Tag: writer Max Blecher

  • Writer Max Blecher

    Writer Max Blecher

    Rediscovered quite recently by literary critics and readers, writer
    Max Blecher holds pride of place thanks to the value of his work. Born in
    September 1909 in Roman (northeastern Romania), Blecher had a tragic destiny.
    At only 19 he was diagnosed with bone tuberculosis called Pott’s disease. As a
    consequence of this incurable disease, the writer was bedridden for the rest of
    his life, which ended in 1938 when he was only 29. The experience of his life,
    spent mostly in sanatoriums in the country and abroad appears in the novels
    published during his lifetime such as Adventures in Immediate Irreality translated into English by
    Michael Henry Heim in 2015 and Scarred Hearts as well as in posthumous works
    such as The Lit-Up Burrow: Sanatorium Journal.


    The name of Max Blecher was well known in the
    literary societies of the time. He made his debut in 1930 in the publication
    entitled Bilete de Papagal led by poet Tudor Arghezi. His writing was
    associated with the avant-garde movement. Although bedridden due to his
    disease, and sometimes at hundreds of kilometers away from Romania, Max Blecher published a lot of books, both poetry and prose, and was
    in touch with many Romanian and foreign cultural personalities such as Geo
    Bogza, Ilarie Voronca and Saşa Pană, and the French Andre Breton and Andre Gide.
    His suffering, which his readers were aware of, marked the way in which his
    books were perceived. Today many questions have arisen related to the extent to
    which Blecher’s tragic destiny influenced the perception of his works by
    critics and writers alike, the extent to which his writings are only
    autobiographical or are more than that. University lecturer Doris Mironescu is
    the author of the book The life of Max Blecher. Against Biography in which he
    tries to offer some answers.


    Doris Mironescu: Blecher’s books are partly autobiographical, they are
    journals he kept inside and outside sanatoriums. But this autobiographical side
    has been changed a lot and turned into something else. To a certain extent
    there is some emotional identification with the author, and this could somehow
    influence a reader’s choice. But that is not enough. Identification with an
    author cannot replace the value of a work. The biographical story could help an
    author, to a certain extent, in the sense that it could attract readers from
    all epochs on his or her side. This is what happened to Max Blecher. The
    critics in the inter-war period who wrote in favor of Blecher had the
    impression that they did an act of justice. The same happened in the 1970s,
    when Blecher’s works were re-published.
    Romanian critics are trying to recuperate Blecher. They are all trying
    to save Blecher from the aggression of oblivion in which his works had fallen
    for about 30 years and which had deprived the Romanian literature of a great
    writer.


    The main characters in Max Blecher’s books, which appear as alter
    egos of the author, seem to perceive reality from the perspective of illness,
    but that perception is not corrupted by pathology. On the contrary, it is
    extremely original and independent of the author’s disease. Blecher, like
    Emanuel, the character in his book Scarred
    Hearts loves life in spite of his illness, says Marieva Ionescu, one of the
    recent editors of Blecher’s work.


    Marieva Ionescu: The narrator’s perspective in
    Blecher’s novels is very minute. He sees everything through a poet’s eye. Emanuel, the character in the book ‘Scarred Hearts’ is very attentive to everything that happens
    around him: objects, people, his own body, his sensations, or nature. At first,
    he looks at the sanatorium world from the perspective of a stranger, then he
    slowly starts to identify himself with the other patients.


    Max Blecher also tried to get involved in the
    social and political issues of his time, to the extent his illness allowed it., as University lecturerDoris Mironescu told us:

    Blecher participated in the
    political life of his time. This aspect is present to a lesser extent in his
    books, but you can find it in his correspondence or the articles published in
    various magazines. The new information that appeared about Blecher is quite
    vast and it gives us a slightly corrected image of him, maybe less pure than we
    wanted to believe. Blecher was a man of his epoch.


    The involvement of Max Blecher in his epoch’s
    problems was dramatized into a film directed by Radu Jude in 2016, a film that
    was inspired by his book Scarred Hearts. Foreign readers can read Max
    Blecher’s books in their English, French, Italian and Polish translations.