Archive for category: Distant Reading Recommends

The eight article of the Distant Reading Recommends series was written by Dmytro Yesypenko.

Ukrainian literature can hardly be considered as well-known in Europe. It is not broadly represented in university courses and its translations make a rather rare appearance on the shelves of bookstores, even in neighboring countries. However, in Ukraine, literary classics are not just authors of texts of aesthetic quality, but also key figures in the history of the development of the Ukrainian language, the formation of the nation’s consciousness, and development of statehood. The images of literary classics and characters from their texts are present in contemporary Ukraine too, both in radio and television broadcasts, in graffiti on city walls, in symbols during Euromaidan protests, and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war (2014-?). Every visitor to the country is likely to soon notice the omnipresence of literature, by just taking in hand hryvnias banknotes and seeing there more than one canonical writer.

The single female figure of Larysa Kosach stands out among male classical authors. In the final decades of the 19^th century, the Kosach family was one of only a few in Kyiv that adhered to the Ukrainian-language education of their children. As a result, in the following years, many Kosachs contributed greatly to the different fields of Ukrainian cultural activities. The role of Olha Kosach (1849-1930) in the family’s success can hardly be overestimated. Like her daughter Larysa, the aforementioned Lesia Ukrainka from the 200 hryvnias banknote, Olha Kosach was a writer. She signed her literary texts with the pen name “Olena Pchilka.” “Pchilka” means a “bee” in Ukrainian and is usually associated with the concept of hard work. Olena Pchilka indeed proved to be hard-working and productive as an organizer and creator in various spheres of Ukrainian cultural life.

She is known primarily as a writer for children. However, the Ukrainian subcollection of ELTEC includes her story “for adults”, or rather for “young adults”. The story “Tovaryshky” [Female Friends] was published in 1887 in the almanac “Pershyi vinok” [The First Wreath], a collection initiated by women, written by women, and for women.

“Tovaryshky” is  a story about girls from the Poltava province of the then-Russian Empire who became the first female students at the University of Zürich. The story colorfully depicts the European journey of young people from a Ukrainian province, detailing their studies in Switzerland and Austria and also includes a number of romantic plots, with entangled and everchanging relations between the characters, in the style of the “Beverly Hills” TV series.

Extraordinary girls, “Sarmatian neophytes”.

The action takes place in the mid-1860s, long before the beginning of the suffragette movement and the so-called first wave of the women’s movement. The main character of the story, Liuba Kalynovska, is a young woman of a new generation who reads long books— and these are not light fiction novels. Ukrainian authors are among her favorites. In contrast to her, Olena Pchilka portrays another heroine, Liuba’s friend Raisa Bragova; she is an aristocrat who rejects everything related to peasants and considers Ukrainian culture to be unrefined.

She is far from the people and their customs; her interest in Ukrainian peasants has a “biological” character and she compares them with plants and animals. Together with a friend of the same age whose name is Kostia, Liuba and Raisa go to Switzerland to study at the University of Zürich. Local university professors are surprised at the success of the students: firstly because they are women; secondly because such results are shown by “wild Sarmatians from the east.” Moreover, Raisa Bragova achieves something highly unusual and unique: she becomes the first woman in the history of the University of Zürich to give a public lecture. In addition to academic accomplishments, Raisa is successful in her amorous affairs, too: she wins the heart of the university professor, Herr Stockmann.

Artistic reality corresponds to historical fact since natives of the Russian Empire were indeed the first women who were allowed to study at the medical faculty of the University of Zürich. Similarly to Raisa Bragova from “Tovaryshky”, Nadezhda Suslova (1843-1919) was the first woman in modern history to obtain a medical degree from a reputable higher education institution. Suslova married Friedrich Erismann and they moved together to St Petersburg. Nadezhda also improved her knowledge of obstetrics and gynecology in Vienna, as does Liuba Kalynovska from “Tovaryshky”.

Ukrainian Zürich

Based on the story, it is possible to draw a fairly detailed map of the most picturesque Zürich locations. These are places where young people live and walk, undertake their studies, have heated discussions, and passionate rendezvous.

For example, the story mentions the hotel “Baur au lac” as the place where the main characters first settle: “the comfort is excellent and the view is wonderful, but, as they say, we couldn’t afford it at all.”

An apartment on Künstlergraben becomes a new, more affordable place for girls to live: “in the windows of the house you can see Limmat with bridges, you can see its bank, the “Old Town”, you can see those nice mountains that attract one’s eye”.

Girls meet with their peers, students on Rämi Strasse, and during their walks, young people enjoy the views near the Zürich Polytechnikum: “They came to the terrace in front of the Polytechnic, from where a view of the city and mountains bathed in the sun opened up.”

It is curious to note how Ukrainian youth, “ukrainize” one of the walking areas in the city center, Hohe Promenade. One of the story’s characters, Korniievych, calls it “a Cossack’s promenade with poplars». The Cossacks he refers to were glorious warriors from the steppe on the territory of today’s eastern Ukraine; between the 15th and 17th centuries, this self-ruling military group exerted great influence on European geopolitics.

Hohe Promenade is frequently described in very passionate terms; it seems that the author herself was a big fan of these landscapes over the lake. The beauty touches the souls of the loving protagonists Kostia and Liuba and corresponds with the first tender feelings of young people: “The rays break through the branches from the side, in wide stripes lies between the tree trunks on the road, and there further – oh, how wonderful! The lake is changing with gold at its edge, and in the distance it is such a pure one, gleaming with color deeper than during the day. And all the greenery on the shore seemed to look younger, it seems so bright! .. The distant mountains seem to be changing with delicate colors too.”

Hohe Promenade (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Adrian Michael)

Mountains are burning and hearts are on fire.

The story extensively describes the stay of young people in the mountains, where they observe the so-called Alpenglühen: “The sun is in the west, and the Alps are burning: the sun is not visible, only its golden glow shines on the tops of the mountains. The pale fawn, golden, pink, orange color changes, varies, shines, then glows more clearly, like the heat of a giant hearth without a flame. One сould not stop watching this sight! .. And then it begins to fade away gradually; the tones change again, this time in a different way, softer, thinner; light shadows penetrate in between the pink color, fight against it, shroud this mountainous distance with a gray haze. The hearth is dying out.”

The “fire” of the mountains kindles sparks in the hearts of the characters; indeed, every single young person experiences the fluctuations of heartfelt feelings.

The next proscenium is a village near Zürich under the particularly telling name of Küssnacht (“night of kissing”, if literally translated from the German language). Raisa goes there with the scientific purpose of collecting shellfish and Kostia accompanies her, and it happens that they stay overnight. Instead of shellfish, Raisa catches Kostia in her nets. From that moment, he  becomes less interested in Liuba. Upon returning to the university, Kostia pays attention to another beauty, Princess Beloselskaia, who reciprocates his feelings. Korniievich, in turn, comforts Liuba, and she begins to notice his charm. Liuba’s admirer, Kuzmenko, is the third wheel in the scenario, so is Pestsova, whom Kuzmenko stubbornly ignores.

As their university studies come to an end,  the graduates make their plans for the future. Some stay in Zürich. However, for Bragova and her husband, Zürich is only an stepping stone on the path to conquering the capital of the Russian Empire for an ambitious young woman. Soon, the Stockmanns escape from “Swiss poverty”, as Raisa describes it, for a profitable practice in St. Petersburg. Along with his new flame, Beloselskaia, Kostia goes to bohemian Paris.

At this moment Liuba again reveals her originality; she decides to study obstetrics  in Vienna in order to return to the “wilderness” in the Poltava province with her newly-acquired skills.

Learning compassion and finding own Ukrainianness in Vienna.

Thus, Liuba is in Vienna, not so much admiring the architecture of the metropolis as contemplating dramatic pictures of human grief and suffering. In addition to what she has read in books and heard at lectures, she practices the essence of a doctor’s work— how to alleviate the suffering of patients—in a local clinic, and specifically the suffering of women, her “poor sisters”: “one hears so much groaning, and immense voice of anguish; and what to do, Liuba looked at those torments, listened to those screams with the thought that later she will be able to lessen the women’s suffering, being a skillful adviser to the poor sisters, and perhaps the savior of some of them from death. She gained expertise as the actual practice gave so immeasurably more knowledge than books.”

Vienna is both strange and familiar to her. Contemplating the Danube, Liuba recalls a song from her childhood: “And the Danube, this “quiet Danube”: isn’t it good! You stand by the bridge, watch how it carries its wide, calmly deep waters. So here he is, the Danube, whose name you know from childhood, from those songs that tell how a Cossack gives his horses to drink near the Danube, and a girl lets her hairs swim in the quiet Danube…”. Luba is lonely in Vienna; men are not courageous enough to approach this independent “junge Dame”, with cropped hair.

And yet she is lucky to meet a fellow countryman from Galicia, a student called Buchynskyi. Thanks to him, she discovers the Galician Ukrainian world, “the European Ukraine,” and the richness of the Ukrainian language. The girl is ashamed of her own national self-consciousness in front of Buchunskyi, and she tries to learn and improve.

Rewarding service. Friends-antipodes

Liuba returns home to the Poltava province not only with new knowledge but also with a altered, much improved sense of national self-awareness. She gets a job as a paramedic in her native countryside and also serves also as a kind of psychologist and adviser. Peasant women share their troubles and secrets with her, “open their souls while laying on a pillow”. Liuba helps them with their female illnesses, which are, at times, very severe. Liuba’s assistance is needed also in the most difficult of cases when local healers cannot help women in labour.

At the end of the story, there comes a denouement of the main love line. Korniievych confesses his feelings to Liuba. Interestingly, the narrative still conforms to conventional storylines: it is man who decides the fate of the relationship. The author of the story explains Korniievych’s restraint  as related to the circumstance that he had not the influence of the “soft female environment” in his childhood; he grew up the writer concludes, emotionally deficient. Ukrainian modernist authors later in the period would continue to consider adult psychological problems as rooted in childhood, of course, by focusing on Sigmund Freud’s theories, especially popular at the turn of the century.

The end of the story marks also the end  of the friendship between Liuba and Raisa;  although they have the same occupation, they are now completely different people. Unlike Liuba, Raisa believes that she should not waste her time treating patients who cannot afford the services of expensive doctors.

Future female leaders.

In her “Tovaryshky” story, Olena Pchilka demonstrates that women’s self-realization in both professional, public, and private spheres is possible. The writer situates events outside the usual locations for Ukrainian literature – outside the village – and shows people a new generation. Her heroines, who come from a traditional rural environments, manage to be successful in the new world and successfully fight against unfavorable circumstances. The story’s female characters are not inferior and often even dominate their male counterparts when it comes to their abilities and professional qualities. They are even more decisive in amorous affairs.

«Tovaryshky» is included in the Ukrainian corpus of ELTeC, and can be read here. The story appears according to the first publication. This is important , since particular fragments have been removed from most of the later published editions of the story. For example, there is no description of how Ukrainian students make fun of the poor pronunciation of their Russian peers. Such cuts are not accidental but inherent in the practice of publishing Ukrainian writers during the time of the Russian Empire and subsequently in the Soviet Union. Russia, Russian culture and its representatives were supposed to be superior “elder brothers”, but by no means should be ridiculed.

Language editing: Francesca Scott

The sixth article of the Distant Reading Recommends series is written by Vedad Mulavdić of the University of Sarajevo and Meliha Handžić of the International Burch University in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They describe Zeleno busenje (Green Turf), the “first Bosniak novel” of so-called “minor” European literatures. The novel will be included in the Bosnian corpus of ELTeC. It can be read at https://archive.org/details/MulabdiEdhemZelenoBusenje.

First Bosniak novel

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The fourth article of the Distant Reading Recommends series comes from Serbia, and is written by Cvetana Krstev of the University of Belgrade and Vasilije Milnovic of the University Library “Svetozar Markovic,” University of Belgrade. They introduce a prominent oriental-themed novel from the Serbian tradition, puzzlingly neglected today but notable for its formal and thematic innovations.

In Distant Reading Recommends, an Action member introduces a novel, published between 1850 and 1920, from one of the participating countries in our Action. These novels may be important or notable within the individual nation’s literary tradition, but less well-known in the broader European context. By bringing these novels to light, we aim to further advance our objectives of creating a broader, more inclusive, and better-grounded account of European literary history and cultural identity.

Jelena J. Dimitrijević (1862 – 1945) was a Serbian writer, but also a world traveler and benefactor. Ignored and neglected far too long, Serbian culture has only recently become reacquainted with her voluminous opus.

Jelena was born in Kruševac, to a merchant’s family, as the tenth child. Her mother’s family was highly regarded, comprising several well-known scholars and artists, and it also bore a princely title. After the marriage to Serbian Army Lieutenant Jovan Dimitrijević, she permanently settled in Niš. Residing in a big city and marrying a well-educated and open-minded Dimitrijević opened up new perspectives for her and developed her lasting love for the Orient. This was particularly prompted by her intense socializing with prominent Turkish women in Niš, but also in Thessaloniki, Istanbul and Skopje, where she was a frequent and welcome guest. In her subsequent opus, that included the novel “The New Women (Nove),” Jelena elaborated in a creative manner the intimacy of these gatherings and her familiarity with the daily life of Muslim women in the Balkans.

By the end of the nineteenth century, she moved with her husband to Belgrade, where she would live for the rest of her life. The First World War founds her in Germany, from whence she returned to Serbia via Switzerland, Italy and Greece. After the war and the death of her husband on the front, trips to France, Spain and England followed, from where she traveled to America. With the same passionate fervour with which she illuminated the well-kept secrets of the everyday life of Muslims, she also discovered the way of life of American women, describing them in a picturesque way in a travelogue Novi svet ili u Americi godinu dana (New World or One Year in America) in 1934. In 1926 she made her way to the East, to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. She went to see Alexandria, Cairo, Memphis, Luxor, the Holy Land, and Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, and Haifa. Of importance is her encounter in Egypt with the famous feminist Huda Sha’arawi, president of the Egyptian Feminist Union. From Egypt she traveled to Bombay, where she also stayed with a famous feminist, Mrs. Tate From there, she traveled to China, Japan, and Ceylon. Her impressions of this voyage were published in her travelogue Sedam mora i tri okeana (Seven Seas and Three Oceans) in 1940.

The novel Nove (The New Women) was published in 1912 and immediately attracted the attention of the professional public, receiving an award from the Serbian Literary Cooperative (Srpska književna zadruga). This novel was recommended for publication by the Serbian Literary Cooperative by the well-known literary historian and distinguished professor at the University of Belgrade, Pavle Popović, who had followed Jelena since her early poetic works, and pointed out that her verses should be given “special importance” due to their quality.

In a letter to her friend Lujza St. Jakšić, dated 2 August 1908, Jelena Dimitrijević explained the reasons for her journey to Thessaloniki, anticipating in fact the action of a future novel: “I went there with great joy and curiosity: I will see the ones I love and who love me, I will find out how they feel now when they became developed, whether old Turkish women are blushing with shame, do they still don scarves on their heads out of habit, are they able to walk along with people and do the new ones rejoice, were there enough hats for all of them in Thessaloniki or are some of them bare-headed.” Her excellent choice of the moment of Young Turk social changes in the novel Nove offers a vivid and unique testimony about the everyday life of Turkish women in Thessaloniki, torn between the anachronistic role of women in traditional Islamic society and the modern requirements of upbringing “in the Western fashion.” The rigorous partitions in traditional Islamic society, with very clear rules, presented constraints to new, young Turkish women, which they faced at every step of their daily lives. When they tried to make their dreams come true, although they were often entirely hazy, lacking experience and idealistic, they fell victim to the dire collision of old and new, Eastern and Western, traditional and modern.

This is portrayed in a very suggestive way through the fate of the main character of the novel, Emir-Fatma. She is the character with all the prerequisites for accomplishing a successful woman’s role in the society, which in this case means the traditional role of a woman deep behind closed doors. Yet she is one of the “new” women, and so is her intimate friend and cousin Mersija, educated on Western European values ​​and French novels, and as such, deeply dissatisfied with the moulds of traditional Ottoman society, which has itself been pretty well weakened by the coming social changes. The vibrant atmosphere of the reality of that time and place in this novel is full of anthropologically intriguing images of women’s lives in the harem, i.e. the feminine part of the house, strictly separated from the men’s world, in which lesbian love often developed, presented in the novel through Emir’s longing for a French female teacher. Traditional regulations are especially evident in the marital problems of Emir-Fatma and her chosen one, Jamal. These regulations entail another essential characteristic of the Oriental world: intrigue. It is through intrigue that Emira marries her chosen one. Through intrigue, because of his alcohol problem, a sin worthy of contempt in the traditional Islamic world, she divorces him as many as three times. Through intrigue, she marries another man, aware of his nature, with the intention of being banished by him so that she can return to her chosen one and thus outsmart the traditional regulations. After her traditional father Hassan-bey refuses to let her daughter marry again the same man with scorn worthy vices, Emir – until then obedient to her father’s will – now openly opposes him for the first time, but in this case the only thing left to Emir-Fatma and Jemal in the context of traditional Ottoman society, is an escape to Paris. In this they will be helped by the skillful intrigues and networks of experienced women, and above all by her aunt Aruf-Hanum, herself also a representative of the “new” ones.

After the arrival of Emir to the much-desired West, through her diary notes that reach Aunt Aruf, the novel provides a testimony of unfulfilled women’s dreams and her sufferings in that same West: unable to live as a traditional Turkish woman in Thessaloniki, Emir-Fatma could not also live in Paris as a European. A year after his daughter’s escape, a granddaughter arrives to Hassan-bey, followed by the news of Emir’s death and the telling Emir’s last will: a request for her father that her daughter be educated solely following the traditional patterns.

The novel’s anthropological and documentary detail contributes to its constant re-readings within feminist, narratological, or orientalist approaches to the study of literary work. From today’s point of view of particular interest is the formal procedure in the novel, which is told in the third omniscient person. However, letters and diary notes, always given in the first person, are also interpolated into this narrative. In addition to the overt depictions of lesbian and incestuous desires, concealed by the drapes of traditional Ottoman society, a particular contribution to the modernity of this novel are also explicit feminist viewpoints, very atypical of the literary context of the time.

Therefore, it is perplexing that this novel, the only one published during the author’s life and awarded immediately after its release from the press, has fallen into oblivion after the death of Jelena Dimitrijević. However, precisely because of all of the above, it should come as no surprise that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interest of both expert and wider audiences for this masterpiece of Serbian literature continues to grow.

Nove is included in the Serbian corpus of ELTeC, and can be read here. For further reading, see:

Jelena Dimitrijević – život i delo: zbornik referata sa naučnog skupa, Niš, 28 i 29. Oktobar 2004: Centar za naučna istraživanja SANU I Univerzitet u Nišu, 2006. ISBN – 86-7025-406-9. COBISS.SR – ID: 133976332.

Čitate li Jelenu Dimitrijević?: zbornik radova, Beograd, Filološki fakultet 2018. ISBN – 978-86-6153-480-5. COBISS.SR – ID: 259682060.

Knjiženstvo: teorija i istorija ženske književnosti na srpskom jeziku do 1915. godine. Beograd, Filološki fakultet 2015. ISBN – 978-86-6153-306-8. COBISS.SR – ID: 217916428.

Biljana Dojčinović-Nešić, “Čarobni san istoka – stvarnost u romanu `Nove’ Jelene Dimitrijević”, izlaganje na konferenciji, 2007, COBISS.SR-ID: 514249902.

Biljana Dojčinović-Nešić, Jelena Dimitrijević, Knjiženstvo, http://knjizenstvo.etf.bg.ac.rs/sr/authors/jelena-dimitrijevic.

Ana Stjelja, Elementi tradicionalnog i modernog u delu Jelene Dimitrijević: doktorska disertacija, Beograd, 2012, http://phaidrabg.bg.ac.rs/o:5604. DOI <http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/BG20121120STJELJA>, COBISS.SR-ID:43215887.

The second article of the Distant Reading Recommends series is written by Roxana Patras of “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi in Romania. Her piece describes a notable hajduk novel, from a genre which followed the adventures of these romanticised hero figures of the Balkans.

In Distant Reading Recommends, an Action member introduces a novel, published between 1850 and 1920, from one of the participating countries in our Action. These novels may be important or notable within the individual nation’s literary tradition, but less well-known in the broader European context. By bringing these novels to light, we aim to further advance our objectives of creating a broader, more inclusive, and better-grounded account of European literary history and cultural identity.

Around 1855, when French, English, German and Hungarian translations of Romanian ballads started to be published, Iancu Jianu did not look like an epitome of the Romanian hajduk. Thus, translators such as Jules Michelet, Henry Stanley, Wilhelm von Koetzebue, Karoly Acs or Vasile Alecsandri went for texts that featured braver outlaws, whose names were spelled in funny westernised versions: “Mihou” ou “Michu”, “Toma Alimoche” or “Thoma Alimosch”, “Boujor”, “Kodran”. Attested from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and spread throughout the entire Central and South-Eastern Europe (Rodopi Mountains, Srena Gora, Stara Planina, Olympus Mountains, Romania Mountain in Bosnia), the Bulgarian haiduti/hayduds, the Serbian hajduks, the Greek klephts, the Albanian kaçaks, the Ukrainian cossacks, the Croatian uskoks, and the Romanian haiduci were known as paramilitary organisations championing democratic decision-making, rebellion against the feudal privileges and chiefly against the Ottoman rulers, a sort of alternative proto-socialist economy and a nomad lifestyle. The hajduk literature, ballads and derived genre fiction, is thus specific to the entire Balkan area, its regional development being favoured by shared geographic, economic, social, and cultural conditions.

Indeed, Jianu’s ballad is considerably shorter and looks lesser adventurous than others of the same type. Living between 1787 and 1842, also being Tudor Vladimirescu’s right-hand man during the 1821 Revolution, it seems that the Romanian hajduk would survive his dying legend and probably witness the decay of his own text (allegedly authored by himself) into bits of drinking songs, as the ones assembled by Anton Pann’s in his colportage collections. Surprisingly, a decade after his death, Iancu Jianu was resurrected as a die-hard literary character and as a national symbol that, for over a century and a half, would enthrall a lot of Romanian writers, composers, film and stage directors.

A young and very energetic aspirant named Nicolae D. Popescu (1843-1921) speculated the success of melodramas and vaudevilles authored and directed by Matei Millo around 1855 and turned the dramatis persona into a sensational character. The resulting novel was issued in no fewer than 7 editions, comprising 5000 copies each. Taking into consideration the social, cultural and economic context, especially the low levels of literacy during the period of its publication, we might say that these are numbers that indicate market success, professionalisation of writing and enforcement of literary institutions. Gaining fame with this simple trick of rewriting recent national history as sensational literature, N. D. Popescu came to be acclaimed as “Romania’s Ponson du Terrail,” as the unchallenged master of nineteenth-century Romanian pulp fiction. Indeed, he wrote around 60 novels, the majority of them belonging to the hajduk genre. 

Between 1868 and 1916, the novel series Iancu Jianu grew in complexity from a structural, thematic and symbolical point of view, at the same time accommodating new historical and ethnographic content coming from scholars who were assiduously researching the hajduk’s biography. As the author himself avers in several prefatory notes, the story about the publication and growth of this series is as spectacular as the hero’s life. While the first edition was actually a newspaper installment and did not exceed the average length of a short-story, the second and the third editions, published in 1872 and 1881, were issued in response to readership demand. Apparently, the hagiographical structure of the fourth edition (1887) was an innovation inspired by Jianu’s recently-revealed autobiography and by a series of unknown documents and testimonies such as those published by Gr. G. Tocilescu, V. A. Urechia, and C. D. Aricescu around 1880; so, the novelist would now deliver the same novel in two mirrored parts that presented the hero’s deeds and temper before and after his conversion to an outlaw’s lifestyle: (a) Iancu Jianu, Zapciu/Iancu Jianu, the County-Tax Collector and (b) Iancu Jianu, Haiducul/Iancu Jianu, the Hajduk.

But the character sold too well for the publishers not to try more profitable typographic formulae or easy-going copyright transfers. The fifth edition had a third part, where the novelist developed the circumstances of Iancu Jianu’s death. The sixth edition (1912) returned to the hagiographical pattern, while the seventh edition (1912) seemed to be an aggregate of the previous ones.

Why does Iancu Jianu decide to become a hajduk in king Caradja’s times? Beside his sister’s/his betrothed one’s elopement, beside his brothers’ plundering of properties, beside the strong ideological commitment to Φιλική Εταιρεία/Filiki Eteria and Tudor Vladimirescu’s riot against the Ottoman Empire, there is something about Iancu Jianu that places him in Karl Moor’s descent and makes him the most romantic Romanian hajduk of them all. Apart from his particular social status—he is an aristocrat offspring, while his kinds are rebellious peasants—it is his deep melancholy, his inexplicable longing for loneliness, isolation and perhaps self-extinction that express a modern consciousness, a troubled sense of identity, an intellectualised manner of acting. Indeed, his decision to commit himself to a hajduk lifestyle, his surrendering to the Phanariote militia and escape from the salt mine, his love affair with his host (Catinca/Ilinca/Stăncuța) and then the forced marriage to Sultana look like not entirely assumed acts, as if the hero is not thoroughly participating in his own life and story.

Taking into consideration the author’s massive interventions on the original text during half a century (1869-1912), Iancu Jianu, Haiducul could hardly be defined as a single novel. It should be considered more of a work-in-progress series. Certainly, there is magic about it, as the hajduk leader’s brave deeds and abyssal personality attracted not only N. D. Popescu’s imitators (Panait Macri, Panait Popescu, Anton Marcu, Ilie Ighel, T. M. Stoenescu, Ștefan Stoenescu, Alexandru Munte Stânceanul, Lazăr, Simion Bălănescu), but also accomplished writers such as Bucura Dumbravă or Panaït Istrati. They exported Iancu Jianu and the hajduk type through novels that were published in Germany (Der Haiduck, Der Pandur) and France (Présentation des Haïdouks). The force of this literary myth is also illustrated by a legion of texts, movie scripts, movie series and musicals that were produced under the Communist regime.

I remember that, during the 1980s when the programme of the Romanian national television was severely limited to 2 hours a day, the movie series Haiducii/The Hajduks, Pintea Haiducul/Pintea, the Hajduk, and Iancu Jianu were anticipated with restless excitement and watched in stunned admiration. Directors Dinu Cocea and Mircea Moldovan would avail of Romania’s isolation and deliver to the communist audiences a kind of Balkan western. This is another proof that Iancu Jianu, Haiducul should be recommended not only as a text authored by N. D. Popescu and restyled by many others, but also as a complex cultural phenomenon whose stretching in time and whose variety of artistic extensions makes it a perfect topic for distant-reading research.

Acknowledgements:

According to Dictionarul Cronologic al Romanului Romanesc (The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel), N. D. Popescu wrote the following novels featuring Iancu Jianu:

Iancu Jianul, căpitanul de haiduci, Bucharest, Editura Librăriei H. Steinberg, 1873, 140 p.

Iancu Jianu, zapciu de plasă. Nuvelă originală, Bucharest, Editura Librăriei H. Steinberg, 1887, V + 120 p.

Moartea lui Iancu Jianu, căpitan de haiduci. Nuvelă originală, Bucharest, Editura Librăriei H. Steinberg, 1894, 176 p.

Tinereţea lui Iancu Jianu, vestit căpitan de haiduci, Bucharest, Tip. Concurenţa, 1909, 164 p.

Jancu Jianu, polcovnic de poteraşi, Bucharest, Tip. Concurenţa, 1910, 148 p.

Scăparea lui Jancu Jianu din ocna părăsită, Bucharest, Tip. Concurenţa, 1911, 178 p.

Dragostea lui Iancu Jianu cu Smaranda Gălăşeasca. Nuvelă originală, Bucharest, Tip. Concurenţa, 1916, 174 p.

Prinderea lui Iancu Jianu căpitanul de haiduci. Nuvelă originală, Buc., Tip. Concurenţa, 1916, 143 p.

Versions of Iancu Jianu editions as well as other Romanian hajduk novels are available on Zenodo:

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2648515; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2648518; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2648520; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2648524; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2648528; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2648532; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2648457.

For more info on Iancu Jianu’s biography and literary legacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iancu_Jianu.

For more details on the hajduk movie series: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiducii_(film_din_1966); https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiducii_(serie_de_filme).

Many thanks to Cornelia Viziteu and to the librarians of Botoșani County Library, who provided me with scanned copies of several volumes from the “Iancu Jianu” series.

For further reading, see:

Joep Leersen et al, The Rural Outlaws in East-Central Europe. In Cornis-Pope, Marcel & Neubauer, John (eds.) (2010), History of the Literary Cultures of East-central Europe, vol. 4. Types and stereotypes. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bracewell, W. (2003). The Proud Name of Hajduks: Bandits as Ambiguous Heroes in Balkan Politics and Culture. In Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case (eds.), Yugoslavia And Its Historians. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc (2003). Vol. 1. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române.

Dicționarul literaturii române de la origini până la 1900 (1979). Bucharest: Editura Academiei RSR.

Hobsbawm, E. (1959). Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Century. New York: Norton.