"The Childhood of Kaspar Hauser" is the first novel of one of the most talented young Romanian writers, Bogdan Alexandru Stanescu. Written with passion, but also thoughtfully, this twelve-story bildungsroman brilliantly depicts the transition of Romanian society and the transformation of a generation lost in that transition. Kaspar Hauser, after whom this novel is titled, was a mysterious wild child from the beginning of the 19th century and at that time he attracted a lot of public attention because he was not socialized and appeared out of nowhere. In the novelistic vision of Stanescu, he is a boy who grows up in the streets of Bucharest during the last years of communism. With a troubled family situation, a rather violent environment, and a homosexual episode that gets him kicked out of school, his path to adulthood is full of uncertainty. But even when he turns twenty, the challenges of modern society set numerous traps for the maladjusted young man. Bogdan wrote a coming-of-age novel for Aleksandar Stanesku, sentimental and pathetic, going through adolescence and maturing, intensely reliving every moment. "The Childhood of Kaspar Hauser" was published by the Croatian publishing house Fraktura, translated by Goran Čolakhodžić.
Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu (1979) is a Romanian literary critic and writer, winner of the award for the best Romanian young writer in 2015. He studied Romanian literature and teaches at the Facultatei de Litere in Bucharest. So far, he has published two novels, two books of essays and two collections of poetry, and his stories are included in several anthologies. His first novel "The Childhood of Kaspar Hauser" was published in 2017, for which he received several awards and was shortlisted for the European Union Literary Prize. The second novel "Caragiale. Scrisoarea pierdută", about the famous Romanian writer IL Caragiale, he published in 2019. He is the founder of the FILB International Literary Festival in Bucharest and the coordinator of literary translations published in the most prestigious Romanian library of foreign literature, at the POLIROM publishing house. He translated into Romanian the works of Tennessee Williams, James Joyce, Sandra Newman, Albert Mangel, Edward Hirsch, Paul Auster. His literary reviews are regularly published in the literary magazine Observator cultural.
How did your novel "The Childhood of Kaspar Hauser" come about? What challenges did you face?
- The challenges came after editing and preparing the book for the publishing house: it was a challenge to decide whether I wrote a novel or a book of connected short stories. Then I had to decide whether to mask or rename the childhood characters. I decided not to make up for reality. Now, joking aside, I say that the main challenge was to find voices, voices of different characters from my past, voices of political transition and voices of violence. Then I had to balance the right amount of humor with the tragic, to try not to become pathetic, nor too joyful. Proportion was my main concern. Proportion and justice to my own memory.
How does the literary motif of a child raised by wolves fit into the plot of your novel? Is it a light motif?
- The literary motive came as a final movement, when I had already decided to write a novel: my character was raised by adults who resembled wolves - animal selfishness, inner violence and thirst for blood. And then I realized that the whole Romanian society was a big pack of wolves for this boy. Tragedy happens when you realize he doesn't have wolf material. Maybe it's a lamb... This motif came to my mind when I realized that language is the medium through which the uncertainty of his education is revealed. Just like in the case of Kaspar Hauser, he too was taught how to speak, but not more than the basics: he could not express love, he could not describe his emotions and feelings. Because of this, in the end, my character is an empty receiver - the lack of expression caused a loss of feeling.
What form and narrative voice did you use to tell the story of the unusual boy? Twelve stories work as a novel?
- The novel began to be built on a set of images, images of childhood from the eighties of the last century, a dark period in our recent history, closely related to what happened before it and up to the fifties. Thus, the narrator's voice should reflect the combination of innocence and terror that were characteristic of those years. In addition, I wanted my character to start out as a very sensitive and imaginative boy, and in the end everything will be taken away from him... life, society, parents, politics, human hypocrisy. I chose 12 cases (with long time intervals), because I could only present this important time span (40 years) in a fragmented way.
"The Childhood of Kaspar Hauser" is a coming-of-age novel, a bildungs novel. Along with the maturation of your hero, the society also matures and changes. Did you have that parallel in mind?
- Yes, definitely! Let's say that in the beginning these parents are the voices of the Superego, but after the 80s, society, transitional Romania, plays that role. So this is where the lack of balance comes in: the Superego is also a growing child - Romania. The result is a developing neurosis and eventually psychosis. The thing is that Romanian society has never matured, it is still as immature as it was in 1989, like a baby in an adult body. My character "evolves" from an imaginative and sensitive child into an adult who is dazed, alcoholic and paranoid. In my opinion, this has also happened on a larger scale with Romanian society in the last three decades.
What is the cause of your hero's misadjustment in society?
- He has no predatory instincts, he is too absorbed in his inner world to focus on details and is too sensitive. He is not ready for a transitional world, for violence, chaos, he is not ready - despite his childhood - to fight for his piece of meat. He is like a wolf born and raised without fangs. That's right, in his mind, because those "animals" raised him in a remote forest and fed him bits of their flesh and soul. He is also driven by a kind of innocence that he cannot fight against: after countless proofs that he should be more careful, he still trusts friendship, his parents, falls in love, deals with politics, literature, the politics of literature...
In the novel Childhood of Kaspar Hauser, you presented the transitional course of Romania. How painful was the transition from dictatorship to neoliberal regime?
- This painful transition never ended. Immediately after 1989, power was seized by second-rate members of the Party, prominent members of the Securitate. There was no neoliberal project for Romania, in fact, as President Iliescu said at the time, we had "original democracy". What changed was only through the sheer force of imitation and the modeling power of consumerism. With the opening of the borders and, paradoxically, due to the storm in Bucharest caused by the "miners" that caused the biblical exodus to Canada, the USA, Germany, Italy, society began to be modeled by the influence of these young people who returned to visit this hell. We had three waves of immigration and all three forcibly helped to modernize Romania. But, in this bigger picture, the nineties still remain the epitome of rampage, violence, chaos and filth. It is a period that began with the assassination of the Ceausescu couple, which we watched in front of our black and white televisions, and ended not so far from our present time.
For almost 15 years, you were the editorial director at Polirom, one of the strongest publishing houses in Romania. Are you satisfied with the cultural mission that this house has been carrying out for years?
- Polirom was and remains a model for the local publishing market, through a very strong list of foreign fiction, and especially through caring for Romanian authors. The market of Romanian publishers is very weak and unpredictable, and Polirom's decision in 2005 to launch a very dynamic and powerful collection dedicated to Romanian literature remains the cornerstone of this market. But now I am focusing on another project, called the PandoraM publishing house, in which I started a new collection of foreign literature and in which I try to publish as many authors as possible from the former Yugoslavia, from Bulgaria, from Hungary and Russia.
You are active in the literary life of Romania in many fields, as a poet, writer, critic, editor, translator. What power do books and writers have in today's Romania?
- The emphasis has shifted from "power" to "survival". Writers are active in small clusters, reacting to the same small storms that affect only their "bubble" and can hardly cope with market principles. Their circulations are very small, they don't earn anything from writing and there are hardly any residencies or scholarships for writers in Romania. So the picture is pretty grim.
You have translated into Romanian the works of James Joyce, Albert Mangel, Paul Auster, Tennessee Williams... How do you choose the works you translate and what do these writers mean to you?
- I am a translator by choice and pleasure, I do not live from this beautiful profession. So, you could say I'm lucky: I choose my books, I choose authors who I think can teach me something, anything. So, I translated Joyce's "dirty" letters to Nora, because I think Romanian literature is stifled by puritanism and hypocrisy, I translated Mangel because of his obsession with books, Daniel Mandelson, because I think he is a model in literary criticism, and so on. Each selection had an objective or subjective strong reason. But the main reason is this: when I don't feel capable of writing, I translate and it gives me the feeling of doing something similar with my brain and my talent.
It is known that the cult of books and reading was cultivated in the countries of the former socialist bloc. Was it really like that in Romania under Ceausescu and what is the situation in this regard today?
- Older people still refer to those huge circulations before '89. And, yes, you could say that the interest in books was higher than now, but don't forget where you had a choice of entertainment back then, at least in the 80s: no TV (two hours in the evening, half of which was filled with Ceausescu speeches), only old movies in cinemas, all the press was state-owned... There was no food in restaurants, you had to stand in line for hours to get a can of meat or 2 kilos of oranges in December. It was Romania, and books were actually the only way to have fun, to be a secret dissident (looking for anti-regime parts in books), a human being. Even if the books were censored (all sexual episodes were cut, all political references were removed): I remember when I published the book "Eyeless through Gaza" ("Blind in Gaza", a novel by Aldous Huxley, edited by V. .), I decided to use the old translation and in the end I ended up translating more than 50 pages myself, because they were removed from the first edition. There's a joke here that books and sex were the only two forms of entertainment in the 80s. And, given the fact that abortion is criminalized by law, the book remained the safest.
Nicolae Ceaușescu and his regime shaped the lives of many people in Romania. How visible are the remnants of his regime in that country today?
- If the politicians who took power after '89 could be called the second wave of communists (or crypto-communists), the third wave is now contesting the country. Therefore, the whole country is a remnant of the communist regime.
At the time when Nicolae Ceaușescu was executed in 1989, you were a boy. What are your memories of those days?
- It's funny you ask that, because my next novel is centered on that assassination: I was 10 years old and I watched the whole execution on TV, and then I stayed up because they were broadcasting Animal Farm, the animated movie. I was shocked, of course: they were tied up, they were cruel and in the end they shot the presidential couple, which I somehow perceived as a parental couple. They killed our parents and made us watch it. That's what I felt then. Even now I think the whole nation is psychotic, because its underlying trauma is the killing of the holy couple.
How did the pandemic affect the world of books, ordinary people and writers in Romania?
- The publishing industry is as weak and fragmented as ever: its net worth is almost 80 million euros. Any change of direction, any gust of wind can make her fall and shake her badly. Thus, immediately after the lockdown, publishers closed entire editions (especially collections of poetry and Romanian fiction), laid off people and reduced circulations. And, of course they published less. The pandemic affected workers from the independent sector, who did not receive state aid, workers from the field of "entertainment" and so on.
Have you ever visited the former Yugoslavia? What did Yugoslavia mean to your compatriots during Ceausescu's rule?
- Yes, I did: I visited the countries of the former Yugoslavia starting 5 years ago. "Kaspar Hauser's Childhood" was written entirely during the month I spent in Kosovo, in Pristina, thanks to the residence where I was hosted by the Traduki Foundation. But Kosovo is almost a novel, a fictitious work (don't take my statements as political, try to read them in a poetic key), so it was the perfect place for me to forget about the world, about my own life and devote myself only to writing. Then I visited Belgrade and had the strange sensation that I could be at home, but it is a strange home, belonging to the past (no smoking regulations!). And finally Zagreb, for just two days, where I felt at home, because it reminded me of Timisoara and because of the many friends I found there. For us, before 1989, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were similar to "good communism, communism with a human face", unlike the one imposed on Ceausescu in Romania. Yugoslavia, especially for the people who lived in western Romania, was a paradise: rock music, pop music, blue jeans, western goods. I still remember my grandfather shaking his head and asking rhetorically, “Why couldn't you be more like Tito? Why?”
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