In May 1990, in Vienna, I began one of the chapters of my life that would absorb much of my passion, energy, and time. Had I known that this intellectual adventure would last fourteen years, I might have hesitated to accept the role my colleagues at International PEN proposed to me during a meeting in the Austrian capital: that of reorganizing a PEN Centre in Romania to continue the interwar tradition, represented by the names of great writers, very few of whom had survived the communist period. The situation was somewhat similar in all Eastern European countries, liberated in 1989 from the dictatorships that had paralyzed free thought and forced writers either into obedience or into a risky struggle against the ideological monopoly of the single party. The PEN Centres (or “PEN Clubs”) in these countries had been banned at the beginning of the Soviet occupation, and during the post-Stalinist liberalization, they had been transformed, at best, into ornamental institutions used only on special occasions to give a façade of democracy to repressive regimes. Now it was time to reactivate these hubs of free thought and conscience, and it fell to my colleagues and me to organize ourselves and reintegrate into the world organization, headquartered in London.
After a summer of consultations and completing the necessary formalities — including registration in the Romanian NGO registry, not without obstacles — on 11 September 1990, the Romanian PEN Centre was reborn in a meeting attended by the most representative Romanian writers, enrolled based on a declaration of adherence to the PEN Charter, as formulated in 1921 by the organization’s founding fathers. Initiated in 1921 by a group of English and French writers, International PEN (the acronym PEN stands for Poets – Essayists – Novelists) was the first and remains the only worldwide organization of writers. The PEN Charter, upon which it operates, was drafted as an act of intellectual reconciliation among writers across borders, after the devastating experience of the First World War, which left a deep mark on European consciousness.
Soon, PEN Centres were established in many other countries, joining both organizationally and individually through the prestigious names of leading authors of the era: John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Arthur Schnitzler, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maurice Maeterlinck, Knut Hamsun, Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Benedetto Croce, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Selma Lagerlöf, Thomas Mann, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost… Gradually encompassing more countries and all continents, the organization became a true “writers’ parliament,” concerned with professional rights, freedom of expression, and, not least, authors’ liberty, with its most active department being the Writers in Prison committee, monitoring cases of repression in dictatorial regimes. Each year, International PEN holds a congress where resolutions, motions, and protests are adopted, and leadership positions are elected or renewed. By way of compensation, each year also sees fascinating poetry festivals, performances, and theoretical debates. While “activists” focused on the survival of the organization, invited writers focused on the survival of literature, threatened at its core by television and the vulgarity of subculture.
The Romanian PEN Club was originally established in 1923, with among its founders Liviu Rebreanu. It had a remarkable activity, as can be inferred from a few notebooks preserved by the Cioculescu family during the arrest of Radu Cioculescu, the distinguished translator of Proust, who had served for many years as the secretary of the Centre. Cioculescu died shortly thereafter in prison, and the most important members of the Centre were also arrested or banned.
With the re-establishment, we sought to reconnect with this tradition, interrupted forty-six years earlier. One member, Mr. Barbu Cioculescu, provided part of his uncle’s archive. On solemn occasions, we invited Mr. Barbu Brezianu, the distinguished writer and art historian, and poet Pan Vizirescu, former members of the 1930s PEN Club. We premiered a volume by Ștefan Nenitescu, another interwar PEN member who had also suffered under the communist regime. In March 1994, following the death of Eugen Ionescu, we organized a commemorative evening, attended by relatives, contemporaries, and scholars of the great playwright. In May 1995, in collaboration with the Civic Academy and the Writers’ Union, we organized a series of celebratory events for the centenary of Lucian Blaga’s birth, including a jubilee session at Cluj University, a pilgrimage to the cemetery in Lancrăm, and an evening of music and poetry at the Bucharest Conservatory. As a tribute to great literature promoted by our compatriots, I proposed, successively, for the Nobel Prize the playwright Eugen Ionesco (1993 and 1994), the essayist Emil Cioran (1995), and the poet Gellu Naum (2000).
The year 1990, when the Romanian PEN Centre was re-established, was dominated, far more than the following years, by the intolerant struggle of old structures, seemingly abolished in December, against anyone who took seriously the freedom paid for with the lives of over 1,100 young people. From the very beginning, our Centre appeared as a defender of the rights and freedoms proclaimed by the Charter. At the time of re-establishment, when officials practiced class struggle (see the miners’ interventions) and hidden forces fueled hatred among nationalities (see Târgu Mureș events), the PEN Centre was a tolerant force calling for respect of freedom of conscience and opinion, opposing censorship, protesting against the obstruction of idea circulation, and unafraid to openly criticize the government, administration, and institutions for abuses.
Soon new PEN Centres appeared nearby: the Hungarian-language PEN Centre in Romania and, immediately after independence, the one in Moldova. We also maintained privileged relations with other centres in former communist countries (Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Lithuania), because writers who had experienced repression found in the global organization a stronger sense of attachment than those in the “normal” world beyond the former Iron Curtain. The issues discussed in the five regional conferences we organized directly in Romania, and the way we engaged colleagues from other regions, demonstrated a maturity proportional to the shared solidarity of destiny. These regional conferences were held in:
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September 1995 – “The Writer and Power”, Neptun
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June 1998 – “Writers in Prisons: Between Physical and Spiritual Freedom”, Sighet Memorial
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April 2000 – “Multiple Languages, One Literature, Many Literatures, One Language”, Iași
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July 2001 – “European PEN Clubs, Arguments for a United Europe”, Sinaia
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June 2002 – “Literature in Conflict Situations”, Bucharest
From 1990 onward, the Romanian PEN Centre participated in the world congresses following the founding conferences in Vienna and Paris (1990, 1991), including Barcelona (1992), Dubrovnik (1993), Prague (1994), Santiago de Compostela (1995), Guadalajara, Mexico (1996), Edinburgh (1997), Warsaw (1999), Moscow (2000), London (2001), Ohrid (2002). The major challenge was always securing sponsors for plane tickets, which explains our absence from distant congresses in Brazil and Australia. We did attend regularly organized regional conferences in Slovenia, Macedonia, and Hungary.
Congress sessions in Central and Eastern Europe (Prague 1994, Warsaw 1999, Moscow 2000, Ohrid 2002) focused on essential issues of creative work, highlighted by writers who had regained their freedom and sought to support oppressed colleagues elsewhere through protest motions, international appeals, and support campaigns. World congresses, while not particularly glamorous, provided the cohesion and passion of our professional conscience.
I participated in nearly all the committees of the global organization, and for special issues I was consulted by the most active committee, Writers in Prison, which had intervened even during the dictatorship in Romania against abusive arrests (e.g., journalists from România Liberă in 1989).
During a professional trip to Vietnam a few years ago, as part of a delegation of the Romanian Writers’ Union, I felt compelled to intervene on behalf of 15 Vietnamese colleagues imprisoned and flagged by an International PEN resolution. I recalled an event almost half a century earlier: in January 1956, Jean de Beer, the secretary of the French PEN Club and playwright, was invited to Bucharest to lecture at the Institute of Foreign Relations. Then, Romania, newly admitted to the UN, welcomed any Western guest. Authorities assigned him a counterpart in Victor Eftimiu, who had held a post in the Romanian PEN Club 15 years prior. When Jean de Beer limited his lecture to generalities about creative freedom, high-ranking politicians summoned him for a formal audience, turning the visit into a political display. The French playwright’s sole satisfaction was that his report, submitted to France, reproduced the discussions with Romanian officials, often with irony.
The acute awareness of Eastern European writers regarding freedom of conscience brought the debate on ideas squarely into International PEN. The Romanian PEN Centre was recognized as one of the most prestigious within the global organization. In the summer of 1996, following resolutions by the French and British PEN Centres, I was proposed as a candidate for the presidency of International PEN. Supported by Romanian colleagues, I was to be formally elected at the Guadalajara Congress without opposition. However, behind-the-scenes maneuvers, not targeting my candidacy but questioning the organization’s definition, led me to make a surprising decision: on the night before the vote (12 November), I withdrew my candidacy in protest. The position was temporarily extended, at my suggestion, for another year to the former president, English playwright Ronald Harwood. This signaled that a role should not be held merely for personal ego and highlighted the crisis of identity threatening the organization. The attempted takeover failed, and in subsequent years, those who had sought to alter the organization could not impose their program.
At the conclusion of my mandate, which lasted from May 1990 to May 2004, I hope that my withdrawal from the presidency will not disrupt the Centre’s activity and that, through the effort of my colleagues, it will remain one of the most active and valuable centres. I also hope this website will continue to document the many actions initiated by Gabriela Adameșteanu and Ioana Ieronim, whom I appointed on 12 May 2004, by majority vote, as President and Secretary of the Romanian Centre. I wish them success and promise to continue supporting them and other colleagues.
Leadership positions in PEN Centres, being unpaid and requiring significant time, represent a conscious sacrifice of energy. The sole income of a Centre, which, to maintain its NGO status, cannot rely on state funds, is theoretically the members’ fees, which themselves cannot fully cover the international fee of $15 per member. I obtained assistance from the Writers’ Union to pay dues to the London headquarters. Sponsorships for regional conferences were provided by the German foundations Hanns Seidel (Sighet), Konrad Adenauer (Iași), and Friedrich Ebert (Sinaia), for which I am grateful. The Foundation for Culture and Human Rights sponsored the “Literature in Conflict Situations” meeting in Bucharest.
Ana Blandiana
12 May 2004