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agonia.net 
· a distance there is
Article 
Despre Boierism: manifest si razie
Round Table
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2007-09-12 | | The present study represents a first systematised attempt to depict the most relevant aspects of the personality of the intellectual Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania. We shall mainly focus on his position as a writer, but, complementarily, on that of theologian as well, while aware of the inherent limits imposed by the attempt to decipher the profile of a learned man who, happily brings together that coincidentia oppositorum between the sacred and the profane, not in a definite antinomy, but in substantial harmony. As a result of a multiple documentation and constant elaboration, our research does not intend to be an exhaustive and definite document, but an exegetic premiere, which can serve as referential starting point to possible similar future approaches. We studied, hopefully rigorously, the considerable and generous bibliographical resources, sometimes unexplored, aiming to underline both the completion of the creative spirit of the author in each of the domains he acted, and the echo his writings determined in the public conscience. However, beyond the canonical circumstances of the configuration and receptivity of the writer’s work, we tried to propose an interpretation key, which would emphasize the associating or dissociating manner in which the work relates to the intentionality of the author or to the tradition of the mitem. Consequently, we argued that not seldom can the intimate meaning of the writer’s work be deciphered but by appealing to the biographic experience of the author, a very important role being held by the theological formation of the writer, dissipated and decanted in the artistic retort with subtlety. Also, the intellectual’s canonical proposing and imposing through a personal vision of interpreting traditions offers just as astonishing and bewildering approaches, mainly of his scientific work. We believe that the place Valeriu Anania’s work, and, implicitly, personality have in the conscience of the contemporary intellectual and public in general required and imposed a systematising and interpreting approach as the one we are proposing. The spirit that has over-passed different epochs and their implications for 85 years has always been in the proximity of essential events and personalities of culture and society in whole. From the position of obeying disciple, Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania has assimilated the numerous and diverse existential hypostases, which he eventually has had the possibility to metamorphose and dimension aesthetically, using word in all the literary or scientific genres and species destiny set in forth for him. A name known and acknowledged by intellectuals starting with the 1970’s, Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania was acknowledged as important public personality especially when becoming an Orthodox prelate. It was a happy case as his work, which was to be acknowledged in the same context, also determined the regeneration of the critical interest and a revising of opinions according to the dual personality of the author. The lifetime dialogue between Anania and Bartolomeu amazes, enchants or triggers off bewilderment in contemporaneity, but only if people ignore the inflexions of a constant and specific vision of the author, through all that has been uttered, ignoring the outer constraints and settling the inner beliefs. This is the exact aim of the present study: the depiction of the fundamental dimensions of the work belonging not to a contradictory but integrating personality. We structured our volume formally according to the criteria of a monographic study, following, in distinct sections, the polyphonic profile of the intellectual Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania. An Autobiographical Portrait; Poetry; Prose; Dramaturgy; Memoirs, Essay, Publicism, Diary; The Translation of the Holy Bible are individual chapters, however integrated in a unitary vision, through the constant depiction of the intermingling of the multiple creative preoccupations of the author. In every distinct section we used the chronological, diachronic criterion of the editorial publishings, trying, nevertheless, to maintain a trans-temporal coherence of vision, through the constant references to the analepses, prolepses or even intertextuality which the work undoubtedly presupposes. Where the subject required, we made use of concise paragraphs. We constantly paid special attention to the writer’s opinions regarding the works discussed as well as to those belonging to literary critics, using, however, the instruments of contemporary exegesis in order to reveal the configuration and receptivity manners of the authorial intentionality. Without claiming the exhaustion of the study material, we nevertheless propose for debate certain personal opinions regarding the interpretation of the work, by using exegetic arguments, which we consider plausible and pertinent, though not irrevocable. While completely aware that it is impossible to say everything both about a work of art and its author, we only state our opinion that the present philological vision, with minimal theological representations, is a necessary approach, accomplished with the honesty of argumentation in order to depict the pluses and minuses – where we ultimately believe there are some – of a literary paradigm, which marked the national culture at the turn of the millennium in a significant way. Last but not least, we express our hope that the present exegesis will represent a first reference for cordial, constructive and complementary disputes, which will reveal, the authenticity of a remarkably creative personality, as completely as possible. I. The first chapter is dedicated to the recovery of the significant events of a distinct biography, which has undergone not few decisive moments for the development of the creative spirit of the author. Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania’s existential line has met numerous extraordinary hypostases of man, and happened to have important positions and tasks for a long time, which have tested the ontological limit of the individual, every time assumed, interiorised and metamorphosed in compensatory and significant gestures and attitudes of the cultivated spirit. As much as possible, the biographical portrait we have made aims also at the gathering of the author’s confessions, discreetly spread along all his work, upon topics which have been neither stated nor hidden, but acquired with dignity by the man who, since early youth has dedicated his life to serving the Orthodox belief and the Romanian people, with both his given talent and personality. The Southern and Transylvanian roots of the author are rendered through the author’s recalls about his mother, father and native village. Mother’s figure imposes as decisive for young Valeriu Anania’s destiny, initialising him in a mythical universe, of candid fairy-tales, turning the objective world of rural references into a land of magic realism, the whole work of the future writer being infused with the intellectually aimed confusion of the real and the miraculous. The image of the native village left behind for good at the age of only twelve, will however remain in the author’s memory as a referential topos of his own development, an existential matrix, nostalgia of the beginnings, which will represent the basic feature of his literary work, as a recovery of the absolute “primordial phenomenon”. The time spent as a student of the Central Seminary in Bucharest between 1933 and 1941 marks the poetic, publicist and dramaturgic debut of the very young man. As for dramaturgy, the writer already initialises the mingling of pure fairy-play with the realistic screenplay seen as the mythical dimension that is understood as natural result of the way he has pictured his writings. The publishing of a temporary literary magazine is to be remarked, in which the juvenile excitement gives birth to poetry, theological studies and literary exegeses of the young graduate. The same stage of life also determines the first expressed manifestations of the decisive political involvement of the individual Valeriu Anania in the life of society, sanctioning promptly and irrevocably what he was to consider all the time, since then, the acts of betrayal of the Romanian people, more specifically, the anti-Carlist street protest. His nationalism and unconcealed patriotism, fervent and basic, and correlated to different historical and political circumstances and contexts placed the man of the fortress, Valeriu Anania, at the juncture of sensitive events and aspects of “the Romanian phenomenon”, which would meet contradictory and puzzling avatars for the following half a century. His anointment as a monk, his ordination as a deacon, his poetry debut in the pages of the Gândirea, and mainly his meeting with Tudor Arghezi are the immediate events that configure a certain existential and aesthetic trajectory. The friendship with Tudor Arghezi will be emotional, constant and full of essence, Valeriu Anania confessing for several times that he considers himself a disciple of the famous writer. Valeriu Anania’s early poetic creation is acknowledged by the author himself as a constant effort to overcome the imitative formula of pastiche of Arghezi’s poetic art. The aesthetic of the ugly will trace a distinct and somewhat new mark in Vaeriu Anania’s work, while Arghezi’s passion for finding olden words, with an impressing semantic area will be inherited by the disciple himself. Finally yet importantly, Valeriu Anania’s relation to Arghezi’s vision of “to create”, the poienin, would be a rather dissociative one. Nevertheless, the relation of the lyrical ego will definitely part from the formula of Arghezi’s rebellion, Anania’s line being similar to the biblical psalmist, an inner celebration of divinity, metamorphosed into prayer-poetry. However, only from now on are the extraordinary experiences of the intellectual monk to come: the status of the eminent student in medicine, the relation with Victor Papilian, the work of creating dramatic sketches, the relation with Ion Luca, an intellectual life full of effervescence will culminate with a decisive gesture of destiny. As president of “Petru Maior” Student’s Centre, he will lead the students’ anti-communist and anti-revisionist strike (against the Hungarian irredentism), which will result into his banishing from Cluj, the expelling from the Medicine Faculty, and the beginning of a long row of arrests done by the Security and semi-clandestine fugitiveness in his own country. The graduation from the theological university studies will be followed, through a sign of fate, by the encountering of the Patriarch Justinian Marina, whose close collaborator he will be for the rest of his life. There would come years of harassment form the Security, the completion of his first literary work, the dramatic poem Mioriţa, but also the imprisonment in 1958, which will delay his creative vocation with a few years, making him involuntarily a member of what Laurenţiu Ulici named “the postponed graduation”. In the prisons of Jilava, Piteşti, Aiud, the archimandrite Bartolomeu knows the horrors of communism, not alone, but together with the intellectual elite of the Romanian nation, whose extermination was set with obstinacy in the obsessive decade by the dictatorial regime settled through fraud and terror. It was an experience that must have revealed limits, but mainly the superiority and moral purity of those who, in reclusion, defeated what was the arbitrary and bestial through their humane and inner being. In the prison of Jilava, intellectuals of most different preoccupations and professions held, while ignored by the ignoring guardians, a series of conferences through which they maintained their reason, faith, spirituality and morality in a world which had started an opposite way. A far echo of the uttering of the imprisoned monk Bartolomeu will become, in decades, admiring pieces of prose, which make up the volume Amintirile peregrinului Apter (The Apterous Peregrine’s Memories), an original and refined reply to Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead. As for the man Valeriu Anania, the unjustly imposed reclusion for a quarter of a century was to determine another radical gesture, more drastic and horrifying this time, through which he was to give up the human inside, which, if accomplished, would have proved the weak of the being, but, which, overcome, meant another victory of the inner ego. In the prison of Aiud, Valeriu Anania was on the verge of blinding himself, with calculated premeditation, but was ultimately talked out of it by the oneiric warning of his sister dead as a child. The episode was to be evoked many times in his articles, fiction or memoirs and was metamorphosed lately on from fact into imaginary hypostasis, without losing whatsoever anything of the thrill of horror. During the time spent “far form the madding crowd”, the playwright creates other two poems, exclusively with the help of thought, the works being printed, because of the lack of other possibilities, in the mind of the author, while waiting silently to be put on paper. From a certain point of view, it can be considered the supreme argument of an illegal battle between the physical constraint imposed from the outside and the spiritual freedom cultivated inside, out of which the inner man has come victorious. Liberated through a general free pardon, in 1965 the Patriarch gives Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania complete trust to serve his people and the Church under not easy circumstances, and names him part of the Archbishopry of the Romanian Missionary Orthodox Church in America and Canada. During the following 11 years, Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania will accomplish all his churchly and priest duties irreproachably, however feeling, in a dramatic way, the nostalgia and acute longing for the native land, whose distance but not estrangement is felt like an ontological wound. While he is away, a remarkable number of his volumes are published, but for the writer Valeriu Anania, in his extraordinary hypostasis of exiled, he feels closer to being a journalist, in a very personal meaning of the word. Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania starts writing for the magazine and the almanac Credinţa and for the literary magazine Noi, in whose pages he will publish, during the years spent in America, a wide range of literary and theological articles, characterised by signs of polemical essays. In these writings, the writer often confesses to himself or offers vehement replies to some events that paradoxically happen in Romania or abroad, maintaining his opinions perseveringly, not seldom criticising bitterly what he considers a threat to the authenticity of the “Romanian phenomenon”, or becomes easily overtaken by any positive form of manifestation of the Romanian spirit abroad. Repatriated, the writer Valeriu Anania has his artistic status and aesthetic quality of his work confirmed, with explainable but not excusable delay. Author of four dramatic poems and three volumes of poetry, Valeriu Anania becomes a member of the Writers’ Union in Romania in 1978. In 1979 he publishes, only one year after its writing, the novel entitled Străinii din Kipukua (The Foreigners in Kipukua), which is, from a strictly literary point of view, his most ingenuous and exciting of all volumes, amazing both for the exotism of the diegetic location and its fascinating way of constructing/deconstructing the fantastic; however, its true substantial dimension is rendered by the allegorical character, the protagonist reiterating, in contemporaneity, the performative role of Apostle John, the witness of a virtual apocalypse. The carefully dissimulated confessions, the appeal to the mythic which itself becomes diegesis, rendering a fascinating magic realism, the analepses and the prolepses, the evasive identity impose this novel as a challenge for any hermeneutical approach. Last but not least, the obsessive illusion of time’s deviations from its natural flowing represent a direct reference to his most amazing dramatic poem, Du-te vreme, vino vreme! (Go Away, Time! Come, Time!), together with which it can be read as aspects of a common paradigm. The literary work of the author meets supportive editorials and positive exegetic appreciations. Valeriu Anania is now a certain reference of the Romanian intellectual elite. On February 7th, the archimandrite Bartolomeu Anania, a month before being 72 years old, but after he has already refused similar positions for decades, is ointed and named Archbishop, in the Archbishopric cathedral in Cluj-Napoca. As Archbishop of Cluj, Bartolomeu Anania will distinguish himself as the most important voice of the contemporary Romanian orthodoxy, his attitudes surprising and puzzling sometimes by stating normality in a world where norms seem figured in such a way as to ignore the fundamental values. Voice of reason and common sense, the Archbishop Bartolomeu Anania sometimes becomes an incommoding figure through his unconventionality of his way of maintaining his faith and beliefs, but he has always proved his point of view to be authentic in a world of artificiality, dissimulation and hypocrisy. The social and cultural distinctions have become a common fact in the life of the distinguished person of Valeriu Anania. Nonetheless, all these are surmounted by The Bible or the Holy Scriptures, Jubilee Edition of the Holy Synod. (Published with the blessing and with a preface of His Holiness Teoctist, the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Version translated after The Septuagint, written and annotated by BARTOLOMEU VALERIU ANANIA, the Archbishop of Cluj, The Publishing House Institutul Biblic şi de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române.) The work is exceptional, highly appreciated by both specialists and public. The novelty it brings is both theological and philological, due to the present language, but also faithful to authenticity, inclusively when the original means the restoration of the specific literature, especially of the Old Testament. The most accessible novelty is represented by the more than eight thousand subsidiary and infra-paginal annotations as well as the introductions, whose aim is to help the reader not to get lost in the labyrinth, which the holy text sometimes presupposes from various reasons. It is the first annotated version of The Bible in the Romanian Orthodoxy. Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania is, at present, more than an accomplished writer and theologian. His personality takes over the certain values of the intellectual elites of the people, a national symbol, which marks and transcends an epoch to eternity, a name that no longer belongs strictly to its time. Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania becomes an axiological symbol for what we can call Romanian spirituality.
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