Chapter five

Dinicu Golescu’s Account of My Travels (1826): Eurotopia as Manifesto*

If you get off the train at ’s Gara de Nord and walk out of the front entrance, you will see (across the busy traffic) a park, flanked on the right-hand side by Dinicu Golescu Boulevard. Some distance down this road there is a statue of Dinicu Golescu. Dinicu owned most of the land on which the park, the statue and the boulevard are situated. In 1826, he did something none of his fellow-countrymen had ever done before: he published an account of his travels. The structure of the book appears simple. After insisting in his preface on the popularity and utility of travel accounts in and bemoan- ing their absence in his home country, Golescu describes his journey and places visited in Transylvania, Hungary, Austria, northern Italy, Bavaria and Switzerland. He usually writes about the things he sees in extremely positive tones. However, he also regularly breaks off at the end of a descriptive passage in order to criticize the absence or deficiency of such institutions at home. The text ends with a plea for a general reform of domestic institutions in a ‘European’ direction. Golescu’s book is very well known in today. Although they sometimes questioned its literary value, all major twentieth-century Romanian critics stressed its significance:

– ‘The whole of the nineteenth century is in this book’.1 – ‘The book had four editions in less than a century’.2 – ‘The transfiguration of this boyar symbolizes our whole revival’.3 – ‘The most powerful testimony to the crisis of consciousness presented by Romanian culture in its modern times’.4

* In Journeys 6 (2005), 24–53 and, revised, in Balkan Departures, ed. W. Bracewell & A. Drace-Francis (Oxford—New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 47–74. Reprinted by permis- sion of the publishers. 1 Eliade, Histoire, 1:214. 2 Haneş, Histoire, 73. 3 G. Călinescu, History, 91. 4 Popovici, La culture roumaine, 83. 136 chapter five

– ‘Dinicu Golescu’s itinerary symbolized our journey through the Euro- pean world to re-establish the true foundations of our modern social life’.5 – ‘the most powerful expression of the critical spirit applied to Romanian society in the 1820s’.6 – ‘Dinicu Golescu’s travel journal had a great influence on the Romanian intelligentsia’.7 – ‘Dinicu Golescu underwent a significant crisis of consciousness on encountering the civilization of the West, being forced to acknowledge that we were ‘behind all the other nations’ and that ‘the world’s ridi- cule’ weighed heavily on our people’.8 – ‘the oscillating interpretation of Dinicu Golescu between East and West remains significant at a moment in our history at which the confronta- tion between two worlds finds its most apt symbol in Account of My Travels’.9

Modern Romanian travellers have cited Golescu as an antecedent;10 cul- tural commentators refer to his experiences as possible models for inter- preting ‘ours’, without the need for further explanation.11 A clear cultural meaning is attached to his personality: he was the man who realised that European culture was better, and he managed to convey this message of change, despite his relative age and the considerable difficulties he had in expressing himself. have presented Golescu’s book and ideas in French, German, and Italian; the whole text has appeared in German and Hungar- ian translations. To the English-speaking world he is hardly known at all, and material is much harder to come by: a subchapter of an older literary history;12 a one-page extract in a collection of texts on social conditions in the nineteenth-century Balkans;13 a slightly more extensive extract in a sourcebook on collective identity in central and southeastern Europe.14

5 Bucur, ‘Prefaţa’, 11. 6 Cornea, Originile, 220. 7 Antohi, ‘Un modèle’, 90. 8 Zub, Cunoaştere de sine, 77. 9 Manolescu, Istoria, 157. 10 E.g., Pas, Carte; Constantin, Vacanţa; Marino, Carnete; Blandiana, Cea mai frumoasă. 11 E.g., Pleşu, Chipuri şi măşti, 227. 12 G. Călinescu, History, 91–4. 13 Warriner, ed. Contrasts, 144–5. 14 D. Golescu, ‘Account’.