health Organization.
She received awards such as the International “Leon Bernard” Prize and Medal (World Health Organization), Merito della Republica, Commander Degree (Italy), Gold Medal (Nicaragua), Knight of the Order “Les Palmes Academiques” (France), the Order “De Orange Nassau”, Commander Degree (Netherlands), Honoris Causa Professor of the Braganza Paulista University (Brazil) and the International Prize “Dag Hamarskoeld” (Florence – Italy).
Nadia Comaneci – The Mark of Perfection
In 1976, a 15 years old Romanian gymnast demonstrated that the organizers of the Summer Olympics from Montreal were not technically prepared to display perfection. Her name was Nadia Comaneci.
Nadia Comaneci was born in Onesti (that time named Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej) on the 12th of November of 1961. Her name was inspired by a Russian movie her mother was watching when she was pregnant and it can be translated as “hope” – one cannot imagine a more suitable name for the girl who, through her brilliant sports performances, gave hope to millions of people suffering the domination of the Communist regime.
Nadia entered gymnastics while she was still in kindergarten and, at the age of 6, she was discovered by Bela Karoly, the coach that would propel her to great successes and who would later emigrate in the USA, where he would also train important American gymnasts. The trainings were harsh, as some later accused Karoly, but Nadia didn’t have any problems adapting and, in 1970, she became the youngest ever to win the Romanian National Gymnastics Competition.
The turning point in the history of gymnastics at Montreal was prefaced by Nadia’s performances at the inaugural edition of the American Cup at Madison Square Garden in March 1976, when she received an unprecedented 10.0 at vault, which meant her jump had been perfect and no score deductions were required. Other impressive performances followed and United Press International named her “Female Athlete of the Year” for 1975.
Nadia’s exercise on uneven bars, during the team competition at the Summer Olympics in Montreal, in 1976 was scored at a 10.0. The moment was rather funny, as the scoreboards were not equipped such marks, so Nadia’s had to be presented as 1.00. The Romanian athlete was awarded with another six such scores and won the Gold medals for the all-round, beam, bar titles and a Bronze medal for the floor exercise. International recognition gathered immediately: for BBC, she was the Sports Personality of the Year in 1976, Female Athlete of the Year in 1976 (Associated Press) and she preserved the title awarded by the United Press International the previous year.
The Communist authorities didn’t miss the opportunities Nadia’s successes presented with and awarded her the title “Hero of Socialist Labor”, the youngest person ever to be offered such a distinction. Unfortunately, the authorities involved in her training and took her to Bucharest, without Bela Karoly. Her mind and body shape became far from excellent and, at the 1978 World Championships, she came in 4th at the all-round, fell during the uneven bars exercise, but won the Gold medal for the beam.
In 1979, she was back in business: she won her third consecutive all-round title, becoming the first gymnast ever to accomplish this and she attended the World Championships with a wrist cut and helped her team win the Gold medal. Nadia participated in the 1980 Olympics at Moscow and she was very close to defending her title in the all-round, as she came in second, after Yelena Davydova. She also won the Gold medals for beam and floor exercise (tied with Nellie Kim for this one).
After her retirement in 1981, Nadia was an object of propaganda for the Communist regime and she was strictly monitored, especially after her former coaches, Bela and Martha Karoly secretly immigrated to the USA. In November 1989, just a few weeks before the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, she secretly crossed the border to Hungary, then she passed in Austria and, finally, to the United States. There was a certain controversy surrounding her escape, as she was accompanied by a married man and her disillusioned attitude and appearance were not those of the top athlete everyone had loved.
Nadia gradually overcome these difficulties, settled in Montreal and rebuilt her life, involving in promotions of gymnastics equipment and modeling. She became engaged with the former American gymnast Bart Conner, whom she had known since 1976, in 1994.
The two were married in 1996 in Romania and, in 2001, Nadia also became an American citizen. She involved in numerous charitable activities and international organizations. She was the first athlete ever to be invited to speak at the United Nations, to launch the International Year of Volunteers, in 1999. She is the Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of the International Special Olympics, Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. In 2003, she was appointed Honorary Consul General of Romania to the United States, she is the Honorary President of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, The Honorary President of Romanian Olympic Committee, Ambassador of Sports of Romania and a member of the International Gymnastics Federation Foundation.
Black Tourism in Romania
Some prefer admiring wondeful landscapes, some enjoy themselves on beaches or skiing, but there are some interested in visiting those places that have witnessed some of the great tragedies of the humankind.
The Auschwitz concentration camp, now a memorial museum, is the saddest and best known example of "black tourism". Besides the Merry Cemetery from Sapanta, there are other places on Romania’s black tourism map.
The Sighet Prison is located in Sighetu Marmatiei, Maramures County. It is the most notorious prison in Romania, because the Communist regime used it to annihilate its adversaries, mostly illustrious politicians and public figures from the pre-Communist era. This prison was not accidentally chosen by the Party officials, as it was only two km far from the Soviet border and the inmates had nowhere to run.
The prison was built in 1897 when Transylvania was a part of the Austria-Hungary Empire. The Communist era of the Sighet Prison began in August 1948, when 18 students that had protested against the regime were brought here. They were kept until May 1949, a pale foreshadowing of the great abuses yet to come. Between 1950 and 1955, over 200 politicians, intelectuals, priests, journalists or officers, many of them over 60 years old, were imprisoned here; some had been victims of fake trials, other hadn’t even had one (they were sent for ”administrative punishements”).
Iuliu Maniu (one of the greatest political figure of his time, several times Prime Minister of Romania), Constantin and Gheorghe Bratianu (descendants of a prestigious family, who had a vital role in the development of modern Romania), Constantin Argetoianu (a very shrewd politician, many times minister) are a just a few of those who suffered the inhumane conditions from Sighet.
Iuliu Maniu (one of the greatest political figure of his time, several times Prime Minister of Romania), Constantin and Gheorghe Bratianu (descendants of a prestigious family, who had a vital role in the development of modern Romania), Constantin Argetoianu (a very shrewd politician, many times minister) are a just a few of those who suffered the inhumane conditions from Sighet.
In 1955, when Romania was admitted in the United Nations Organization, and after the Geneva Convention, Sighet ceased to be a political prison and became a common law prison until 1977, when it stopped functioning. In January 1993, Ana Blandiana, a Romanian poet known for her resistance against the Communist regime, presented the Council of Europe with a project that aimed at transforming the former prison in a museum. The Memorial of the Victims of Communism was inaugurated in 1997.
A small statuary group The Cortege of the Sacrificed, executed by the sculptor Aurel Vlad, is placed in the museum’s courtyard. The first room the visitors enter is the Map Room, where there is a presentation of the geography of the Communist prison system, which consisted in approximately 230 establishments, between 1945 and 1989. The place that was provided by prison like Sighet with forced laboreurs and that was equal to a death sentence was the Danube – Black Sea Channel, where the inmates had to work in miserable conditions, sometimes with their bare hands. The Picture Corridor is situated on the ground floor and it has its walls covered with 3600 anonymous pictures of those who spent agonizing moments in the dark, small cells, which can be visited, too. The one where Iuliu Maniu died tries to recreate the dreadful conditions from that time: the windows had wooden planks to prevent the prisoners looking outside, the floor was wet and dirty and the bed was made in such a manner that it didn’t allow someone to sit, just to lay.
These torments and many other one can find out while visiting the museum were meant to destroy the opponents step by step, both physically and psychologically.
Until the half of the XIX the century, the people from Bucharest used to bury the dead in the churches’ courtyard. In 1852, the city council decided to establish a common cemetery outside the city and a wealthy Romanian nobleman, Barbu Bellu (1825-1900) donated a large garden he owned at the outskirts. The cemetery began functioning officially in 1858 and, in 1859, the Romanian politician C.A. Rosetti was the first person to buy a resting place here, for his daughter, Elena. In time, Bellu became the cemetery for the rich and the famous.
Many of the great Romanian poets and writers are resting here. People around Romania come to see and somehow be closer to those whose works have charmed their childhood and marked their education. There is a special alley for the artists, where there are the tombs of Mihail Sadoveanu, Ion Luca Caragiale or Mihai Eminescu, but there are many more spread around the cemetery. Mihai Eminescu’s tomb never lacks lit candles.
There are also other notorious monuments, not because of the fame of their residents, but because of the strange and tragic stories that surrounds them. The poet Bogdan Petriceicu-Hasdeu suffered enormously when his 19 years old daughter died, so he ordered a monument in her memory, executed by Ion Georgescu.
The crypt of the Poroineanu family, with its monument representing a young woman laid on a bed, mourned by a bearded man who sits next to her, attracts many people because of its story. It tells about two young men, brother and sister, who were separated when they were infants. The boy remained in Romania and the girl was sent to Paris. When the boy became an adult, he also went to Paris, for studies and, there, he met a very beautiful young woman. They shared a passionate love affair and even got married. But, when they returned to the country, they found out they were brothers and, in their despair, they put an end to their lives.
Another tragedy buried in the Bellu Cemetery is “The Lady with the Umbrella”. Some say that a very rich man from Bucharest fell deeply in love with a beautiful young woman and he took her as nanny for his children. His wife was so jealous that she killed her by putting poison in her food. The man was so affected that he ordered the sculptor Romanelli to carve her in real proportions.
Romanian Comedy Plays
The great Romanian theater plays have the disadvantage of having been written in a language that is not world spread, but have the advantage of depicting people and situations everyone can recognize, with a humor everyone can enjoy.
“O scrisoare pierduta” (“A Lost Letter”) was written in 1884 by Ion Luca Caragiale. The author was a sharp minded person who looked at its contemporary society with an extreme criticism, combined with an enormous sense of humor. That time, democracy in Romania was rather fragile and it made room for many deviations and abuses. The 1884 elections were the historical source of inspiration for this play. In a province capital town, the Prefect has a love affair with the wife of an old, prominent politician. A letter sent between the two lovers gets into the hands of another aspiring politician, who dreams of having himself elected in the Romanian Parliament and blackmails both the lady and the Prefect to accomplish his goals. The plot involves twists, insanely funny political speeches and other memorable characters, such as two moronic pseudo-politicians, an able policeman who officially serves the Prefect, but who understands that behind every powerful man there is a powerful woman, or the old husband who seems senile, but who is actually rather shrewd. The characters’ names are hard to translate in another language as they are suggestive for their bearers’ personalities.
The play has been so successful since it first appeared that, nowadays, some puns and lines have entered the Romanian daily language, while contemporary political figures and events can hardly escape being compared to those from “O scrisoare pierduta”.
Romania as an intercultural universe is superbly compressed in Tache, Ianke si Cadar (Tache, Ianke and Cadar), written by Victor Ion Popa in 1932. Tache is a Romanian, Ianke is a Jew and Cadar is a Turk, they are all old friends and merchants on the same street in Bucharest. Ianke and Tache tease each other and they both tease Cadar, who is the least talkative of them all. Tache has a boy and Ianke has a girl and they both lost their wives some time ago. The two children grew up together, they went together for studies abroad and, when they returned, they announce their parents that they are engaged. Tache and Ianke are surprised and disapprove their children’s decision, as each of them fears that his community, Jewish or Christian, would forsake him for this.
Desperate, the two lovers are about to pennilessly elope, but Cadar gets involved and devises a plan to help. The Turk goes to Tache and tells him that Ianke’s daughter was actually his and, as Tache has no more objections to the marriage, he asks for some money to help the two. He tells a similar story to Ianke (that Tache’s boy is actually his) and, again, asks for some money. The young couple leaves secretly, establish a successful business and, later on, they return and all are reunited.
The play subtly satirizes the prejudices related to nationality and religion and it demonstrates that they can be overcome by true love and friendship. The play’s witty lines offer a lot to any actor and none of the several generations of stage performers who were involved in the representations of “Tache, Ianke si Cadar” failed to delight the audiences. Another famous Romanian comedy is “Titanic Vals”, written by Tudor Musatescu in 1932. As the name suggests it, it is related to the sinking of the Titanic. Spirache Necsulescu is a peaceful man, who values simplicity above else, without financial possibilities, but with a large family, consisting in a daughter from a first marriage, another daughter and two sons from the second marriage, a quarrelsome wife and an equally pestiferous mother-in-law. One day, he finds out that his rich brother died during the tragedy of the Titanic and that he left him his entire fortune.
The humor of the play, residing in the unusual methods the main character employs to pacify the petty aspirations of his family and the hostility of his wife and his mother-in-law towards the step daughter, combines with the love stories of the two girls, of whom, the younger is pregnant and she tries to hide it from her parents.
The humor of the play, residing in the unusual methods the main character employs to pacify the petty aspirations of his family and the hostility of his wife and his mother-in-law towards the step daughter, combines with the love stories of the two girls, of whom, the younger is pregnant and she tries to hide it from her parents.
Author: Iulian Fira
Henri Coanda – Father of the Jet
In 1910, when aviation was in its incipient stage, a Romanian named Henri Coanda (1886-1972) ventured beyond his time and tested the first jet aircraft in history.
Henri Marie Coanda was born in Bucharest in 1886 in a family with a tradition in exact sciences – his father, Constantin Coanda was a Mathematics Professor at a technical school in Bucharest and Prime Minister of Romania in the troubled year 1918; his mother, Aida Danet was the daughter of the French physician Gustave Danet. Even since he was a child, Henri Coanda was fascinated by ”the miracle of the wind”.
Coanda studied in Bucharest and, while he was in highschool, his father moved him to Iasi, at a prestigious military school, as Constantin Coanda wanted him to follow this career. Young Henri Coanda respected his father’s wishes, but preserved his interest for applied sciences. He spent some time in Germany at the Institute of Technology in Charlottenburg and in Belgium, at the Science University in Liege. When he returned to the country, he enrolled in an artillery regiment, built a missile airplane for the Romanian army, but he didn’t resist for long in the military restricted universe, so he got the permisson to leave it and went into a long automobile trip to Isfahan, Teheran and Tibet. When he returned, he started following the courses of Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Ingenieurs en Construction Aeronautique in Paris and he graduated as head of the first class of aeronautical engineers in 1910.
That same year, at the International Aeronautic Salon in Paris, at Issy-les-Moulineaux airport near Paris, he presented the first jet powered aircraft, called Coanda-10 (which he had designed and built in engineer Gianni Caproni’s workshop). The innovation this new flying device brought was that is used a four-cylinder piston engine to power a compressor, which fed two burners for thrust, instead using a propeller. Unfortunately, the jet wasn’t too stable and Coanda not a very experienced pilot, so he lost control of the device, which hit a wall near the taking off grounds and burst into fire. Coanda managed to jump out of the jet before this happened and he only suffered a couple of minor injuries. However, neither the public, nor the scientific world was too interested in his innovation and he abandoned it for some time. Gustave Eiffel, the constructor of the Eiffel Tower and of the Statue of Liberty said about the 24 year old Henri Coanda that he was born 50 years earlier than he should have.
Later on, he worked as technical director for Bristol Aeroplane Company in England, where he designed several aircraft devices called Bristol-Coanda Monoplanes, and for the air division of Delaunay-Belleville in France, where he designed and supervised the construction of three different models of propeller aeroplane. He invented a new fireproof material, bois-beton, that immitated wood (the constructors of the Palace of Culture in Iasi widely used his invention) and, in 1926, he developed a device capable of detecting underground fluids. His invention was successfully applied in an offshore oil drilling in the Persian Gulf.
His most important contribution to the world of science was the Coanda Effect, for which the French authorities gave him a patent in 1934. The effect that now bears the name of the Romanian scientist was described as “deviation of a plan jet of a fluid that penetrates another fluid in the vicinity of a convex wall”. His discovery was the result of a 20 years constant work, which started from the very moment when his first jet, Coanda-10 crashed, when he observed that the flames and incandescent gas emitted by the fire tended to remain close to the fuselage.
The international scientific world acknowledged his contributions: even though the first functional jet plane, designed by Frank Whittle appeared in 1937, Henri Coanda was still praised as its inventor in New York in 1956, where he was named the “past, present and future of aviation”; he was granted with the UNESCO award for Scientific Research and with the Medal of French Aeronautics, Order of Merit and Commander Ring.
Henri Coanda spent his last years of his life in Romania, where he was appointed as director of the Institute for Scientific and Technical Creation and helped reorganizing the Department of Aeronautical Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest.
His vision on the future of aviation may lead to the conclusion that he was always ahead of his time: “These airplanes we have today are no more than a perfection of a child's toy made of paper. In my opinion, we should search for a completely different flying machine, based on other flying principles. I imagine a future aircraft, which will take off vertically, fly as usual, and land vertically. This flying machine should have no moving parts. This idea came from the huge power of cyclones”.
Author: Iulian Fira
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