Turning death into fulfilment

Dinu Pillat (1921-1975), son of the poet Ion Pillat and great-grandson of the Brătians, is an important author of novels, monographs and literary studies, among which those on Ion Barbu and Dostoevsky remain a reference. Ion Pillat’s mother, Maria, was one of the seven children of I.C. Brătianu, the historian who fought for the unification of the Principalities and the accession to the throne of Al. I. Cuza (1856), Carol of Hohenzolern, who became the king who laid the foundations of modern Romania, supported the start of the war against the Turks in 1877, which led to the country’s independence.

From 1945 to 1947, Dinu Pillat was George Călinescu’s assistant at the Department of the History of Romanian Literature. At the same time, he prepared his doctoral thesis on his father’s work, as a supreme sign of filial love and intellectual admiration. But times were becoming increasingly difficult and Dinu Pillat was removed from his chair. Soon the same thing happened to his teacher. Years of misery followed, during which the Pillat family survived by selling the valuables they had inherited from their parents – books, jewellery, furniture, clothes – in the Bucharest butcher’s shop. In her memoirs, “Eternal Return” (published by Du Style in 1996), his wife, Cornelia, dutifully records Dinu’s feverish waiting in front of the stall, his stalking of buyers and his desperate efforts to maintain his dignified, seemingly carefree appearance. At that time, he was still allowed to work at the Institute of Literary History, of which Călinescu was the director (and which now bears his name). The young scholar’s religious beliefs were well known, which confused his colleagues. One of them said: “How can a man as intelligent as Dinu Pillat believe in God?” The relationship between master and pupil seemed good until one day… Cornelia remembers: “Dinu told me, wrapping the gravity of the facts in his fine gestures, how, when he met the professor at the Institute, he began to rage, accusing him of reactionaryism, of his hostility to communist cultural directives, of his interest in the Hungarian Revolution (…). I knew then that it was Dinu’s turn to be arrested, and that is why G. Călinescu had disowned him”. (op. The accusations were manifold: the fact that he had commented, together with Alexandru Paleologu and Ion Caraion, on Radu Gyr’s poems, written in prison and circulated as real manifestos; the “hostile” discussions in the Noica group; the fact that he had written the novel “Waiting for the Last Hour”, inspired by the Legionary movement; and, last but not least, the simple fact that he was the son of the poet Ion Pillat, a landowner with anti-Communist views. On 1 March 1960, Dinu Pillat was sentenced to 25 years’ hard labour, 10 years’ deprivation of civil rights and confiscation of property for sedition, and 15 years’ hard labour for treason. Cornelia Pillat also lost her job at the Institute of Art History. When she tried to protest, she was told that she had only been demoted, while the wife of Păstorel Teodoreanu, also convicted in the Noica trial, swept the pavements. Păstorel was condemned solely for his ironic jokes against the regime.

As soon as he was imprisoned, the young scholar was tortured to extract false statements that would incriminate other intellectuals. One day, when he was thrown into his cell, covered in blood and with broken teeth, Dinu felt that Jesus was beside him and embraced him. From that moment on, his suffering seemed lighter. When he was released, Dinu was a changed man. His confessions show that he was only interested in values related to faith. He was a good and forgiving person. Freshly returned to the institute after an absence of 5 years and 7 months, he wrote a letter to his teacher, G. Călinescu (10 October 1964): “I confess that I felt particularly moved to return to the familiar surroundings, to meet again some of the colleagues with whom I had once begun to form a family around you. But when the meeting was opened, when we were all seated around the table, I suddenly felt a great intellectual emptiness. You were no longer there to animate everything, to keep us in a state of mental tension, to make us live the passionate adventure of thinking. Everything now seemed dull, bland, conventional, flat, mediocre… and I understood once again how great and overwhelming you are, above all the pretentious mediocrity of contemporaneity. And once again I missed you terribly”. Here is an example of admiration, forgiving fraternity and assumed Christianity from a man who paid dearly for imaginary wines. After his agonising death (this time from cancer), his faithful and loving wife remained to record his life, his aspirations and his faith, saying to herself: “If I do not make Dinu’s death a fulfilment, I do not deserve the suffering I have been given”. But she did.

(Camelia Leonte – Light Newspaper)