Ciuleandra by Liviu Rebreanu, translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh, Cadmus Press, 2021
Hailing from rural Transylvania, the sober and profound Romanian writer Liviu Rebreanu used the novel form to discover both society and the individual at a moment of rapid national and global evolution. One example of such a drama, depicted in Rebreanu’s deft style, is The Forest of the Hanged, which tells the tale of two brothers who fight for opposing sides in the First World War, though most of his novels are focused around agrarian life. Ciuleandra, however, tells a different story: that of Puiu Faranga, a high society dandy of 1920s Bucharest, who strangles his beautiful young wife, Mădălina, and descends into madness in a private sanatorium, under the—apparently—cold gaze of a certain Dr. Ursu. Though more classical than experimental (Rebreanu seems influenced by Balzac and Tolstoy and thus represents rather an anecdotal writer than one influenced by psychoanalysis), Ciuleandra has its seat, without a doubt, among the great novels that have emerged from Modernism.
Exploring the darker side of human nature, Ciuleandra puts a quasi-gothic spin on Modernist postwar alienation, despair, and loss. The text’s central motif is the vortex-like “Ciuleandra,” a hypnotic folk dance of intense contained energy that ends and begins the novel. Thus the dichotomy between the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian,” as used by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, is spot on for Ciuleandra, as the relationship between Eros and Thanatos is obvious, suggesting subliminally that Puiu is under an enchantment or curse: “his spirit turned away from the sight, petrified, delaying the moment when he would have to face his deed.”
Puiu likens this dance to a human sacrifice, but what is the nature of this enchantment? Violence is akin to sex and dance for Puiu, who has a high libido (bringing to mind Jungian notions of the human animal or Henri Bergson’s idea of a vital force, as the dance itself does) and an intuitive disposition. Puiu’s jealousy is made apparent by a Dionysian dream sequence and chimeric flashbacks. In comparison, Mădălina, in turn, becomes subjugated by this dichotomy when she is made Madeleine, tamed as a captive animal. In this masculine world, in which women are ghosts who haunt men but have no agency of their own, there are multiple foils of healthy masculinity to Puiu. His lucid father, Polycarp, who quips that “murderers are usually cowards,” is the Apollonian element to Puiu’s Dionysian—Puiu is effeminate, weak, driven by impulse. Men from “simpler” backgrounds, such as the guard Andrei Leahu and Dr. Ion Ursu, have lived more deliberately than Puiu, although their “hot peasant blood” would qualify them as Dionysian in a national vision defined by Hegel or Germaine de Staël—like Thomas Mann’s representation of the Dionysian in Death in Venice, involving vice, temptation, and the notion of the forbidden fruit. Even the premise of the plot is a question of masculinity or lack thereof, as Polycarp has Puiu marry a woman of peasant stock so that the next generation would be “more solidly built” than he is. There is curiously little dwelling on their four-year marriage, or the fact that they had no children: something unusual in the era and which indirectly points to Puiu’s failure, in spite of his supposed love for his wife. Meanwhile, the relationship between the patient and his doctor is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy: “My fate is in the hands of an enemy,” Puiu thinks.
Ciuleandra is rife with symbolism. The eyes of Puiu’s murdered wife are a recurring trope; these eyes, which are said to be the portal to the spirit, haunt Puiu, and we witness repeated surreal images of them. The names of characters, too, are important. Puiu might be translated to “baby”; Mădălina (Magdalena) means tower in Hebrew (Rebreanu writes of the “perennial vague look in her eyes, as if she were searching for something in the past,” indicating that her true nature is unknowable to Puiu); Polycarp means “many fruits” in Greek, ironic given that the frail Puiu is his only child; and Dr. Ursu is as uncharismatic and gruff as a bear. An electric lightbulb reappears as an image, signaling Puiu’s eureka moment. What’s more, Rebreanu’s style seems reactive, somewhat akin to free indirect discourse—he writes of “the irritating wails of the maid,” “the words splitting his heart open like an arrow.” We readers are both inside and outside of Puiu’s head, as his insanity is foreshadowed ominously with cinematic effects: “He led the way, smiling at the guard who followed him like a sinister shadow.”
The struggle between urbanism and the rural context is a major concern of Rebreanu’s. Though Ciuleandra is a story of one individual’s distortion of the outside world, within this book, society is viewed objectively yet pessimistically from all perspectives, with the author subtly questioning both the slyness of peasants (Rebreanu himself being of peasant extraction) and the hypocrisy of aristocrats: “Faranga owed a considerable part of his political gravitas to that beard.” This sense of social irony is heightened by the absurdity of many characters’ attempts to excuse the murder, which they name “Puiu’s misfortune” and attribute to inbreeding in Puiu’s bloodline, thus infantilizing him.
Rebreanu engages in a game of mirrors and tricks of perception, teasing the reader into wondering if Puiu is truly mad. Puiu seems to have more moments of lucidity than of madness, but he engages in magical thinking through self-persuasion, displaying an irrational mentality. Though an otherwise amiable and candid man, he is self-indulgent, blaming others for his crime (his father or, of course, Mădălina herself). “To think he had regarded this perversity as a sign of overpowering love,” he muses, seeming to suggest that this murder liberated him from his previously clouded judgment, a plainly absurd reversal of common sense. In the strange world of the sanatorium, however, both peasants and members of urban society share a mythical, magical understanding of the murder: “That’s how misfortune gets you, it watches you until it gets you,” one character says. The notion of “fulfilling his destiny” springs to Puiu’s mind: “The seed of this crime was buried inside me always, it grew, it hunted me down, and finally conquered me.”
Ion Simuț states that “the main flaw of the novel resides in the unbelievable rationality of adopting madness, although it could be said that the author takes risk and embraces that paradox willingly.” While this confirms the view that Rebreanu teases the reader, it seems that the central dilemma is doubtless successfully constructed, presenting a deft dive into the human psyche within the frame of a unique premise. In any case, Gabi Reigh has translated an incredibly complex and haunting work of art: “A murder of crows swept down and settled on a branch laden with snow.” The revelatory power of this beautiful dance and its melody sends a shiver down the listener’s spine—as the cautionary tale of possession and obsession does to the reader.
Andreea Iulia Scridon is a Romanian-American writer and translator. Her translation of a series of short stories by Ion D. Sîrbu, a representative of subversive writing under the communist regime, is forthcoming in 2021 with ABPress, and her co-translations with Adam J. Sorkin of the Romanian poet Traian T. Coșovei are due out with Broken Sleep Books. Scridon’s chapbook of her own poetry is appearing with Broken Sleep Books, and a book of poetry with MadHat Press is forthcoming in 2022.
*****
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