Mircea Vulcănescu, a special figure by mere presence alone

Of the last batch to arrive, they were all one and one, and the most special figure was Mircea Vulcănescu. He stood out not only because of his stature and poise, not only because of his exceptional erudition, but also just by his mere presence. After spending the night in December in a room with water on the floor and no place to lean, he was sick with a fever. He had been there with several others, all equally naked, suffering and afraid. Despite the hunger, cold, beatings and extreme fatigue, he still looked like he was willing to make concessions and understand others.

Wrapped up in his overcoat, he wore a faint but warm smile to try to ward off the cold.

Mr. Vulcănescu had been told in prison that he was like an encyclopaedia. In the first few days, he was in a lot of physical pain because he’d been kicked in the back, so he could only sit comfortably on his stomach. He was also really traumatised morally because they’d beaten him with their bats, like horse thieves. The guys in the room were pretty gentle with him and didn’t ask him any direct questions. But he picked up on this, and with his usual good nature, he started getting involved in the discussions that were going on, often making long speeches about philosophy, science or literature, which everyone in the room listened to. As a kind of vague reproach, but also as a bit of self-irony, he said one day: “I’ve reached the point where I can only speak in lectures.” 

Tăchiță Stamu, who’d just learned Baudelaire’s “Albatross”, said the last line in French: “Ses ailes de géant l’empechent de marcher“. Of course It was a mistake, and Tache tried to apologise, but Vulcănescu understood him so well that from then on he was very close to him. 

The two of them would chat for hours, trying to fill in the gaps in Tache’s intellectual education, which had begun with sheep herding or sheep turning. Tache explained to the scientist the technical details of milking, curdling curds or winterising sheep’s milk, which in Macedonian is called strigliati.

Even though it was tiring, Mircea Vulcănescu never hesitated to chat for hours on end to explain a problem in detail, whether that was answering a question or trying to build on someone else’s explanations. Timi Râmboiu, a second-year math student, was trying to explain to the younger students how an electronic calculator works. 

Then Mircea Vulcănescu stepped in and gave a detailed explanation of how Pascal, who made a counting machine to help his father, an accountant, invented the principle of adding up using cogs with a number of teeth. This principle was later improved by Leibnitz and Babbage, who made the first machine that worked on a program. 

In a smaller circle, one evening, until lights out, starting from an observation by Titi Stoica that he and Mircea Eliade were listening to Nae Ionescu’s lectures, he spoke about the discussions he had with Eliade after his return from India, about enriching the spirit through dialog. The younger people were trying to get him to talk by themselves, and they made sure not to ask him questions, especially in the morning when he could rest. 

In the afternoons, he’d sit with his back to the door or peephole, leaning against a pillar of the lower bad, and tell stories and answer questions. It was clear that this pleased him, not because he could talk, not because he was listened to attentively, but because he could offer something of his own to other eager, culture-hungry, and able young people.

One afternoon, Tache, in his childlike way, said that he, too, would like to know as much as possible so that he could speak up and be heard. Vulcănescu was kind enough to point out to him that the pleasure you get from a speech isn’t related to its quality, but only to pride. Speaking is hard work. It only gives self-satisfaction to people who are mediocre or inferior. The word is creative and creation is born of pain. It’s a natural law.

When it comes to speech, it’s best to go hand-in-hand with compassion and pity. A politician gives a speech, often full of promises, and is satisfied with it. It’s not because he’s told the truth, the only creator, but because he’s lied and it seems like people have believed him. Jesus Christ spoke to the crowds who followed him and listened to him, but he didn’t feel satisfied, he felt compassionate, the evangelist says. He had compassion on them and provided them with food, even multiplying the loaves and fish.

Since then, every speaker of the word has had to learn that the people listening to them need more than anything else to feel the compassion of the speaker. It’s not something that’s required of the people who just talk. They’re happy just to hear their own voice; it gives them enough satisfaction at the level they’re comfortable with. If they’re not engaged with the creative aspect of communication, they’ll remain as ineffective as communism.

Many of Mircea Vulcănescu’s words were later understood by young people.

Vulcănescu was lucky that he didn’t have too many people asking for information. There were ten of them in total, and they were all intellectuals of a high caliber. They had different backgrounds and approaches, but that made them all the more intriguing and engaging. The remaining time at 5 Bis was spent in some fascinating and informative discussions between Horia Cosmovici, a well-known lawyer and the main defence counsel in the Corneliu Codreanu trial, and Alexandru Constant, former deputy minister of culture. 

Despite also suffering the effects of the regime set up in Jilava by the Maromet-Ivănică partnership, which has been labelled “the most sinister couple of comedians of the absurd in the deadly comedy of communism”, they still managed to find time to discuss topics such as the Great Schism, which occurred almost a thousand years ago, the series of Protestantism’s end, the desacralization of the world through communisation and freemasonry, and, perhaps least appealing of all, the resurrection of Islam. Mircea Vulcănescu would rather stay out of these discussions. Maybe he had some doubts about Horia Cosmovici too, who’d converted to Catholicism under the influence of Monsignor Vladimir Ghica.

(Constantin Iorgulescu – Memory as an exercise in forgetting. Jilava, Vol. II, Crisserv Publishing House, Mediaș, 2002, pp. 170-174)