| Staying for years in prison is not a misfortune. But it’s a misfortune to have stayed long years in prison and not learning anything from that. I have learned. I learned to love God a lot, even when I’m going through suffering, and to love all the people. Richard Wurmbrand The detention theme, present in the ancient layers of myth and sacred, follows humanity from all time and place, through creations that decisively participate to building the highest level of the universal culture. Being a source of inspiration and a theme of great proportion itself, the prison represented the main system of references for the literary transfer of questions and unrests felt every time the human thinking got around the idea of freedom. The confinement of the titans, the chains of Prometheus, the labyrinth of the Minotaur, Joseph’s prison, the torture of Sisyphus – are just some of the oldest examples, the prisoners, the slaves and the detainees frequently appearing in the narrations of the antiquity. Following Christ, the groups of saints and holly martyrs have passed from prisons and strains to the pages of a huge literature, with rich illustrations, from the hagiographies to the novels of authors like Sienkiewici, Bulgakov or Giovanni Papinni. As well, the heroes, warriors and great leaders are populating the pages of a universal history that points out many incarcerated personalities. To them also, the literature responded with an equivalent gallery of imprisoned characters. Starting with the crusaders and princes that suffered long years of confinement and became central characters of the western medieval epic, the theme will be resumed and will suffer semantic changes until the present times, “knights without fear and blemish”, redeeming and brave men often coming out from the cell of the Man in the Iron Mask of the well-known Count of Monte Cristo but also from Jean Valjean’s world of convict prison. Not by hazard, the theme will pass into the less commented level – and regarded as “inferior”, in a way – of the adventures, war and even science-fiction novel. An already “classical” example could be the famous Papillon but also the spread series of Dune, where prison-planets are imagined, the amplitude of the phenomenon answering to a horizon of demands and receptions that proves the theme’s persistence and functionality. The theme is triumphantly set up in the modern literature, propelled to new dimensions by Les Miserables of Victor Hugo, by the writings of Dickens or Alexandre Dumas and especially by the Russian novel. Tolstoi’s Resurrection but especially the masterpieces of Dostoievski, Memoirs from the House of the Dead or Crime and Punishment, will receive in the second part of the last century a new confirmation, moving due to the documentary realism, through The Gulag Archipelago of Solzhenitsyn or Man’s Fate of Malraux. The Romanian literature is not an exception. Opened, as a secondary element, by Nicolae Filimon in Ciocoii vechi si noi (The Old and the New Boyars), and in the epistles of Ion Ghica, the theme will be resumed in the novels of Liviu Rebreanu (Ion – John, Padurea spânzuratilor – Forest of the Hanged, Rascoala – The Revolt, Gorila – The Gorilla) or Eugen Barbu (Groapa – The Pit, Principele – The Prince), reaching a maximum development in the prose of Vasile Voiculescu, Zahei orbul (Zahei the Blind), and, with a very special system of reference, in the novel of Marin Preda, Cel mai iubit dintre pamânteni (The Most Beloved of Earthlings). After 1989, several books of memoirs and reconstructions of some dramatic experiences will follow, wrote by former political prisoners like Paul Goma (Patimile dupa Pitesti – The Passions according to Pitesti), Constantin Noica (Rugati-va pentru fratele Alexandru – Pray for Brother Alexander), Richard Wurmbrand (Cu Dumnezeu în subterana – In God’s Underground) or the monk from Rohia, Nicolae Steinhardt (Jurnalul fericirii – Happiness Diary). But the great achievements belong to poetry. Shyly made public by Asachi and Bolliac, launched by Tudor Arghezi in the area of great poetry, the theme will reach the aesthetical perfection through Nichifor Crainic and Radu Gyr, poets that express on a high level an overwhelming spiritual and literary phenomenon, the poetry of resistance created in the prisons and concentration camps of the 20th century. By using a large set of symbols and lyrical methods, the poetry writings born in the prisons of dictatorship offer the sensation of complete use of the theme’s whole potential of meanings, masterpieces like As’ noapte Iisus (Last night, Jesus)[1] or Unde sunt cei care nu mai sunt (Where are those that aren’t anymore)[2] rising the theme on the highest levels of sensibility recorded in the universal literature.[3] The ample display of the literary works is strongly supported by an imposing suite of imprisoned creators, brotherly evoked in the lines of one of their brilliant representatives: Up there, in the sky, there are too A lot of prisons and jails, of course Closed cells are lying there Beyond granite and copper doors... There you are, my cousins, my brothers, Thight locked-up rooms made of precious stones are the host... Hello, splendid batty ones, hello profligates! Ave, imprisoned ghosts!... Or behind the bolts, sublime rounders, Villon and Cervantes, dear punks, You challenge the cells and through the lattice You throw to Europe sparks?... Yes, late in the night, you cry too at the gratings. Then, I take my palms out of the worldish cell that I’m in For your tear of flames to drop in them So it becomes a bracellet or a ring...[4] A history of detention’s literature should be followed and even, in a way, preceded by a history of the imprisoned literature or, better said, by a chronicle of the imprisoned word. This double perspective would be proved as profitable both for examining the concept of freedom as well as for understanding the way humanity lives its freedom. Because it’s not by chance the fact that, among the creators that have influenced and profoundly marked world’s literature and thinking, there are so many those that have directly known prison’s experience. And also, this kind of biographical thresholds have produced, without any doubt, consequences in the essence of some works that represented support and spiritual inspiration for entire nations and, in some cases, for the whole mankind. There are exemplary situations in which the biography joins the work becoming, in a way, part of it, giving new meanings to it and dramatically developing them as well as the expressing force. The fact is more obvious when the historical landmark becomes a clear element of the text. Was the biographical fact of conviction, imprisoning and killing Socrates lacking of consequences, for example? Aren’t The Dialogues expressing the exemplarity that the life and not only the thinking of the wisdom Athenian were? The Apology of Socrates, Critias, Phaedo, live, of course, by the force of the ideas and by the beauty of the exposition, but they are related, together with the entire work of Plato, both to the landmark of the life of the character that inspired them and to the theme of imprisonment, contained and expressed by the texts that we mentioned. The history of literature and thinking seems to systematically make a halt in the world of detention, tireless going down, through its most impressive exponents, to the dark torus of the prison. Isn’t the prison of Boethius the birth place of De consolatione philosophiae, philosophic poem that strongly influenced the spiritual development of the European Occident and, especially through Chaucer and Dante, of the entire literature? How much out of the captivity of Camoes can be found, transformed, in his works, one that represented the literary foundation of an entire linguistic community, the Portuguese speaking one? Or, again, how much out of the detention of Cervantes led to the configuration of some feelings, images and meanings that make out of his thrilling novel a landmark for the entire universal literature? What would the French literature have meant without the imprisoned rebel, Francois Villon? How could the French spirit have developed if the young Jean Marie Arouet wouldn’t write, in prison, his first masterpiece, Oedipe, there taking also the name that will be so famous, Voltaire? If the prisons from Florence and the torture forced Machiavelli to retire from his political activity, to which he was so found of, isn’t this very experience the one that determined his entering, through The Prince, not only to the elite of the social and political thinking but also to the Italian literature and from here to the universal one? And isn’t also the political failure the one that threw John Milton in prison, from where, coming-back, he will give to literature The Lost Paradise? How much out of the protesting flame of young Friedrich Schiller was mended inside the military prison walls in which he was imprisoned after his famous act, The Thieves? How would have developed the Polish literature if, for example, Adam Mickiewicz wouldn’t know, being student, the hard experience of the tsarist empire’s prisons? And not from the same “house of the dead”, profoundly marked but also spiritual enriched, came back the one that will become the overwhelming landmark of the universal literature, Dostoievski? Didn’t the Romanian culture receive the message and the signs of the prisons through which passed Nicolae Balcescu, Ion Slavici, Octavian Goga, Tudor Arghezi or, as well, of the terrible experience of concentration lived by Vasile Voiculescu, Nichifor Crainic, Radu Gyr, Constantin Noica, Petre Tutea? If we were to extend the covering area of the theme towards other forms of freedom restraining, we would observe that almost the entire history of literature is placed, through the passions of its creators, under the sign of abuses, restrains and even the most severe violence. It would result such a long list of exiled, persecuted, ostracized people that only a few significant authors wouldn’t match , in a way or another, this new and painful “classification” criteria. The reader will be able to foresee, by scouring this present work, a correspondence without any doubt between the basis represented by the activation of the theme in folklore and the sublimation resulted by taking and refining it in the major culture. Because the deaf moan of prison and captivity doesn’t only accompany the works of earlier mentioned authors, but, before them, the whole folkloric phenomenon everywhere. Our work tries to prove this, for now only through the particular case of traditional Romanian culture. A comparative approach will become possible if, in the future, other folkloric areas will also be examined through similar perspectives. * Narrators and poets, known and unknown alike, remind us that the history of the art of word can be itself a history of the privation of freedom. That, in a way, should not surprise us. Was it not the same path of earthly suffering, injustice and humiliation that was crossed through by the embodied Logos? We will humbly step into our research, invoking the Word that broke the locks of all prisons, confessed in the sacred pages of one of the supremely representative writers for the detention theme, Saint John the Evangelist: And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. (John, 8, 32) 1 Radu Gyr, Poezii (Poems), Vol. I-III, Ed. Marineasa, Timisoara, 1992, Vol. I, Sângele temnitei (Prison’s blood), page 25. 2 Nichifor Crainic, Soim peste prapastie. Versuri inedite create în temnitele Aiudului (Hawk over the chasm. New poems written in the Aiud prison), Editura Roza Vânturilor, Bucuresti, 1990, page 31. 3 The limited circulation of the works after 1989 (obviously, during the communist dictatorship it was impossible to put in discution publishing them in Romania) could be explained, probably, by the residual prolonging of some guilty stocks of political nature but also by the cultural managers’ of the moment lack of interest without any aestetical justification. 4 Radu Gyr – Si-acolo sus, ... în vazduh (Up there too, in the sky...), op. cit., page 66. |