"...then he discovered he was in a strange state": Saul Bellow's Romania before, during and after Ceauşescu

PhDr. Christopher E. Koy, M.A., Ph.D.

Tuesday, October 25, 18.00 – 19.35, P100

Saul Bellow, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature to both visit and include a substantial representation of totalitarian Romania in a novel written and published after winning this literary prize, visited Bucharest in 1978 to assist his wife attending to her dying mother. With his Romanian-born wife Alexandra Bellow, Saul experienced Bucharest for the first time and realistically conveyed their humiliating experience with the notorious Securitate of Ceauşescu’s regime in The Dean’s December (1982). The contribution will underscore the anxiety Bellow experienced writing the novel; out of a strong fear for his Romanian in-laws, it is hypothesized that Bellow engaged in pre-emptive self-censorship. This contribution will further focus on Bellow’s changing view of Romanian people in his final novel published 18 years later, Ravelstein (2000), underscoring a pronounced anti-Romanian take, in which, among many other portraits, Mircea Eliade’s youthful fascist past is utilized fictionally to implicate Eliade in Professor Ioan P. Culianu’s shocking murder on the University of Chicago campus in May, 1991.