The abstraction of a smokestack in Uioara and the no less abstract grapevine in Manchester.

This blindness to the laws specific to life, this blindness to the ways specific to living, is a perversion of those historical roots which must be traced all the way back through the nineteenth century, to the roots of the French revolution and, further, to the roots of reform. Our lectures over the past years have sketched the general framework of the problem. I propose this year that we study several particular aspects of the Romanian economy, deformed by the revolutionaries of 1848 and liberalism to the point of smothering the most elementary local features.

It was a beautiful lecture, and Vieru had to admit it. We took a walk together afterwards.

‘Decidedly, I’m never going to see eye to eye with Professor Ghiţă. He’s a seminarian, a theologian. A man who’s happy when he can be subject to something, whatever it may be. With a thousand Moldovans and a thousand Muntenians like him, I’m not surprised that for centuries this place has been dominated by whoever imposed their will: Turks, Russians, Phanariote Greeks. His whole life consists of subjugations. “Subject to the demands of life,”’ as he’d say. Subjugation to everything above and beyond you. For my part, the day I start to believe that by the very fact of being a man I’m condemned to be circumscribed in this way, I’ll shoot myself. If I’m not free, then I’m nothing. Free to think, free to ascribe values or fix hierarchies. The world can be understood through critical discrimination or through rigorous examination. And, conversely, it can go permanently dark if we give up on thinking and take refuge in mystical intuitions.’

Ghiţă Blidaru and Mircea Vieru are divided by a whole history, an entire worldview. Were it not for the picturesque aspect of each, Vieru with his blond faun-like head, Ghiţă Blidaru like a wintry wolf, were it not for their colourful and contrasting lives, with their passions, struggles and loves, what fine characters in a Platonic dialogue those two would make, these two ideological poles! ‘The drama of modern Romanian history’, as portrayed by two heroes. Utterly schematic, but representative nonetheless.

To put it crudely, Romanian culture has remained stuck with the same intellectual problems which arose when the first railroad was built in 1860. With the problem of identifying with the west or the east, with Europe or the Balkans, with urban culture or the spirit of the countryside. The issues have always remained the same.

The poet Vasile Alecsandri formulates them with naivety, Ghiţă Blidaru and Mircea Vieru formulate them with a critical spirit. Yet the rural type and the urban type are the only categories that remain permanently valid in Romanian culture. I believe you can always easily distinguish the devotees of one or the other of these two orientations, anywhere, in Romanian literature, in politics, in music, in journalism … The choice is clear for Vieru. He’s the urban type par excellence. One of those Europeans who have been shaped by Cartesianism, the bourgeois revolution and civic culture, a new nation on this continent, and one that transcends any national borders.

‘I believe in the identity of man. I believe in permanent, universal values. I believe in the dignity of intelligence.’

I’m convinced these three short sentences sum up the basis of Vieru’s thinking. I once asked him if the war, from which he returned with two poorly mended wounds, had not turned his intellectual certitudes upside down.

‘Rather the contrary. I fought seriously, because I like to take everything I do seriously. But I always knew what it was all worth. After I was wounded the second time, I woke up one night in a field hospital, dumped on a stretcher in a corner, beside a German corporal, also wounded, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen and who told me he was waiting for the war to end so he could go to Paris, to work on his thesis about the connections between Goethe and Stendhal. We talked about this all night and helped each other to reconstruct a map of Beyle’s pilgrimage through Europe between 1812 and 1840. The next morning we were going to go our separate ways for good, me to one hospital, he to another, and perhaps both to our graves – but, in the meantime, that night, our most urgent problem was that one.