Moldova
- works
- 27
- 23 books · 4 films
- period covered
- 1840–1975
- language of writing
- Romanian
The founding text of this country is a poem in which a shepherd learns that he is going to be killed and gives his instructions. A ewe warns him that his two companions have decided on his death; he does not flee, he asks to be buried near his sheepfold with his flutes at his head, and begs that his mother be told he has married a queen. The ballad was noted down in the nineteenth century, nearly a thousand variants have been recorded, and it is sung on both sides of the Prut.
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That border is the central fact. The province was taken by Russia in 1812, returned in 1918, retaken in 1940, and each change bore on the language: the Cyrillic alphabet imposed, a Moldovan language declared distinct from Romanian, an administrative vocabulary modelled on Russian. The Latin alphabet was restored in 1989. The name of the language, Moldovan or Romanian, remains an internal political stake: both designations are used here without one being preferred. To which are added Transnistria, separated since 1992, and an emigration that has emptied the villages.
The form is song. The doina, a lament without fixed measure, and the ballad hold the place that the novel occupies elsewhere, and the lăutari, professional musicians often Roma, are their bearers: Emil Loteanu devoted a film to them in 1972 that is the country's best known. The price is that of an administered literature. Nicolai Costenco was deported at the beginning of the nineteen forties and returned only after Stalin's death; Vladimir Beșleagă saw his 1966 novel attacked for its subject, a child crossing the Dniester during the war; and one had to publish in Cyrillic, in Chișinău, within a framework decided in Moscow.
What awaits the reader is a poetry of lament and of the land, without grandiloquence, and a brief prose that goes around what it cannot say. The poem that opens this page was written in the summer of 1917 by a priest, an army chaplain, who died in August of the same year; it says that the language is a buried treasure, and five of its stanzas now form the national anthem.
A way to begin
Our Language
Alexei Mateevici · 1917
Twelve stanzas to "our language", five of which now form the national anthem of Moldova. Free of rights.
Twelve four-line stanzas saying what "our language" is: a treasure buried in the depths, a fire burning in a people woken from a deathly sleep, a song, a green leaf, the language of old writings. The text also shows it rusted, groaning in oblivion, and calls on those who speak it to wash off its grime so that a new flood of words may spring forth.
Timeline
- 1842–1863Writers of BessarabiaDonici, Negruzzi, Russo, Hasdeu. They write in Romanian under the Russian Empire.
- 1850MiorițaThe folk ballad shared by Moldova and Romania.
- 1917Limba noastrăMateevici writes the poem that will become the anthem, and dies at thirty.
- 1926–1948Soviet republicMilev, Bucov, Lupan. An official Moldovan literature, set against Romanian.
- 1957–1975ThawDruță, Vieru, Beleagă on the page; Kalik and Loteanu on screen.
Reading keys
- Names are Romanian, with endings in -escu, -eanu or -aru, and many were Russified in Soviet documents by the addition of a patronymic in -ovich: the same man appears in two forms according to the archive.
- Godparenthood at baptism and at marriage creates a spiritual kinship that binds as much as blood kinship, and characters call each other godfather or godchild in daily life.
- The name of the saint celebrated by the family structures the calendar, and the eldest often bears the grandfather's first name.
- The Gagauz families of the south, Turkic-speaking and Orthodox, and the Bulgarian or Ukrainian families have their own usages, and a name immediately places a region.
- The question of unity with Romania has divided the country since 1991 and is read in the vocabulary a text uses even before in its opinions.
- The deportations of 1941 and of 1949, the famine of 1946 and 1947 and collectivisation are subjects opened only recently, with archives lately accessible.
- The war of 1992 and Transnistria are treated with caution, many families being divided between the two banks.
- The Chișinău pogrom of 1903 and the extermination of the Jews of Bessarabia in 1941 belong to a memory long erased from the curricula.
- Orthodoxy is massively in the majority, with two competing jurisdictions, one attached to Moscow and the other to Bucharest, which makes parish belonging a political position.
- The calendar of saints commands agricultural labours and marriages, and the fasts structure the year of food.
- The practices of unbewitching, the women who read the future in coffee grounds or in wax and the formulas against the evil eye are common and without contradiction with the Church.
- The legend of the builder obliged to wall up his wife so that the monastery would stand is the founding narrative common to the whole Balkan area.
- The mărțișor, a red and white cord given on 1 March and worn until the end of the month, opens the year and is found in every childhood narrative.
- Orthodox Easter commands the year, with the Easter of the dead a week later gathering families in the cemeteries around a meal.
- A wedding unfolds over several days with godparents, songs of separation and a simulated abduction of the bride, a codified sequence that a text uses without explaining it.
- Funeral vigils include lamentations sung by women, a poetic genre distinct from prayer, and a garment and money are placed in the coffin.
- The ballad of the shepherd and that of the builder are the two texts that everybody knows, common to Moldova and to Romania.
- Ion Creangă's tales, published between 1875 and 1878, are the narrative base of childhood on both banks, and the collector Grigore Botezatu established the Bessarabian corpus in the twentieth century.
- The music of the lăutari, with its violins and its cimbalom, is a sound reference that literature constantly summons.
- The figures of Stephen the Great, a fifteenth-century prince, and of Bessarabia taken and retaken provide the common historical repertoire.
- Moldovan and Romanian are the same language, written for a time in two alphabets, and the choice of the word to name it is a matter of politics, not of linguistics.
- Independent Moldova and the Romanian region of Moldavia are two distinct entities, which explains why Creangă or Eminescu are claimed on both sides.
- The country is not Slavic: the language is Romance, the alphabet has been Latin since 1989, and the Slavic neighbourhood is a fact of history and not of kinship.
- The lăutari are not picturesque amateurs but hereditary professionals, with a regulated repertoire and transmission.
- The catalogue is slender and stops in the nineteen seventies, which measures access to translations and not the literary vitality of the country.
Tales and mythologies 1
- PoetryThe Ewe LambMiorițaAnonymous · 1850A shepherd warned by his ewe lamb that someone wants to kill him, who turns his foretold death into a wedding with the world.Literature
Available in English 2
The books from this country that can be read in English, in the original or in translation.
- PoetryThe Song of RomaniaCântarea RomânieiAlecu Russo · 1850A song in verses in praise of a country and its history, published without the author's name by Romanian exiles in Paris.Literature
- PoetryOur LanguageLimba noastrăAlexei Mateevici · 1917Twelve stanzas in praise of the language spoken in Bessarabia, written in 1917, five of which now form the country's anthem.LiteraturePublic domain
A selection to begin with 10 / 27
- PoetryThe Song of RomaniaCântarea RomânieiAlecu Russo · 1850A song in verses in praise of a country and its history, published without the author's name by Romanian exiles in Paris.Literature
- PoetryDiscursul soareluiEmilian Bucov · 1937not translated into EnglishRostrum verse written in Bucharest before the war by a young communist, on the model of Mayakovsky.Literature
- PoetryPoezii aleseNicolai Costenco · 1957not translated into EnglishThe book of the return of a poet deported to Siberia for having defended his language.Literature
- NovelFrunze de dorIon Druță · 1957not translated into EnglishA Moldavian village just after the war, two young couples, and a love that the ambition of one of them pulls away from the other.Literature
- CinemaMan Follows the SunChelovek idyot za solntsemMikhail Kalik · 1961A day in the life of a child who crosses an entire city in pursuit of the sun.Cinema
- CinemaPosledniy mesyats oseniVadim Derbenyov · 1965An old man makes the rounds of his sons to find out what they have kept of what he had passed on to them.Cinema
- NovelZbor frîntVladimir Beșleagă · 1966not translated into EnglishThe war seen through an adolescent searching for his brother from one bank of the Dniester to the other, in a narrative that rejects the order of time.Literature
- CinemaSe caută un paznicGheorghe Vodă · 1967A poet filmmaker brings a folk tale by Creangă to the screen; the film is banned in 1970.Cinema
- NarrativeIsprăvile lui GuguțăSpiridon Vangheli · 1967A little boy and his magic hat, big enough to shelter a whole village: the Moldovan children's classic.Literature
- CinemaThe FiddlersLăutariiEmil Loteanu · 1972A musical fresco about the Gypsy fiddlers of Bessarabia in the last century.Cinema