Mircea Cărtărescu is the Harriman Institute’s 2024 Writer in Residence. He is an award-winning poet, novelist, literary critic, journalist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bucharest, member of  the Romanian Writers’ Union, Romanian PEN and the European Cultural Parliament. He has published over 40 books and a large number of articles. Cărtărescu’s work has been translated into over 25 languages. His book Solenoid was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, and Words Without Borders.

Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where did you grow up? How did your personal trajectory inform and influence your professional trajectory?

I was born in Bucharest, Romania, in a poor neighborhood. My parents were peasants brought to the capital in the 1950s to become workers in the Communist factories. Even though they were indoctrinated with the official Communist ideology, they remained good people with strong moral values. Every morning my mother told me about what she had dreamed the previous night: fantastic, colorful, surrealistic dreams! Some of them, I will never forget. She is still alive, and at 95 her mind is sharp as ever. My father was a handsome man who looked a bit like Rudolph Valentino. He eventually became a journalist and started buying books. By the time I went to school in 1963, I could count a few dozen books in our home.

My school was a typical, U-shaped building with bars on the windows, making it look like a prison. It was built near the much bigger Circus building where I went each Sunday to see the shows. Many of the child actors performing in the arena were my classmates. While food shopping with my mother we sometimes encountered the clowns, the tattooed athletes, the wrestlers, the lady tiger tamer, the tricksters, the dwarfs, now dressed like ordinary people, standing in line. In front of the Circus—a modern, reinforced concrete and glass, mushroom-like building—there were two ancient oak trees. Hundreds of flying stag beetles swarmed from the holes in their bark. Often, they got caught in our hair. Sometimes I took the tram and went downtown to the Natural Science Museum to see the stuffed animals with glass eyes, the serpents in formaldehyde jars, the butterflies pinned in their insectariums, the wonderful colored minerals…

But the most important building for me as a young student was the public library in my neighborhood. It was very small: a tiny, dark room with four walls full of books. There were classic books and modern ones, novels, stories and poetry. Some books were in very bad condition, others looked brand new. In the span of three years, I read every single one of them. Reading was and still is my greatest passion. During my school years I read like a madman, at least 8 hours a day. My parents worried about this and tried to send me out to play soccer, like all the other boys.

Then I went to a lyceum, where I found a very good student literary circle, run by a bizarre, very elegant, red-haired lady who was like a walking encyclopedia. It was there that I first heard about Ibsen and Joyce, Melville and Rilke, Mann and Sartre. And it was then that I started writing literature, mainly poetry.

When did you start writing fiction and what inspired your writing?

Even today the readers and critics in my country think of me mainly as a poet and not as a fiction writer. I started to write literature professionally after I became a university student at the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest. There I found another literary circle, the famous Monday Circle run by the great professor and literary critic Nicolae Manolescu. I met a brilliant group of poets who intended to revolutionize Romanian poetry. They called themselves “The New Generation” or “The Blue Jeans Generation,” but later literary history would refer to them as “The Generation of the ’80s.” I was part of that group for seven years and we used to define ourselves as beatniks. We were totally against the dictatorship and the totalitarian regime ruling our country. This is why our circle was banned in 1987 and our first books were harshly censored.

During the ’80s I started to write fiction, too. In 1989 I published Nostalgia, a collection of stories, long and short, which is still one of my most read and beloved books. It has been translated into more than 15 languages so far. Later on, I shifted completely to prose, and I wrote some of my best-known novels, The Blinding Trilogy (over 1500 pages long), Solenoid, and Theodoros, which are among the nearly 40 books I’ve published over a life of intense writing.

I found my inspiration in my inner life, in my way of perceiving things, in my strange, oneiric but still very precise world. Most of my books contain the complete cartography of my mind, with its peculiarities, its real and false memories, its uniqueness in dealing with feelings, colors, and concepts. But I also wrote travel books, humorous books, books for children, academic books, diaries, etc. My literary adventures have always been guided by a profound veneration for nature and a respect and caring for all humankind.

What are the greatest challenges to being a fiction writer in this period of history? The greatest advantages?

We don’t live in the Gutenberg Galaxy anymore. Books are no longer at the center of our civilization, and the number of people who read literature declines every year. The Internet, social networks, movies, computer games and AI continue to erode the prestige of books. The book market is shrinking, and because of it the quality of literature suffers a great deal.

I love literature and that is enough for me. I will go on reading books even if people stop reading entirely. I will go on writing my books even if I know that nobody will ever read them, just because I love to write poems and novels. And I’m sure that many readers and writers out there think like me. Literature is a noble art; it provides beauty and relief. As Faulkner once said, it helps people to endure. If now we live in the times Bradbury foretold in his book Fahrenheit 451, I’m sure some of us will end up learning Pynchon’s V. by heart (as for me, I will try The Crying of Lot 49, it is much shorter…)

Can you please tell us about the course you will be teaching at the Harriman Institute?

I will be teaching about the wonderful generation of Romanian poets of the 1980s and their roots in American poetry of the 20th century. It will be a relaxed, interactive course, yet a serious one, with lots of insights into literary history, literary theory, and the art of writing poems. I would encourage students to read the poems of Traian T. Coșovei, Florin Iaru, Ion Stratan, Mariana Marin, Magda Cârneci, Ion Mureșan, Matei Vișniec and many others, along with some of my own poems. Similarities to the poetry of Pound, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Snyder, or Plath will be discussed, without questioning the originality of the Romanian poems.

As a teaser, here is a nice little story about Air with Diamonds, a collective volume four of us published in 1981. The volume was a literary manifesto, and a monument of inner freedom, which has become a legend. Because we were four young men (Traian T. Coșovei, Florin Iaru, Ion Stratan, and I), we used to compare ourselves to the Beatles, and had frequent disputes about who of us would be John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and so on. The trouble was nobody wanted to be Ringo Starr…

Is there anything else you’d like to share with the Harriman Institute community?

I’m proud and honored to teach this course at the Harriman Institute. The two months I will spend at Columbia University will be a great opportunity for me to gain better knowledge of American social and intellectual life. I’m really very grateful for it.

Mircea Cărtărescu will teach the four-week course “Postmodernism vs. Tyranny: A Romanian Literary Revolution” (September 19-October 10).