Martzolia of history, Muma Padurius of fate

About the novel by Matei Caragiale “The Helipads of the Old Court”

Mateiu Caragiale's (1885–1936) novel “The Helipads of the Old Court” is considered one of the main works of Romanian literature, which was illegally read by post-war intellectuals and around which a whole cult developed. Now this sophisticated masterpiece of Eastern European modernism has been released in Russian, as reported by Eduard Lukoyanov.

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

Matei Caragiale. Helipads of the Old Court. M.: Ad Marginem Press, 2026. Translation from Romanian by Maria Ryzhova. Content

She made a non-human out of a person [1] .

From afar, Romanian culture fascinates with a remarkable property - everything in it at first glance seems somehow childish, puppet-like, vaudeville-like. It seems as if historically these people resolved issues of life and death in their natural theatrical mode. For example, extremely artistically and at the same time wisely, Romanian peasants solve the problem of overcrowding in cemeteries: exactly seven years after the death of the deceased, they dig up the deceased under the strict supervision of the village priest, wash the bones, dry them, put them in the ossuary and bury them back, but deeper, in order to free up the grave for a new guest.

The calendar of traditional Romanian society is scheduled according to days that have their own patrons from pure and unclean forces - with a more tangible presence of the second, ready at any second to make a woman a widow or drag her into a swamp if, say, she washes her hair on Monday. To prevent this, one must live according to a script written many generations ago to, as far as possible, delay the inevitable outcome of every person’s existence.

Well, Corneliu Codreanu, they say, loved to address his guards, riding a white horse and wearing an equally white toga. Eugene Ionesco, according to the apocrypha, watched the performance from the outer balcony of the theater as there was a bustle in the traffic jam caused by the premiere of The Bald Singer. It was as if he sincerely did not understand how his bright, extremely excessive comedies of the absurd differed from Beckett’s, and insisted on his primacy among the discoverers of the genre (to the fierce indignation of the Armenian Arthur Adamov). Having a rich cinematic tradition, the Romanians were not too lazy to bring a camera to the announcement of the verdict of the Ceausescu couple, and the subsequent concert for Kalashnikov assault rifles was as playful as a Transylvanian fechoresque. And even in the mortal melancholy of Emil Sioran, one can imagine a funny mask, the laughter of a pale harlequin.

What causes such an artistic, if not clownish, attitude towards existence? The modern era found its typical answer to this question, expressed in the words of the French President Raymond Poincaré: “Well, what do you want, we are here at the gates that open the entrance to the East, where nothing is taken seriously.” These words are included in the epigraph of Matei Caragiale’s novel “The Helipads of the Old Court” - a book that the Romanians themselves mostly reverence as the most important one written in their native language. These same words are repeated again and again throughout the entire narrative, as if insisting on their complete rightness.

The phrase “helicopters of the Old Court”, unusual and inconvenient for modern ears, was not chosen by translator Maria Ryzhova by chance. It should be unusual, hopelessly outdated, understandable only intuitively, given how it appears on the pages of the novel. It is spewed towards the central characters of the novel by a completely insane old woman, who had long ago gone crazy due to the death of her lover in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877, one of the results of which - let us remember, since this is important - was the proclamation of an independent Romanian state, from which Southern Bessarabia was immediately cut off in favor of the Russian Empire.

Moreover, it is no coincidence that he is included in the title by Matei Caragiale, a ministerial official who was obsessed with proving his aristocratic origins: he was terribly offended by the fact that he was an illegitimate child, who, after much doubt, was nevertheless sheltered by his biological father. “Helicopters” are called the word “craii”, which has many meanings, including those that are emotionally antonymous to each other. Maria Ryzhova gives the following translation options: “revelers”, “rakes”, “revelers”, “loafers”, “helicopters”. But also: “magi,” “princes,” “kings.”

In the tiny, but written ten long years, in fits and starts, on random sheets of paper in hot establishments, Matei Caragiale’s capodopere has three such helipad sorcerers, if you don’t count among them the nameless narrator - a young man leading a bohemian lifestyle and, like the author, diligently avoiding contact with his relatives.

The first of them is Pantazi, although, as it turns out, this is not his name, but the name of the man for whom he was mistaken in Bucharest, when, in flight from the past, he changed his appearance, unwittingly becoming a double of a man whom he had never seen. In the logic of “The Helipads of the Old Court,” the metamorphosis is quite ordinary - Caragiale’s creation is entirely woven from such post-Romantic oddities, standing with one foot in old Europe and the other in modern Europe.

According to his own statements, Pseudo-Pantasi is of Greek blood, although due to the tendency of his family to have red hair, he does not exclude the possibility that his ancestors were Normans. Be that as it may, he is definitely sure of his origins from seafarers, or rather, pirates. This is confirmed by his dreamy nature, which leads him and everyone around him to fantasies about overseas destinations: to the smells of Bangkok and the sun of Florida. He is a deeply unhappy man: the gypsy woman told his mother that Pantazi would have everything in life except love, and gypsy predictions in the world described by Matej Caragiale tend to come true.

Returning from the war of 1877, the then twenty-year-old Pantazi lost first his mother, then his father, but found a girl, Wanda, whom he loved with the highest love, contrary to physiological preferences. His happiness did not last long - having received a reminder of the gypsy prophecy, he discovered that his bride was not at all what he had pictured her in his heart, and out of grief he squandered his entire fortune, but by chance, in the person of his uncle, crucified by the peasants, he received (not without deception) a saving inheritance. He put an end to debauchery, instead choosing voluntary recluse: “In essence, by abandoning the decision to commit suicide, I only changed the method of death, moving away from my past.” After many years, Pantazi, the stranger's double, who is on the verge of old age, will meet an exact copy of Wanda - young Ilinka Arnotyan.

The second kutil prince's name is Pashadia. He is from a poor aristocrats, who through prudence, moderation and public service has risen to the social elite. Pashadia hates the state he serves with all his heart. Not in the sense of a state as an apparatus, but in the sense of a whole region called Romania, inhabited mainly by Romanians. There is “nothing Balkan, nothing gypsy” in him; he grew up abroad, for the time being unaware that “here we vegetate at the gates of the East.” Here is one of his characteristic dialogues with an unnamed narrator:

“I asked him whether we should not look for the reason for our lack of majestic and durable buildings, such as we see in the West, in the unstable power of the rulers and the fear of invasions? <...> He answered me that no; love of beauty is one of the privileges of peoples of high blood, to which we cannot be counted; our people have given nothing to civilization.”

He is by no means Smerdyakov, but a subtle nature (may Pavel Fedorovich excuse us), sublime, extremely gifted. He is writing something grandiose, comparable to the works of Tacitus, something that will clearly change historical literature, and at the same time history itself and literature itself. However, following Scipio, he says: “Ungrateful homeland, you will not receive my bones.” By bones, Pashadia means the very book whose manuscript he bequeathed to be burned.

His moderation and sophistication are dissipated in the taverns where the male society of helipads of the Old Court meets. He indulges in revelry with the same consistency as in abstinence, and even outside the tavern he is capable of behaving in a far from aristocratic manner: according to the narrator, he is characterized by the cynicism of a smuggler or moneylender. And again, duality - for the time being hidden in Pashadia, but gradually revealed on the pages of the novel right up to the very death of the hero, which is not at all noble and sublime, but in a sense rather absurd.

The duality of the natures of Pantazi and Pashadia does not at all prevent the narrator from experiencing an intellectual attraction to them, craving their company and friendship. The same cannot be said about the last of the three idler kings, to whom the author generously gave his full name - Gorike Pirgu. Pirgu is a scum and scum, a “wild creature of the slums” who is disgusted by everything elegant and beautiful. He is disgusted by the dreams of his comrades about foreign women like the Jewish Rashelika, who captivated Pashadia, but he is no stranger to voluptuousness when it comes to women who are crippled, unimaginably obese, toothless, hunchbacked, ideally pregnant, capable of giving birth right in bed with Gorike Pirgu. During feasts, he mostly abstains from alcohol, but without company he gets drunk to the point of losing his already not entirely human appearance.

And yet there are some fascinating features about it. Firstly, he somehow attracts Pantazi and Pashadia, since they tolerate his presence, although they do not miss any opportunity to publicly humiliate him. Secondly, he, as befits a semi-demonic, clownish figure, equally belongs to two opposite worlds: his native social bottom and the seemingly infinitely distant high society. Pirgu is an intriguer, weaving intrigues without any clear goal, writing anonymous denunciations, playing off friends, bringing decent men with married ladies, and decent women with married men: “The whole city danced to his tune, and the three of us became part of this fair show, where he threw some dolls on others, pulled, tossed them, without worrying that he could break them or smash to pieces." What is noteworthy is that he avoided, is avoiding and, as the reader learns, until the end of his days he will avoid even a hint of punishment for his aimless treachery. He, as it turns out, is a man of a new era that has replaced the old world - a pathologically cynical person who has chosen meanness not as a survival strategy, but as a way to live life as required by the Zeitgeist.

It is not for nothing that Pirgu blurts out the almost exact date when the reader finds the heroes as if suspended in timelessness: “At the latest by the new year, 1911, that is, in three weeks, the conservatives should come to power.” That is, the fuse has already been lit under the Balkans, and soon the powder keg will explode with two wars that will lead to the First World War. It is also alarming in Romania itself - the memory of the peasant uprising of 1907 is still alive (by the way, the young Caragiale warmly welcomed it), and the young state is reconsidering relations with its allies, looking for itself on the imperialist map of the world, awaiting redistribution. In the novel “The Helipads of the Old Court,” the war, however, exists as if on the periphery of consciousness: either as fragments of memories of the past, or as vague premonitions of the future, when Europe will be torn to shreds by the Martsol of history, and the Muma Padurius of the planet will make a non-human out of a person.

In the meantime, Pantazi and Pashadia, despite the clowning Pirgu, indulge in their favorite thing - conversations about history and fantasies about lands far from Bucharest, and from the “Gate of the East”, and from Europe. But the trickster Pirgu will get his and lead his companions to the fall on the other side of the city, about which the narrator will note: “Debauchery struck me less than the madness that reigned everywhere. I admit, I did not expect to see so many varied and numerous quirks, to encounter so much open madness.” There the narrator feels himself infected with the aristocratic disease of degeneration: Pirgu did his job, dispersing a series of plots that succeed each other in a hallucinatory manner that forced critics to rank Caragiale among the Balkan fellow travelers of the surrealists.

Critics generally have great difficulty in determining the species of this truly original writer. As a poet, he became close to the Symbolists, faithfully followed the precepts of the Parnassians, but at the same time retained and developed the traditional motifs of romanticism. And despite the obvious interest in repressed and repressed sexuality that permeates the pages of “Helicopters of the Old Court,” Caragiale pursues goals other than surreal ones. Still, the surrealists of that time strived for collectivism in life, creativity and life-creation. Caragiale, on the contrary, is an extreme individualist, clearly labeled as a reactionary in the quasi-socialist ideology of the post-war authoritarian state - and thus won the special posthumous love of the reading public. If you really want, then in terms of genre, “The Heirs of the Old Court” can be defined as a novel of intoxication, close, say, to “Bertalan’s Night” by Laszlo Czolnoki or “Apollo Bezobrazov” by Boris Poplavsky - works that also hardly fit into the school classifications of that era, but are also endowed with the alarming sensuality of drunken delirium and a feeling of a tragic gap between pure artistic fantasy and dirty reality.

In addition to the “surreal” one, there is also a “social” interpretation of “The Helipads of the Old Court”, according to which, in the persons of Pantazi, Pashadia and Pirgu, the author depicted three classes of contemporary Romanian society: nobleman, nouveau riche and lumpen. There is justice in this, although even without a deep dive into Caragiale’s biography, it is noticeable that he sees himself reflected in each of the three heroes. But if it all came down to the dissection of social types, “The Helipads of the Old Court” would hardly have survived its creator, who died in 1936, and the national communist despotism, and the deadening registration in school textbooks. The latter can be especially difficult.

Of course, every nation wants to have in its national library, if not an encyclopedia of its soul, then at least a book that can be used to restore the capital after the bombing. “The Helipads of the Old Court” occupied both of these places in cultural memory. So the Russian-speaking reader, usually almost unfamiliar with Romanian literature, has a certain advantage over those for whom it is native: he can, with the same unclouded gaze as the young storyteller, follow Gorique Pirgu into the house of the Arnoteanu family and experience for himself what happened in the extremely exquisite capodopere of Eastern European modernism called “The Heels of the Old Court.”