On Becoming “Princesse Bibesco”:
The Intimacy of Modern Identity,
Between the Self and the World
Carmen Beatrice Dut,u, Roxana Patras,, Antonio Patras,
“Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University, Splaiul Unirii, 176, Bucharest, Romania
https://orcid.org/0003-3654-6809
carmen.dutu@ucdc.ro
“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Ias,i, Alexandru Lăpus,neanu Street, 26, Ias,i, Romania
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2534-8663
roxana.patras@uaic.ro
“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Ias,i, Bvd. Carol I, 11, Iași, Romania
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6174-5370
antonio.patras@uaic.ro
79
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 46.1 (2023)
With the exception of Eva Behring who does not regard Martha Bibescu (1886–
1973) as an “exile writer,” the few dictionaries and lexicons tackling Romanian
exile writers only mention this turn-of-the century Romanian-French woman
writer’s name with modest assertiveness. This narrative of her censorship is
probably the story of any exile woman writer, yet with a few entanglements
created by her special social status (she became a “Princess” by marriage), by
her outstanding political allegiances, and by her Bovaric spirit: malicious critics
commented that her epitaph is a composition of four personae, none of them
authentic. In this article, we present reasons and contexts of/for Martha Bibescu’s
exclusion from the Romanian national literary canon. Moreover, assuming “a
new geographical consciousness” that might bring to the fore the transnational
routes of emancipation, our specific aim in the present article is to move away
from the enduring narrative of censorship in Martha Bibescu’s case and to
propose her as a candidate figure for a transnational literary canon, forging a
specific, modern, intimate écriture. Our stance is that shaping a complex intimacy,
in-between the ways of the Self and the ways of the world, represents these women
writers’ major contribution to modernity and should be counted as one of the
characteristics of modernism.
Keywords: Romanian literature / Romanian women writers / Bibescu, Martha / literary
canon / censorship / intimacy
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
80
Introduction: The dynamics of in-betweenness
The following remarks are grounded on the assumption that, at the
turn of the twentieth century, women writers took an active role in
constructing and deconstructing national modernisms at the fringes of
Europe, which meant, most of the times, placing themselves in a prob-
lematic position of “in-betweenness” that challenged the classical co-
nundrum core vs. periphery. Our stance is that shaping a multi-layered
intimacy, in-between the ways of the Self and the ways of the world, is
indicative of and represents these women writers’ major contribution
to modernity and should be counted as one of the key characteristics
of modernism. Coined by Homi K. Bhabha’s “Culture’s In-Between,”
the concept of “in-between”-ness reflects a hybrid and dialogic position-
ing that involves exceeding the traditional divides between the public
and the private, but also assuming the incompleteness of any cultural
agency (53–61).
In line with Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s idea on the
temporal, spatial, and vertical expansion of the concept of “modern-
ism” (Mao and Walkowitz 1–19), we are claiming that moderniza-
tion, modernity and even modernism (Călinescu 24–87) were shaped,
not just from core to periphery, but also backward, from multiple
European peripheries and semi-peripheries to multiple European cen-
ters. Moreover, it has been argued that an
interesting twist in the thinking about modernism is offered by the view that
while modernity was born in the West (even if authors differ on whether it is a
universal or an entirely western phenomenon), modernism was the product of
the periphery…. Some authors even posit that modernism is not in the core,
but always in the periphery, and they speak of the modernism of underdevel-
opment, where culture is one form through which one can belong if one is
excluded from modernity. This is certainly, very relevant to Eastern Europe,
the first and closest periphery to the core of modernity. (Todorova 5–6)
Accordingly, in the present article we do not use the term “national
modernism” with an ideological acceptation—thus modernism is not a
“national allegory” (Osborne 61)—but in order to enhance the variety
of aesthetic affiliations, political solidarities and socio-economic trans-
actions across national spaces instead.
Though in our analysis, we make mention of the spearhead notions
of the World-systems theory (that is, “center” and “periphery”), and
thus amend its monistic and over-deterministic frame (Worseley 305;
Chirot and Hall 97–99) by introducing a view on the transnational
Carmen Beatrice Dut,u, Roxana Patras, , Antonio Patras, : On Becoming “Princesse Bibesco”
81
routes of emancipation, that were charted by both carefree itinerants
and tragic exiles. From this perspective, the intellectual conversation
between “fringe” women intellectuals and their environment does not
function as “an ambient universe of denationalized, deracialized forms
of discourse” (Ramazani 350); on the contrary, this kind of conversa-
tion enhances the profound experience of in-betweenness and “gath-
ers,” as Homi Bhabha explains in his chapter on “DissemiNation,” var-
ious “forms-of-life” on the edge (Bhabha, The Location 139–171)—on
the edge of cultures, languages, countries, nations, cities, social classes
and genders.
Taking on board Bhabha’s hybridization and third space theories,
Florin Manolescu regards the Romanian exile writers as in-between
figures moving in a “non-Euclidean” universe because they are bi/
multi-lingual, multi-citizens (Manolescu 17–18; Ifrim 182–186). This
state, or, more specifically, dynamics of in-betweeness in situ between
two or more cultures, civilizations, and sets of mentalities—triggers a
specific imagery in the writer’s works, but it is also reflected in the reac-
tions that the home and, respectively, the adoption cultures generate in
this kind of borderline positionings. Furthermore, Florin Manolescu
asserts that there are certain advantages and disadvantages in being an
in-between writer: first and foremost, because of the existence of, a
pervasive identity complex, which is the friable bedrock of exile writ-
ers’ literary achievements. As noticed above, it is equally important to
trace what has been kept from these writers’ original mentality in the
adoption culture and language: for instance, Emil Cioran and Eugene
Ionesco’s Romanian works, written before their emigration in the
1940s, provided a genuine ground for further thought on their activity
as international intellectuals.
A narrative of exclusion?
With the exception of Eva Behring, who does not regard Martha
Bibescu as an “exile writer,” the few dictionaries and lexicons tack-
ling Romanian diaspora mention her name with modest assertiveness
(Manolescu 80–86; Simion et al. 813–816). Assuming “a new geo-
graphical consciousness” (Sorensen 1) that might bring to the fore the
transnational routes of emancipation, our specific aim in the present
article is to move away from the enduring narrative of exclusion in
Martha Bibescu’s case and to propose her as a candidate figure for a
transnational literary canon. The narrative of her exclusion is probably
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
82
the story of any exile woman writer, yet with a few entanglements
created by her special social status (she became a “Princess” by marriage
with Prince George Valentin Bibescu), by her outstanding political al-
legiances, and by her Bovaric spirit: malicious critics commented that
her epitaph is a composition of four personae, none of them authen-
tic (Princesse Bibesco—Ecrivain Français). Thus, holding that “what is
relegated to the margins is often… right at the centre of thought it-
self” (Ahmet 4), we will present reasons and contexts of/for Martha
Bibescu’s exclusion from the Romanian national literary canon.
Born in 1886, Martha Bibescu had a prodigious literary activity
spanning from 1908 (Les Huit Paradis [The Eight Paradises]) to 1972
(Échanges avec Paul Claudel [Conversations with Paul Claudel]), her
last volume being published one year before her death. Possessing a
charismatic and impressive personality—as much by her intelligence
and social skills as by her beauty—Martha Lahovary, future “Princesse
Bibesco,” proudly claimed to belong to two cultures, declaring her-
self French at heart and Romanian in her origins. Also known as
“The Princess (of) Europe” (Pavelescu 11–25), she was one of the
most distinguished European personalities of the twentieth century
and a celebrated writer, politician and hostess of lavish gatherings at
her Mogosoaia Palace, on the outskirts of Bucharest. Her outstand-
ing personality charmed Marcel Proust, Saint-Exupery, W. Churchill,
Charles de Gaulle, Alfonse XIII of Spain and many others. In 1954,
the French Academy awards her with the Great Prize for Literature for
her entire lifelong literary oeuvre. A year later, she is elected member
of the Belgian Royal Academy of Language and Literature. In 1962
she receives the Legion of Honour. Her itinerant, cosmopolitan and
carefree spirit was forced into exile by the dire circumstances of the
Bolshevik regime in Romania. In spite of her public fame during the
first decades of the twentieth century (Simion et al. 813), her writ-
ings have been constantly put in between brackets and today are quasi-
unknown to Romanian readership, the only trace she has left in the col-
lective memory being her tumultuous love life or the mysterious aura of
the Romanian Mata Hari that her competitors, Elena Văcărescu, and
Anna de Noailles, spread around.
The narrative of exclusion and its milder version, the narrative of
omission, concerning exile literature in general, and Martha Bibescu
in particular, come to the fore when we examine how the mainstream
Romanian literary criticism reacted to her hybrid formula before and
after the fall of the Communist regime. In order to show that Princesse
Bibescu’s literature springs from the experience of in-betweenness, we
Carmen Beatrice Dut,u, Roxana Patras, , Antonio Patras, : On Becoming “Princesse Bibesco”
83
chose to face off fiction and biography: on the one hand, with her most
praised novel Isvor, le pays des saules (Isvor, Country of Willows, 1923;
translated into Romanian only fifteen years after), on the other, her
most cherished life-writing Le Destin de lord Thomson of Cardington,
suivi de Smaranda (The Destiny of Lord Thomson of Cardington, followed
by Smaranda, 1932), both of them pitch and toss of a constructed and
censored intimacy, both of them sharing strategies of hiding and show-
ing the Self.
Martha Bibescu’s early debut (at the turn of the twentieth century)
should be put in the template of the Romanian Francophonie, which
was then already in its second wave. Programmatically following the
model of French civilization, the young Romanian intellectuals—some
of them “transnational figures belonging with the European aristoc-
racy” (Manolescu 80)—experienced a certain cultural fluidity between
Bucharest, Paris, and other places of the world (see, for instance, Matila
Ghyka’s memoirs The World Mine Oyster, 1955); this sense of conti-
nuity was enhanced by bilingualism or by the exclusive use of French
for political influence, for cultural diplomacy and for easier integration
into the European milieu. In spite of these transnational intellectu-
als’ impact abroad, the Romanians’ most prominent interbellum critics
gave them the cold shoulder.
If truth be told, except for a few circumstantial praises that stressed
on a gentle lady’s noble delights, Martha Bibescu’s publications did not
have a friendly reception in the interbellum Romania either. While in
France she was appreciated by Albert Thibaudet, Robert Kemp or Paul
Souday, and praised without reserve by Proust, Rilke and Valery, in
her home country, everybody criticized Bibescu’s snobbery in choos-
ing French as her main language and in dubbing herself “Princesse
Bibesco.” E. Lovinescu, one of the few male Romanian critics who pro-
moted female literature during the interbellum period,1 recommended
his daughter to read the princess-writer’s books (Lovinescu 191). This is
not however an instance of public appreciation; along with Musset and
an obscure Romanian memorialist, this kind of literature becomes a part
of Monica Lovinescu’s familial pedagogy. In spite of his acknowledged
opening toward modernity, toward experiment with hybrid literary
forms and toward female and ethnic minorities’ literature, Lovinescu
did not chose to include Martha Bibescu in his historiographical
1 E. Lovinescu prefaced enthusiastically the first anthology of Romanian female
literature entitled Evoluția scrisului feminin în România (The Evolution of Female Writ-
ing in Romania).
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
84
syntheses. The reason is not for her books’ lack of aesthetic value, but for
Zeitgeist reasoning according to which ethnic creativity is represented
only by works written in the national language (Romanian).
In fact, this theory is the main framework of G. Călinescu’s mon-
umental and canonic history, where Martha Bibescu’s name only
appears, ironically, in the last footnote (930). Needless to say, this
snapshot of the princess-writer’s works serves as a kind of “fringe” con-
textualization to the consistent chapter entitled The New Generation.
Moment 1933, which comments on other international intellectuals’
works (Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran). Nevertheless, Călinescu’s attitude
is more complex than it seems because it epitomizes the Romanian
readership’s reactivity to Bibescu’s literary endeavors: immediately after
the publication of Bibescu’s self-translated versions of Le Destin de Lord
Thomson of Cardington, suivi de Smaranda (The Destiny of Lord Thomson
of Cardington, followed by Smaranda) and Quatre portraits d’hommes:
Ferdinand de Roumanie. Herbert Henry Asquith. Anatole France. Jean
Lahovary (Four Portraits of Men: Ferdinand de Roumanie. Herbert Henry
Asquith. Anatole France. Jean Lahovary), the Romanian critic is on the
brink of “counting her among the national writers”: more precisely,
the princess-writer’s talent for portrait takes after “Plutarch’s model”
and renders “hieratic and symbolic art,” “poetically pathetic,” “gra-
cious and fine in describing moral and physical movements” (Călinescu
300–304). In 1939, somehow annoyed by the princess’s experiments
with genre fiction—the popular novel Katja, for instance—Călinescu
acknowledges Bibescu’s “writing skill, as being very nice for a mondain
lady, but unsatisfying as a writer” (Călinescu 2007). Obviously, the
famous critic was not ready to accept the princess-writer’s defying atti-
tude to write in French rather than Romanian: even though, by trans-
lating two of her biographic pieces, Bibescu had proved, with honors,
her phenomenal talent in writing, in Romanian too.
Within this context, we contend that Camil Petrescu’s intervention
made a difference. Speaking from the position of the most appreci-
ated modernist writer and with the authority of the philosopher, Camil
Petrescu acts as an influencer for Martha Bibescu’s postbellum recep-
tion. One of his articles on Bibescu was selected for publication in his
synthetic volume Teze și antiteze (Thesis and Anti-thesis), which shows
that his interest in the princess’s personality is neither trivial nor cir-
cumstantial. Even if the text reads as a pro domo sua plea, the celebrated
philosopher and novelist attacks his contemporaries’ lack of interest of
exceptional personalities. In a nutshell, despite the language she chose,
Martha Bibescu expresses the ethnic substance in a very modern manner
Carmen Beatrice Dut,u, Roxana Patras, , Antonio Patras, : On Becoming “Princesse Bibesco”
85
because she is able to grasp the universal values: “She is an elevated
flower of our [Romanian] race, a remarkable achievement of our
national genius after so many strays and suspicions.” (Petrescu 143)
Moreover, the princess-writer illustrated one of Camil Petrescu’s the-
ses on authenticity, built upon Marcel Proust’s narrative innovations.
But the appreciation could not have been complete without the genu-
ine admiration for Martha Bibescu’s stylish femineity, which probably
served as a real-life model for Camil Petrescu’s fascinating female char-
acter, Doamna T (Lady T) from the much-acclaimed novel Patul lui
Procust (The Procrustean bed) published in 1933.
The narrative of exclusion turned into censorship during the fifty
years of Communism (1945–1989).2 It is “cosmopolitanism” that
becomes a taboo, allegedly threatening to replace all things national.
Consequently, exile authors, their occurrences and their translations
abruptly disappear from the Romanian literary field: for instance,
Dicționarul scriitorilor români (The Dictionary of Romanian Writers,
1983) completely eradicated any exile writers from its pages. Starting
with the Romanian translation of Au bal avec Marcel Proust (Marcel
Proust at the Ball, 1976), Bibescu’s name surfaces again: in 1979, a
few fragments from the “political” diary are compiled and published,
and in 1983 the first monograph appears, aimed at reintegrating her
in the Romanian literary tradition. It is interesting that the critics of
the Communist period avoided commenting on Bibescu’s literature,
some of them recycling Camil Petrescu’s suggestions about aristocratic
posture which was supposed to work as universalia beyond any racial or
linguistic determinations (Cioculescu 395–398; Paleologu 274–282),
and others claiming that the princess was a declared enemy of the
Romanian Royal House. With these exceptions, the most authoritative
voices of Romanian criticism—Nicolae Manolescu, Eugen Simion,
Lucian Raicu, Mircea Martin, etc.—did not reconsider her. Being per-
ceived as a figure of the Romanian diaspora, Martha Bibescu becomes
the specialty of other diaspora writers who, under the same sign of
misfortunate reception, engage in a love-hate relationship (Lovinescu
75–78). The only notable recovery belongs to Elena Zaharia Filipaș,
who analyzes Isvor, pays des saules (Isvor, Country of Willows) in the
context of ethnic cultural movements such as Sămănatorism and
Poporanism (localized versions of “Narodnic-ism”), and emphasizes
Bibescu’s originality in catching the ingenuity of the Romanian people.
2 Martha Bibescu was not only the victim of Communist censorship, but also of the
legionares’ censorship before them, who confiscated her personal archive from Mogo-
soaia in the fourties—among these documents there was the draft of her Nymph Europa.
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86
Nearing the 89’ Revolution, the princess-writer’s life and works
become a rich topic for historians, some of them being interested
in rediscovering the pre-communist aristocratic environment, oth-
ers more committed to digging up secrets from the political police’s
archives (Pavelescu; Majuru; Bulei; Hîncu). After that, things seemed
to clear up in literary studies with regard to the exiled authors. A series
of monographs and articles exploring the Romanian-French co-influ-
ences provides solid ground to claim that Bibescu’s work belongs to the
Franco-Romanian cultural heritage, and thus to an in-between, hybrid
area where cultural agency is always assumed as potential, and thus
incomplete (Rujan).
In the revised editions of the above-mentioned dictionary, exile
writers are an integral part of the Romanian literary history (Zaciu
et al.; Simion et al.). However, at odds with this recent integration,
the narrative of exclusion regarding exile writers persisted with certain
literary critics, and this has now become a more recent trend of nar-
rative of omission. On the other hand, as explained at the beginning
of this chapter, many male writers of the exile such as Emil Cioran,
Eugen Ionesco, Mircea Eliade have been retrieved by Romanian
culture, translated and even introduced in school books after the
Romanian Anti-Communist Revolution in 1989, despite the fact that
both Cioran and Ionesco repeatedly insisted on their voluntary divorce
from their Romanian identity. But some other exile writers took much
longer to be rehabilitated, and some have not been rehabilitated at all,
especially women writers. Moreover, scholarly interest in the period
has labelled the rise and founding of the Romanian modern identity,
as well as national models for constructing it, as generally being a male
concern. By correlating reception fluctuations with the major political
changes in twentieth century Romania, we assert that this narrative of
exclusion continues to be political—be it the politics of nation or the
politics of gender.
Despite Martha Bibescu’s outstanding cultural heritage, Romanian
scholars have consistently “edited” her occurrence in the national liter-
ary canon both before and after the Communist regime, claiming that
her literary achievements should not be taken into account because
of her linguistic “inaccessibility.” While it is true that more recently
Martha Bibescu has broadly been acknowledged as an exile Romanian
author, and her life has been the subject of extensive research and
even of tabloid columns (see for instance Stelian Tănase’s “Bucharest,
Top Secret”), one cannot omit or deny the fact that to-date there has
been no major comparative work solely devoted to her output in the
Carmen Beatrice Dut,u, Roxana Patras, , Antonio Patras, : On Becoming “Princesse Bibesco”
87
Romanian literary canon, or even her contribution to Romanian liter-
ary modernism, for that matter.
As we can see, dealing with exile women writers is an intricate busi-
ness of cultures belonging to the former Communist bloc, especially
from a gender perspective. This is particularly problematic because
although these authors originate from Romanian culture, they are
transnational and trans-lingual figures, not belonging unequivocally
to any national tradition. While we accept trans-nationality as an
aesthetic value, the biographical, social or ideological circumstantial
aspects (exile, social status, gender) should be given less prominence.
Most certainly, in Martha Bibescu’s case, she was a transnational writer
even before the Communist party took over in Romania and her values
and literary strategies did not suffer any interference or alteration due
to her forced exile. Effectively we are confronted with a lack of theoreti-
cal fundament, lagging behind, so to speak, the realities concerning the
special categories of writers who do not fit in the mainstream canon of
the Romanian literature, such as exile, bilingual women, for example.
In what follows, we endeavor to discuss Martha Bibescu’s strategies of
rendering intimacy as a social construct or, mutatis mutandis, to point
where it makes “the realms of privacy” not a static and impermeable
sphere, but an agential and relational device (Mitroiu 135). As in other
cases—Carmen Sylva, for instance—the concept of “collective inti-
macy” could be used to describe a mechanism of self-censorship and
postural composition: it is about dismantling and adjusting the Self so
as to make it look like the person the others name “Princesse,” which
boils down to experiencing in-betweenness and fluidity between what
is real and what is ideal (Parry; Patraș and Pascariu).
Intimacy and in-betweenness: Modern writing practices and
strategies
This article builds on Anthony Giddens’s The Transformation of Intimacy
as well as on further developments in the field (see Berlant; Donovan
and Moss; Parry), whereby intimacy is regarded as a cultural construct,
a product of social and spatial relations, a medium for conveying mod-
ern affects and mentalities, a form of shaping a modern self-reflexive
identity. This perspective may reveal, for example, how exile women
writers thrived in the overlapping of private intimate spaces with pub-
lic ones, such as in the theatre or salon. They used salons as spaces of
in-betweenness, as members of French and Romanian high society were
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88
grouped in Martha Bibescu and Anna de Noailles’ salons, frequented by
the most famous writers of the time. Also, this perspective on collective
intimacy may enable us to explore how these women writers travelled
and experienced exile as an in-between space, as an escape from the
limiting and oppressive environment “at home,” which was perceived
as the static (thus, negative) side of intimacy; or, how they felt lost and
alienated when spending time or living abroad, longing for the lost in-
timacy of the home and/or language they left behind.3
As shown above, sharing an in-between position enables exile
women writers to have a deep knowledge of both cultures leading
to a circulation of ideas as well as influences flowing both ways. For
instance, before Marcel Proust became “Proust,” his tremendous influ-
ence on the Romanian cultural milieu was channeled by Bibescu’s
agency: a much less known fact is that she and her cousin (and liter-
ary rival) Anna de Noailles are documented as having impressed the
French writer to the extent that he even consulted the two Romanian
ladies about important stylistic and thematic choices (Sturdza 450–
535). Naturally, Proust’s influence on Martha Bibescu (and her circle)
is just as, as considerable, chiefly in her way of reworking life writ-
ing genres such as autobiography or biography. More specifically, the
princess’s sense of “collective intimacy” fashions the autobiographic
discourse and generates (literary) strategies of elusion and auto-elision:
to write a biography of an ex-lover (Lord Thomson of Cardington) is
a way of disguising the frankness of the diary notes; to depict an exotic
landscape and to frame it in an intimate letter is also a way of say-
ing that the narrative of a love story is not only about discovering the
foreign Other but also about returning to the fountain of one’s true
origins. It is probably worth mentioning that the princess’s cultural
circle at the Mogoșoaia Palace—restored in the spirit of the genuine
style of the former Wallachian prince Constantin Brâncoveanu—was
as cosmopolitan and prestigious as her salon in Paris. In fact, some of
her guests wrote interesting travelogues about the wild and fascinating
“country of willows,” which should all be considered subtle intertexts
to Bibescu’s Isvor, echoing her literary manner marked by stylization,
density and economy of tropes (Sitwell).
Our perspective about cultural in-betweenness also raises awareness
about these non-normative texts and para-literary writing practices
which have been repeatedly disparaged and undertheorized, proposing
instead a more viable and flexible direction. Exile women writers are
3 More on intimacy, women’s writing and spatiality in Estelle, Duțu, and Parente-
Čapková.
Carmen Beatrice Dut,u, Roxana Patras, , Antonio Patras, : On Becoming “Princesse Bibesco”
89
often consumed with an identity complex which becomes the bedrock
of their literary achievements. They write on topics such as intimacy
and diverse cultural identity, strange loves, new gender roles etc. and
adopt hybrid genres, bordering autobiography and fiction, recycling
obsolete forms such as the letter or the moralist’s portrait (Principesa
Bibescu). As we will see further, the thematization of intimacy plays a
crucial role in constructing the modern self.
Martha Bibescu used the tropes of intimacy as a way of obliterat-
ing the limits between the self and the landscape, as well as the lim-
its between the Self and the Other. We chose her novel Isvor, Le pays
des saules (Isvor, Country of Willows, 1923)4 and her biography Lord
Thomson of Cardington: A Memoir and Some Letters (1932) as case stud-
ies in order to foreground her contribution to the (trans)national lit-
erary canon. The two works should be considered landmarks of her
literary career, albeit for very different reasons: while the first one is
probably the most praised of her books, the second one is the only one
in which she secretly weaved both French and Romanian voices, by
translating the original text manu propria, which is actually a notable
exception of the princess’s artistic behavior. The complexity of the bio-
graphic account is enhanced by the fact that Christopher Birdwood
(Lord Thomson of Cardington), Martha’s lover during his service as a
British diplomat in the Kingdom of Romania, published, in his turn,
a fictionalized memoir of his Romanian experience whose center of
attention is a character called “Lady Smaranda,” the romantic chat-
elaine with emerald eyes ruling over a place allegorically named “The
Still Waters.” As a sort of boomerang effect, the princess-writer’s biog-
raphy reverberates the secret Arthurian tones of her own myth as “Lady
of the Lake”: by writing his life, she actually writes about herself too.
Isvor begins on the brink of autobiographical writing and fiction.
Marked by in-betweenness and generic fluidity, neither entirely auto-
biographical, nor entirely a novel, the text could be integrated to the
category of “the autobiographical novel”: the first person-narrative is
the most adequate to illustrate the tension of a style oscillating between
the key concept of distance (or relational identity, gap, otherness) and
the need to express oneself, to narrate the Self and to give agentive
force to the privacy of the self. This is not the first person of confes-
sions, but a voice that hints at objectivity: “I learn to read between the
lines of what I write, and I laugh all alone at my discoveries. Blessed
4 The present article makes reference to the edition Isvor, le pays des saules. Paris:
Bartillat, 1994. The translations from French into English also belong to the authors
of this article.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
90
mania of recording everything and then rereading what I record.”
(Bibescu, Isvor 167)
The same generic hybridity marks the biographical discourse in the
biography of Lord Thomson of Cardington, which is also written in the
first person in order to suggest not only the temporal contemporaneity,
but also a kind of impersonation, a way of writing a beloved life from
inside: “If I could write his life with musical notes, I’d be pleased.” (14)
A letter at the beginning of Isvor introduces a fictional persona and
sets forth the story line. A Romanian princess is confronted with an
existential challenge: a law in her country does not allow foreigners
to own land. Since she is about to marry her French fiancé, Émilien,
before committing her life to him she decides to visit her Romanian
estate for the last time. She takes her time, though: she allows herself a
year before making the choice between the love of her fiancé (symbol of
the Other) and the love of her country. Consequently, Marie (the main
character) immerses herself in a universe that offers her another way
of life, far from civilization. The narrator writes about the Romanian
peasants on her estate, people whose spiritual richness inspires the prin-
cess to compose a veritable fresco of peasant life at the beginning of
the twentieth century. The testimonial is organized as a collection of
diverse ethnographic material (legends, myths or tales, translation of
popular songs or various refrains etc.). In the end, the reader (who
is left in suspense as to Marie’s final choice throughout the story), is
provided with the answer via a letter in the afterword: Marie will not
return to Paris. Her integration is complete; the character remains in
the realm she came from to regain. The fictional pact is therefore based
solely on the attestation of the two letters framing the story itself. The
first-person narrative exposes the reader to what could be defined as a
real travelogue. Due to detailed and suggestive descriptions, the reader
should have no trouble at all finding the Romanian countryside, with
its traditions and oral culture.
In effect, the rural (or, better yet, primordial) realm recalls the writ-
er’s beloved residence at Mogoşoaia to which she devoted seventeen
years of her life. The Still Waters, fashionable and cosmopolitan resi-
dence of artists, diplomats, politicians and aristocracy from the entire
world, provides a place to suggestively illustrate the East-West rela-
tionship and the complexity of any such rapprochement process with
the other. A fragment that opens the chapter “Their sad songs” is also
restyled in the biography of Lord Thomas of Cardington as well as in
Cardington’s ficto-memoir Smaranda. The travelling passage catches
a dialogue between the princess and Pitts, the English governess who
Carmen Beatrice Dut,u, Roxana Patras, , Antonio Patras, : On Becoming “Princesse Bibesco”
91
“understands nothing of the people of the country of the willows”
(Bibescu, Isvor 37) and who criticizes the sad tone and the nasal voice
of the traditional folk songs. Although the reflections of this bewil-
dered spectator are accurate, her words sound unjustly contemptuous
and the narrator resorts to an intertextual reference—most probably
to Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book (2006)—so as to balance the verdict of
“poor Pitts”:
I have however copied and translated into French the preludes of their songs,
and my notebooks look like herbariums in preparation, for there is no flower
on a stem that is not named there. I know many of these floral preludes; I like
them and I collect them. In their succinct form, they remind me of certain
Japanese poems which have only one verse, a cry thrown into the night when
our senses are asleep. What force of restrained love, what science of observa-
tion, this supposed brevity in oneself and in others! (137)
Author of La Nymphe Europe (1960), an epic of the European civiliza-
tion told through narrative genealogies, Bibescu pleads for the com-
mon origins of all civilizations: French and Romanian, but also, by
resounding the echoes of Arthurian legends of the British. The return
to the Orient, as represented by the journey of the Parisian princess
to her native country, thus symbolizes the return to a lost Eden, to an
intimate universe where original harmony is still possible. What makes
Isvor and Thomson of Cardington so special is their interrogative and
secretly intimate substance. The narrator plays with the in-between
perspective: there is the freshness of the gaze which discovers a new
realm but, at the same time shares an intimate familiarity with the
cultural background.
For the peasants on the Mogoșoia Estate and for her foreign lover,
she is the “exotic princess” because she comes from far away, from
another world, even. This intrinsic ambivalent position of the sub-
ject relativizes the perspective. Dialogue can only take place within
the framework of a relationship of trust and familiarity because, for
the Other to reveal his/her knowledge, a universal language is needed
which can only be that of intimacy. In Fictions in Autobiography, Paul
John Eakin insists on the dynamics that the Self undergoes through
the autobiographic narrative: “Autobiographical truth is not a fixed
but an evolving content in an intricate process of self-discovery and
self-creation, and […] the self that is the centre of all autobiographi-
cal narrative is necessarily a fictive structure.” (Eakin 3) Employing
intimacy also involves the desire to charge writing with an existential,
ontological value. The Self becomes the mediator of an experience that
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
92
never ceases to aim for transcendence, for fusing death, life and writing
in the same discourse:
Whiteness is nothingness… For the written page, the snow first replaces a
blank page. But as soon as it has stopped falling, all the guests of Isvor, men
and beasts, come to be inscribed legibly on this paper. My walks have become
a kind of reading in the open air: I decipher, I do a kind of mental solfeggio
and census, police investigation too. (Bibescu, Isvor 269)
Conclusion
The history of modern Romania and the abroad cultural agency of
Romanian intellectuals represent an inspiring foundation for discus-
sions related to the dynamics between language and culture, between
the national and the transnational, between the intimate and the pub-
lic. The in-betweenness status of exile women writers sometimes trig-
gered an incontestable melancholy of displacement. They adopted dif-
ferent coping strategies to deal with this existential melancholy: some,
negated their Romanian cultural and ethnic identity altogether, such as
Anna de Noailles; others, such as Martha Bibescu, took an active role
in creating a new European literary and cultural perspective. But both
categories mediated indirectly or directly a cultural dialogue between
French models and the local, Romanian forms of modernism, going
both ways, in a continuum.
Martha Bibescu falls into the category of active agents of change,
programmatically developing a European supra-identity and becom-
ing a keen advocate for Romanian national emancipation and national
identity, preoccupied with the remapping of European culture. In the
present article we have argued that, the reconsideration of Martha
Bibescu needs to be reassessed from a fringe perspective (relying on
concepts such as “in-betweenness,” “fluidity,” “collective intimacy”)
and placed into the context of her efforts to link her birthplace and
her place of residence, to link her public personae and the core of her
Self. Her work is heavily reliant on the personal trajectory imposed by
her family and social status to build a life between the two cultures,
Romanian and French. The issue at heart in her writings is how the nar-
rator/the author constructs her identity within a space that is imbued
with intimacy, in which the Self moves incessantly towards others.
In the case studies briefly commented, the narrator of Isvor and the
voice of the biographer from The Destiny of Lord Thomson of Cardington
move towards the profound Self, whose profile emerges either from
Carmen Beatrice Dut,u, Roxana Patras, , Antonio Patras, : On Becoming “Princesse Bibesco”
93
Romanian origins (the native country of willows) or from the per-
fect, almost musical, communion with the beloved one (Christopher
Birdwood, Lord Thomson of Cardington). To conclude, although the
French myth, the dialogue of the Romanian-French culture was already
a well-established fact during Martha Bibescu’s time, to-date the con-
tribution of this woman writer to this continuum is still not included in
the Romanian canon. We have referred in particular here to the speci-
ficity of her writing, approached themes, negotiation with the literature
of the time, the characters, the world vision, stylistic particularities etc.
This article advocates for the repositioning of her writing within the
national literary canon by regarding her, alongside other women writ-
ers of the exile, as an active mediator among Europe’s national litera-
tures (after all “the nymph Europe” is a political trope of solidarity), as
well as a perfect example of the trans-national European culture. Her
writings serve as a reflection of that invisible bridge, not only among
cultures, but also between historical and political processes, which gen-
erated a two-way influence, beyond the apparent incongruences.
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Kako postati »princesa Bibesco«: intimnost
sodobne identitete med jazom in svetom
Ključne besede: romunska književnost / romunske pisateljice / Bibescu, Martha /
literarni kanon / cenzura / intimnost
Z izjemo Eve Behring, ki Marthe Bibescu (1886–1973) ne obravnava kot
»izgnanske pisateljice«, je v redkih slovarjih in leksikonih, ki obravnavajo
romunske izgnanske pisatelje, ime te romunsko-francoske pisateljice s pre-
loma stoletja omenjeno le s skromno samozavestjo. Ta pripoved o njenem
cenzuriranju je verjetno zgodba katere koli izseljenske pisateljice, vendar z
nekaj zapleti, ki so jih ustvarili njen poseben družbeni status (s poroko je
postala »princesa«), njena izjemna politična lojalnost in »bovarijevski« duh:
zlonamerni kritiki so komentirali, da je njen epitaf sestavljen iz štirih oseb, od
katerih nobena ni pristna. V tem članku predstavimo razloge in kontekste za
izključitev Marthe Bibescu iz romunskega nacionalnega literarnega kanona.
Še več, ob predpostavki »nove geografske zavesti«, ki bi lahko v ospredje posta-
vila transnacionalne poti emancipacije, je naš posebni cilj, odmakniti se od
trajne pripovedi o cenzuri v primeru Marthe Bibescu in jo predlagati kot kan-
didatko za transnacionalni literarni kanon, ki oblikuje specifično, sodobno,
intimno pisavo. Naše stališče je, da je oblikovanje kompleksne intimnosti med
načinom sebe in načinom sveta glavni prispevek teh pisateljic k modernosti in
bi ga bilo treba šteti za eno od značilnosti modernizma.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.135.1.09Bibescu M.:305-055.2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i1.05