Roger's Rules

May 3rd, 2008 1:30 am

Who was Monica Lovinescu?

The brief answer is: Monica Lovinescu was a Romanian journalist and critic who, from her perch in Paris, was fierce and effective critic of the Romanian Communist Party from the late 1940s on. Lovinescu died on April 20, aged 85. Wikipedia has the inevitable biographical summary here, but the piece you really need to read is on the excellent web site of Radio Free Liberty. Entitled “Why Does Monica Lovinescu Matter?”, the essay, by Vladimir Tismaneanu, is a must-read for anyone interested in freedom’s triumph over Communist tyranny. “Monica Lovinescu matters,” Tismaneanu writes,

because she was one of the most important voices of the Eastern and Central European antitotalitarian thought. Her passing away is a major loss for all the friends of an open society. My personal indebtedness to her — like that of many Romanian intellectuals — is immense. As a member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (which I chaired), Lovinescu participated, even during the most painful moments of physical suffering, in the condemnation of communist totalitarianism. Her solidarity was unswerving, both morally and intellectually.

Lovinescu’s crucial impact on Romania’s culture is inextricably linked to her major role as a cultural commentator for Radio Free Europe (RFE). There is no exaggeration in saying that no other RFE broadcast was more execrated, abhorred, and feared by Ceausescu and the communist nomenklatura than those undertaken by Lovinescu and her husband, Virgil Ierunca.

For decades, Lovinescu fought against terrorist collectivisms, the regimentation of the mind, and moral capitulation. Her patriotism was enlightened and generous. Thanks to her, Romanian intellectuals were able to internalize the great messages from the writings of Camus, Arendt, Kolakowski, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, Cioran, Milosz, Revel, Aron, and the list is fatally too short. A spirit totally dedicated to modernity, open to the crucial polemics of the 20th century, Lovinescu wrote poignant essays on the what American critic Lionel Trilling called “the bloody crossroads, where literature and politics meet.”

Read the whole thing here.

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5 Comments

1. Cristina:

Thanks, Roger, for this post about Monica.
As a Romanian refugee from Ceausescu’s upside-down, Orwellian world, in which the Party proclaimed it was warm and cozy when it was freezing and people were dying from lack of everything, Monica and her husband, Virgil Ierunca, kept us sane on the radio by reaffirming what we knew to be the truth and by bringing light into the murky waters of literature and society in Romania under the rule of the sacred Communist Party.
Both of them were immensely literate and insightful, of modest means, though both could have pursued careers that would have been much more lucrative than working for Radio Free Europe. They were fierce and uncompromising to the end, though the neo-communists and oligarchs issued from the ranks of Ceausescu’s Securitate sang their siren songs to them after December ‘89 in an effort to have them give their blessing to the scam of the “Revolution”.

It’s a sad and pathetic testimony to the Left’s guilty silence about the horrors of communism and totalitarianism that a friend of mine asked me yesterday, upon reading the news, “Who was Monica Lovinescu, and why haven’t I heard about her until now?”
He’s in love with celebrities of any kind, but he also has a sense of value and justice. Brittney Spears no, Monica Lovinescu yes.

May 3, 2008 - 2:30 pm 2. Cristina:

One more thought for all the communists and Castro/Stalin/Kim Jog Il fans out there:

You morons, Monica’s mother, Ecaterina, was imprisoned on trumped-up charges, so common in commie countries, of “collabaorating with foreign powers”, was tortured in prison, was offered amnesty if she could convince Monica to return to commie Romania from France, where she had become an outspoken critic of communism. Mother refused. She died in prison. She was in her 70s. She was thrown, nazi/commie style, in a common grave.
The prosecutor who “managed” Ecaterina’s case moved into her and Monica’s apartment after Ecaterina’s death (nice, on a major Bucharest boulevard) where he apparently still lives in his secure old age, huge pension from the former commies.

I truly wonder how Monica Lovinescu managed to keep her sanity through all of this, plus Ceausescu’s attempt to shut her up with the help of a bunch of PLO (Palestinian Liberation Army)thugs in the seventies that nearly killed her.
Yet she couldn’t be silenced.

She loved music. She and Virgil couldn’t go through a day without their Mozart and Brahms and Beethoven. They devided their waking hours between work and music.

May 3, 2008 - 3:33 pm 3. Cristina:

erratum: “divided”

May 3, 2008 - 5:11 pm 4. Admirante:

Lovinescu,
Is easy ’cause you’re beautiful …

(Indeed, what a beautiful and brave soul.)

Thank you for so graciously bringing her to our attention, Mr. Kimball. Long love her memory.

May 5, 2008 - 6:16 pm 5. Why Does Monica Lovinescu Matter? « Memorie, libertate, moderaţie:

[...] And a reaction from

Feb 18, 2009 - 2:53 pm