Out of the Fog

Matei Vișniec's life and art trace a line that connects Eastern and Western Europe. Born in Rădăuți, Romania, in 1956, he began writing plays as a student in Bucharest; none of them published, due to the communist regime's censorship. Ten years later, he moved to France, was granted political asylum and began working for Radio France Internationale. His newest novel, Un secol de ceață (A Century of Fog), is an ambitious work: a 700-page endeavour aiming to "X-ray the 20th century."

Italian writer Marco Archetti, in conversation with Vișniec at Festivaletteratura, described it as at once a family saga, a historical novel, a surrealist novel, a short treatise on the freedom of garden gnomes, a political novel, a romantic novel, an epistolary novel, a meta-novel. An ambiguous novel, too – where ambiguity is conceived as multiplicity, as richness –, where the comic, the tragic and the surreal are inextricably linked. And, lastly, a novel where a young Hitler and a young Stalin can meet up and chat in 1913 Vienna.

Vișniec, who, as he told the audience in Mantua, “discovered literature in an era when it was subversive”, in Ceaușescu’s Romania, sees fiction as a space of freedom, of cultural resistance, of especially vital importance in a country where it acted as a weapon to criticise the totalitarian orthodoxy. Decades later, he digs up this past in search of answers to still-unresolved questions. Why are we still suffering for events that happened a century ago? How could Hitler love children and dogs, how could Stalin enjoy Romantic music and Georgian wines? Lastly, how could the perfect, solid architecture (at least in theory) of communism fail so terribly, killing millions of people in the process? Vișniec laments that, after the fall of the communist regimes, no serious reflection on their failures and crimes has been carried out.

A writer in communist Romania had one consolation: the evil was easily identifiable, as was its hierarchy, from the Ceaușescus down. Ideology was an easy target, and humour a survival strategy. Today, he regrets, this consolation has been lost: in consumerist society, propaganda is more subtle, and evil is "a confluence of circumstances that man cannot control." His own lucidity, nevertheless, appears to remain intact.