Alexandru Mironescu – an admirable figure

A complex, honest and generous man. An admirable figure. Although he had a scientific background, he was a poet, novelist, theatre critic, essayist, publicist and memoirist. He began as an atheist of the French school and ended as an Orthodox mystic. He made socialist politics, but he saw a moral-Christian socialism and so was a white crow among socialists.

He participated intensively in the Burning Bush movement, for which he was also condemned. He spent five years in prison as a swordsman. His philokalic poems, still unpublished, will occupy a special place in literature.

After his release, he remained uncompromised. He believed in God and practised the prayer of the heart, but he was doubled by a man of intellectual rigour, achieving a balanced and harmonious demeanour.

– The communists were finished, he said.

– But how? I asked him.

– Well, the socialists in the West will have to do something.

– That’s a double naivety, I said. The Communists are full of enthusiasm, and the Western socialists will suffer the fate of the Romanian socialists.

– Lazy, he said. You’re a pessimist. You’ve suffered too much, can’t you see that there are no more communists?

– There are no communists of faith, but there are political communists, obsessed with unbridled power and aware of the effectiveness of the Marxist-Leninist system.

– I may not live, but you will see how this bloated bubble of Marxism-Leninism succumbs!

He was politically naive.

Before he died of cancer, he said: “I go serenely to the next life. I don’t doubt its existence, but I’m being careful, like in a laboratory, to see how it will be!

He ended serenely, lucidly, full of love and wisdom.

(John Ianolide – Return to Christ. Document for a New World, Bonifaciu Publishing House, Bucharest, 2012, pp. 311-312)