In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour,\u00a0Mircea C\u0103rt\u0103rescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s butterfly collection. C\u0103rt\u0103rescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres \u2013 as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.<\/p>\n
Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov\u2019s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, C\u0103rt\u0103rescu was allowed access to Nabokov\u2019s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. \u201cHis most important scientific work was about butterflies\u2019 sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,\u201d he whispers in awe. \u201cIt\u2019s like\u00a0an\u00a0image from a poem or a story. It\u00a0was\u00a0absolutely fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n
The enchantment with papilionoidean genitalia seems fitting. Blinding, C\u0103rt\u0103rescu\u2019s trilogy that critics voted Romania\u2019s novel of the\u00a0decade in 2010, is conceived as a butterfly in shape, with the first and third parts the wings and the middle book the body. In The Left Wing, the first volume which Penguin is publishing almost 30 years after it appeared in Romanian, there are butterflies fluttering on every other page. But they are rarely ethereal beings.<\/p>\n
Part memoir, part dreamscape, one\u00a0characteristically surreal scene sees a group of medieval villagers discover a swarm of gigantic butterflies frozen under the ice of the Danube river like woolly mammoths, 20 paces long and 40 paces wide. They\u00a0marvel at the insects\u2019 beauty \u2013\u00a0and then proceed to hack away the ice and boil them like lobsters, for a sumptuous feast.<\/p>\n
I have always felt a kinship with Salvador Dal\u00ed and Giorgio de Chirico<\/p>\n
\u201cNabokov was a fine artist, but he had fewer connections with fantastical literature and surrealism than I have,\u201d says C\u0103rt\u0103rescu in a video call from his\u00a0flat in Bucharest. \u201cThe image of the huge butterflies under the ice of the Danube could have come from Salvador Dal\u00ed or\u00a0from Giorgio de Chirico<\/a>, artists with\u00a0whose imagination I have always felt a\u00a0kinship.\u201d<\/p>\n The Blinding trilogy has been described as doing for Bucharest what James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses did for Dublin, turning the author\u2019s home city into a character in its own right, but it\u2019s the kind of character one might discover engaged in some unspeakable act in the corner of a Bruegel painting. From his fifth-floor apartment overlooking the \u015etefan cel Mare boulevard, C\u0103rt\u0103rescu\u2019s narrator fantasises about the city\u2019s green bronze statues descending from their plinths to copulate with limestone gorgons. A tower block on Strada Uranus appears to him as \u201cthe city\u2019s penis, red and erect\u201d. These books are not love letters to his birthplace. \u201cI took a stylistic and literary revenge against the people who stole my youth.\u201d<\/p>\n Born on 1 June 1956, C\u0103rt\u0103rescu grew up in a communist state within the Soviet Union\u2019s sphere of influence, even if Romania\u2019s status as a satellite state was notoriously non-docile. His father, the subject of the Swiftian third part of Blinding, played an active if minor role in the administration of the communist regime, and was devastated when the iron curtain came down in 1989. After hearing the news of president Nicolae Ceau\u0219escu fleeing the country in a helicopter with his wife, C\u0103rt\u0103rescu recalls: \u201cHe went to the kitchen and put his red party book on the fire. He\u00a0was crying all the time because he\u00a0believed in communism and now he saw that everything was a lie.\u201d<\/p>\n C\u0103rt\u0103rescu junior felt differently. As\u00a0a young man, he was already a key\u00a0figure of the beatnik-influenced cultural movement known as the \u201cblue jeans generation\u201d, who listened to Beatles records bootlegged in India and knew Allen Ginsberg\u2019s Howl off by heart. \u201cIt was a tongue-in-cheek term: we all wore blue jeans, not original Wranglers but primitive blue jeans made in\u00a0some cloth factory in Romania.\u201d<\/p>\n The collapse of the Soviet Union felt\u00a0for him like a liberation. \u201cAfter the revolution I became a citizen of the universe,\u201d he recalls. Though now based in Romania again, he has by his\u00a0own estimate spent a third of his post-cold war life living abroad, and wrote only the first few pages of the Blinding trilogy in Bucharest. The rest of the 1,400-page work was completed over a period of 14 years in Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest and Stuttgart. His favourite butterfly, he tells me, is the monarch butterfly, because it migrates thousands of kilometres every year.<\/p>\n In recent years, his books have started to enjoy the universal status to which the author aspires. His novel Solenoid was longlisted for the International Booker<\/a> this year; German news magazine Der Spiegel included The Left Wing in its list of the\u00a0100 best books in the world<\/a>; a new translation of the work was also published in France this year.<\/p>\n The fact that he has been considered a serious contender for the\u00a0Nobel prize in literature for the last\u00a010 years may be a factor behind the\u00a0revival: in 2023 and 2025 his odds with the bookies were 11\/1, as promising as those of one of his other great idols, Thomas Pynchon. Is he tired of waiting for the call from the Swedish Academy?<\/p>\n \u201cI never waited for a call,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m grateful to the people who consider me worthy of it, because to be seen as worthy of the Nobel prize, even if it\u2019s only a rumour, is an absolute honour.\u201d<\/p>\n This year\u2019s win for L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai<\/a>, from neighbouring Hungary, may have somewhat dented his chances: there may only be so much appetite among the Academy for another eastern European with a taste for apocalypse and travelling circuses. Then again, literature from the borderlands between Europe\u2019s east and west is flourishing. Poland\u2019s Olga\u00a0Tokarczuk<\/a> and Bulgaria\u2019s Georgi Gospodinov<\/a> are not just admired by critics but fervently read. \u201cI think you can talk today of a sort of a boom of eastern writers, which I\u2019m very proud to be part of,\u201d C\u0103rt\u0103rescu says. \u201cYou could compare it with what happened in the 1960s and 70s with writers from Latin America like Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, Vargas Llosa or Borges.\u201d<\/p>\n What makes eastern European writing so fresh? \u201cMany are absolutely non-commercial writers,\u201d he says. \u201cThey never thought of making money or getting prizes; they were people who really loved literature. They are totally devoted to their art.\u201d<\/p>\n Though critically acclaimed, C\u0103rt\u0103rescu has never been entirely embraced by the literary establishment: earlier this year, C\u0103rt\u0103rescu was controversially denied membership of\u00a0the Romanian Academy by a single vote in its general assembly. One of the Academy\u2019s elderly members said his work simply wasn\u2019t up to scratch: \u201cIn Dostoevsky there are dozens of characters, in Thomas Mann there are dozens of characters\u201d, Nicolae Breban told Romanian media. \u201cIn Mircea C\u0103rt\u0103rescu there are three characters: daddy, mommy and Mircea.\u201d He insists he is emphatically unfussed by the snub. \u201cI was rather relieved that I didn\u2019t make it at the end. I think I\u2019m not fit for it \u2013 there\u2019s nothing academic in myself.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet for all his outsider status, there are distinctly Romanian aspects to his books. Their treatment of religion, for one. Like elsewhere across the eastern bloc, church activity was suppressed in Romania during the communist period. \u201cWhen I was a kid we never went to church and we didn\u2019t have a Bible in our home,\u201d he recalls. \u201cUp to the age of 30 I thought that the Bible was just a collection of sermons.\u201d<\/p>\n I noticed the Bible wasn\u2019t just a holy book but the greatest novel ever written<\/p>\n But if some regions east of the iron curtain are now the most secular parts of Europe, such as the former East Germany, the Czech Republic and some of the Baltics, in Romania the church has roared back to life: according to the 2021 census, more than 73% of the population here identify as Orthodox Christian. \u201cWhen someone first gave me a Bible, I was reluctant to look through it, but when I started reading I couldn\u2019t stop. I noticed it wasn\u2019t just a holy book but the greatest novel ever written. My whole mind was impregnated with the expressivity of the text, with the fantastic poetry of the prophets and the extraordinary parables of Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the most striking scenes in The Left Wing is an epic, Avengers-esque battle between an army of angels with double-edged swords and a horde of horned and winged \u201ccacodemons\u201d, with the monsters eventually driven back into the dark by angelic psalms. \u201cReligions are madness,\u201d C\u0103rt\u0103rescu writes, \u201cand yet they are the only way, since they are the only way out of our world the mind can imagine.\u201d C\u0103rt\u0103rescu\u2019s ambivalent relationship with his home country may be the most Romanian thing about him. Romania has the largest diaspora in the European Union, with\u00a03.1 million Romanian citizens<\/a> recorded as living in other EU countries in 2024. Yet at the tense re-run of the country\u2019s presidential vote in May this year, a clear majority of these expats voted for a nativist, Maga-esque candidate.<\/p>\n \u201cFor some time, the diaspora were\u00a0the most democratic and most advanced people, but to our huge surprise they turned completely against it,\u201d he says. \u201cThey started to envy the Romanians who lived in Romania when they began earning more money than them abroad. They started to hate actually their own country so much that they wanted to destroy it.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, he insists, Romanians have always been Europeans and will continue to be. \u201cThe date in 2007 when they became members of the EU was maybe the most important day in our history. Even if those fascist or extremist movements are very strong in Romania now, we hope that they\u00a0will\u00a0diminish.\u201d<\/p>\n