Incognito by Petru Dumitriu

First published: 1962 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1940-1960

Locale: Romania

Analysis

Until 1960, when he escaped to the West, Petru Dumitriu was head of the State Literary Society of Romania; he was not only the most powerful man in the literary apparatus of Romania but was also regarded as his country’s leading writer on artistic grounds. Since his escape, he has become recognized at least in Europe, as one of those few writers whose talents so far transcend the conventions of nationality as to make them something on the order of writers to the world at large. It is obvious in any case that Dumitriu’s stature as an artist raises him above any poet or novelist in the history of Romanian literature.

INCOGNITO, like all the novels of Dumitriu that have been translated into English previously, was written in French. Given the historical sympathy between France and Romania and the natural desire of a writer to reach as wide an audience as possible, Dumitriu’s adoption of this language was natural. Racially, culturally, and linguistically, Romania is a Latin island in the midst of an Asiatic—Slavonic and Magyar—sea, and it is significant that his characters speak, when they speak of literature, not of Fyodor Dostoevski and Leo Tolstoy but of the poets of France, Italy, and Spain, while the first “foreign” author quoted in INCOGNITO itself is Tacitus, in whose Histories the narrator, apparently intended to stand for Dumitriu himself, finds remorseless parallels with the state of Romania in 1960.

It is almost as if, indeed, centuries later in the Romanian microcosm, the Roman Empire had at last found a creative artist capable of capturing the whole sweep of its decadence and downfall, its decline, and the subsequent reign of the Eastern barbarians. INCOGNITO should not be read alone but in its proper sequence among the body of Dumitriu’s work, that work which, written for the most part within a five-year period, attempts to render the essence of Romanian history from the nineteenth century to the time of Dumitriu’s own escape to the West. In particular, INCOGNITO should be read as the companion piece to MEETING AT THE LAST JUDGMENT, to which it stands in much the same relationship as the PURGATORIO to the INFERNO.

Focused upon a smaller patch of time than Incognito and directed at depicting the character of a particular level in the Romanian governmental hierarchy, MEETING AT THE LAST JUDGMENT describes a Hell on earth, Romania as a colony in the Soviet bloc, and its inhabitants, the damned, many of them disillusioned, many of them still believing in the Marxist-Leninist cause, all of them in greater or lesser degree responsible for the creation of a country where life is genuinely intolerable, all of them thus genuinely damned. Their suffering, as it should be in Hell, is not physical but psychological, for the soul is where Dumitriu’s interest lies: the country and social level in which they live, particularly as high functionaries in the imperial apparatus, make such things as love, friendship, loyalty, self-respect, or charity impossible for them. Their Romania is ruled instead by brutality, greed, lust, jealous hatred, duplicity, and subanimal ambition, and one by one they take their turns as victims of this Romania they have made.

In such a country, the mere maintenance of sanity is an achievement; the maintenance of any other human characteristics becomes something of a miracle, a miracle which seems to testify in Dumitriu’s eyes to the essential truth, despite all of his own evidence to the contrary, in a conception of man as a creature at least capable of his own salvation, if not of any very much higher nobility. Consequently, though he is by no means an “optimistic” writer, one feels at the end of MEETING AT THE LAST JUDGMENT, as Dumitriu describes in a few quick pages the narrator’s escape with his wife—Dumitriu’s child was allowed to join her parents in 1964, having been held hostage for four years—a sudden sense of exaltation.

INCOGNITO may be read as a kind of gloss on this exaltation. All the characters in the book have already appeared in MEETING AT THE LAST JUDGMENT, the difference being that whereas in the previous novel they are seen in their basest, most abject, and most superficial aspect, in INCOGNITO readers see into the secret nobility of their real selves, where it exists, or into the fear of self that creates a Judas.

The central figure of INCOGNITO, Sebastian Ionesco, is, in fact, a kind of Christ. The major part of the novel is his autobiography, which he has handed over to the narrator, who has been entrusted by the hierarchy with the job of gathering evidence of a secret conspiracy against the state. This conspiracy actually exists. It is not, however, the kind of conspiracy which the state, thinking only in terms of dialectical materialism, can understand. It is a conspiracy of the soul itself, or of the spirit, and its situation, Dumitriu intends the reader to see, is exactly like that of primitive Christianity under the Caesars.

It has been customary since Gibbon to treat the conversion of Rome to Christianity as the result of a kind of bribe, the bribe of “everlasting life.” Such an interpretation of this major event in Western history is naive in the extreme, ignoring as it does the testimony of the Roman Empire itself. From the melancholy of Vergil and the despair of Horace’s Roman odes to the agonizing self-reappraisal of St. Augustine, the Latin writers bear increasing witness to an unease of the spirit which only Christianity, of all the hundreds of available religions (all of them equally proferring the offer of resurrection), could assuage. Rome chose Christianity, one may conclude, because it was “truer,” because it replaced some form of consciousness which had been lost in the process of “civilization,” because its implied description of human nature fitted with what seemed to be the human facts. Like primitive Christianity, Sebastian Ionesco’s secret sect is thus a conspiracy of truth, a conspiracy against the mechanical lie of Romania’s Oriental masters.

Sebastian’s narrative begins with his describing a day in his adolescence, when his country was still a kingdom and a kingdom still renowned for the paganism of its ways. Over every doorway might have been hung the mottoes “Si piace e lice” or “Fayce que vouldras”: life on a Danube estate like Sebastian’s father’s was a perpetual Theleme, a pastoral idyl as it might have been painted by some post-Giorgionesque Italian. In this setting, the reader is reintroduced to Sebastian’s brothers and to his sister, Valentine, who figure in MEETING AT THE LAST JUDGMENT largely as promiscuous, ambitious schemers.

The real leader of the family, dominating the others not only through his own talents and strength of character but also through their pagan capacity to be intimidated by his beauty, is Philip, brilliant and licentious, a symbol, perhaps, of prewar Romania, doomed to die in the wreckage of the house during a bombardment. The hint of incest, lurking in his younger brother Christian’s relationship with their mother, becomes an apparent actuality, during the course of the day, in Philip’s seduction of Valentine, which Sebastian stumbles on as a witness. It is this event, as much as any other, that drives him away from the comforts of home to join the army, then allied with the Germans in forcing the Soviets out of Romanian territory and invading Russia.

Captured by the Russians, Sebastian is converted to Communism and repatriated by the Red Army’s victorious drive to the West. What he hopes to find in Communism, just as he had hoped to find it in heroic sacrifice to patriotism, is purity; his conversion is an attempt to atone for the sins of his people. Nothing deludes like success and for a while, as he becomes one of the leaders in the movement to overthrow the kingdom and establish a Soviet state, Sebastian believes that he has found the purity he was after. He discovers that Valentine, Christian, and Erasmus, his third brother, have all found their way into the Party apparatus as well, following his lead despite the fact that he is the youngest and least prepossessing of all. Though never a Party member, Valentine, in fact, is destined to become the wife of one of the most influential men of the new regime, Basil Morcovici.

At the highest peak of his personal success within the Party, Sebastian again becomes disillusioned and resigns his position, a step that puts him automatically under suspicion and leads, by no very circuitous route, to a series of prison camps. It is while working as a slave laborer that Sebastian completes his final conversion, to a vision of life that is analogous to, if not directly derived from, the vision of the New Testament. From this point on, his life becomes even more dangerous; persecuted though he has been in his search for his vision, he is now in a position to become a martyr, for his faith demands converts. Meanwhile, a plot directed by Malvolio Leonte, one of Morcovici’s rivals in the Party, has seen in Sebastian a chance to topple Morcovici through Valentine and the fact that she is Sebastian’s sister. The narrator of INCOGNITO, “Dumitriu” himself, has been assigned the task of facilitating Sebastian’s martyrdom by exposing his creed and denouncing those who adhere to it, a task which he is reluctant to fulfill but which he fears he may have to carry out, to his own shame, for the sake of self-preservation.

In the votaries of Sebastian’s sect, the narrator finds his allies, in Valentine, Christian, and Erasmus Ionesco, and in Arthur Zodie, a character whose presence in MEETING AT THE LAST JUDGMENT (1961) always generates suspicion, but whose evasive acts and language are explained in INCOGNITO as the ambiguous defenses, like Christ’s “render unto Caesar,” of a man living in a world whose rulers are hostile to his vision of himself. Unfortunately, such allies are powerless against the machinations of Party members more vicious than they. Malvolio Leonte soon finds his Judas in Leopold, a neurotic cripple. At the end of the book, however, readers do not know what has happened to Sebastian; Morcovici has managed to turn the tide, and Sebastian, now no longer a wanted man, has simply disappeared. In fact, whether Sebastian is dead or alive no longer makes much difference, for the conspiracy of soul of which he was the center has given signs of spreading even into the Byzantine cave of Soviet Russia itself.

INCOGNITO is a considerable work of art, made more considerable by the place it occupies in the total work of a writer who is already recognizably a classic. If Dumitriu has not wholly succeeded in conquering the eternal problem of expressing the experience of religion in words, it must be added that, even so, INCOGNITO may be compared to Arthur Koestler’s DARKNESS AT NOON (1941) and Boris Pasternak’s DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1957).

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, the unnamed witness to the testimony and a minor Party official
• Sebastian Ionesco, the hero and a storekeeper
• Erasmus Ionesco, a high Party official
• Christian Ionesco, and
• Philip Ionesco, Sebastian’s brothers
• Valentine Ionesco Morcovici, their sister
• Basil Morcovici, her husband
• Malvolio Leonte, Morcovici’s rival in the Party
• Romeo Romanesco, Sebastian’s friend
• Sabine, Sebastian’s wife
• Arthur Zodie, Sebastian’s friend
• Leopold, a cripple