Travel for the Dying: Ceauşescu’s Romania as Seen by Saul Bellow

Christopher E. Koy

doi:10.31261/rias.16532

Published: 2024-05-01

Vol. 17 No. 2 (2024)

Travel for the Dying: Ceauşescu’s Romania as Seen by Saul Bellow

Christopher E. Koy

Website: https://www.jcu.cz/cz/univerzita/lide/clovek?identita=Koy_Christopher_Erwin_30319

Section: FEATURES

https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.16532

Abstract

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) traveled to Bucharest in December, 1978, to assist his Romanian-born wife who wished to attend to her dying mother. He experienced Bucharest for the first time and realistically conveyed his wife’s humiliating experience with the Securitate of Ceauşescu’s regime in the novel The Dean’s December (1982). This contribution will underscore the anxiety which Bellow experienced writing the novel, leading him to pre-emptive self-censorship, undermining to some extent his brief look inside communist Romania and its people during its repressive years. Bellow followed up that novel 18 years later with a pronounced anti-Romanian take in Ravelstein (2000) in which, among other themes, the youthful fascist past his former university colleague and friend Mircea Eliade is exploited to implicate Eliade in Profesor Ioan Culianu’s murder on campus in 1991. Ravelstein is revealed as a cruel novel impugning a few stand-in Romanian characters, as Bellow exposes his thoroughly modified perspective on Romania.

Keywords:

Saul Bellow , Romania , cold war , communist oppression , self-censorship

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Koy, C. E. (2024). Travel for the Dying: Ceauşescu’s Romania as Seen by Saul Bellow. Review of International American Studies, 17(2), 161–175. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.16532

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Christopher E. Koy

koy@pf.jcu.cz
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2299-198X

Affiliation:

University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic Czechia

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Christopher E. Koy has taught in the English Department at the University of South Bohemia since 2006. His teaching interests include American literature, Irish literature and culture and academic writing. His essays have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as B.A.S. British and American Studies, Primerjalna književnost (Comparative Literature) and American and British Studies Annual. He edited of a special issue of Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture on the novels of Philip Roth (2015).

Vol. 17 No. 2 (2024)
Published: 2024-12-31

eISSN: 1991-2773

10.31261/RIAS

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Travel for the Dying: Ceauşescu’s Romania as Seen by Saul Bellow

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Christopher E. Koy

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