INSULA HUMANITAS

Insula Humanitas NICOLAE ODAGIU

1989 -

Whilst the other Communist satellite states are passing through a pacifist Velvet Revolution, Romania is facing a bloody Revolution which culminates with the trial and execution of the Ceaușescu family on Christmas day. These events layered the base of what Romania is today. Shortly after, the entire state had to be reformed in order to permit the liberal ideas and concepts of democracy and capitalism to pass through. Along with this, the political and economic apparatus of the state had to be reformed, an ambiguous process which was slowed down due to power struggles and political crises along the way to design Romania as we know it today. Besides the steps that had to be taken into consolidating the new state, the first Prime-Minister, Petre Roman, was interested in reconstructing Romania culturally due to the consequences of decades worth of communist propaganda, Ceausescu’s personality cult, and ideology. As a result, in the first cabinet of ministers, Walter Roman proposed Andrei Pleșu for the candidacy of the Minister of Culture. Pleșu, who until the Revolution spent his time in exile in Tescani, due to his implications in the Transcendental Movement, (for which he was excluded from the communist party in 1983), found himself in front of a significant task that required a subtle and professional approach. The main accomplishments of his office, were the conversion of the Museum of Romanian’s Communist Party to Peasant Museum, marking a return and an awakening of the national consciousness, as well as the metamorphosis of the main propaganda organ to a publishing house known as Humanitas. Andrei Pleșu, writer, philosopher and anthropologist, proposed Gabriel Liiceanu, another influential and fundamental philosopher that Romania has to offer, and one of Pleșu’s closest friends, the candidacy for this new publishing house. Interestingly enough, the office of this ideological institution, which resembles the imposing Stalinist architecture of the Lomonosov University, was called Scânteia (Kindle) from the name of the main Newspaper of the Communist Party. The chosen name for the publishing house, Humanitas, was not aleatory. Liiceanu, who translated Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in Romanian found the name for the publishing house in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”, where he discusses the translation of paideia through humanitas for homo romanus, which means eruditio et institutio in bonas artes or cultivation and formation of virtues. Once Liiceanu took charge of the entire process of reviving the arts, a genuinely luminous kindle appeared. Liiceanu, in one of his latest interviews, talks about the difficulties of resetting such an institution with all of its employees who only had experience with editing politicized texts in favour of the Communist Party. The main objective of the publishing house, Humanitas, was to publish authors that were censored, banned and exiled during Ceausescu’s regime. Authors like Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, Eugene Ionescu, Monica Lovinescu, Andrei Pleșu, Mircea Cărtărescu and many more were published in Romania for the first time. “The Pitești Phenomenon” by Virgil Ierunca caused an astonishing stir, being a book centred on the victims of the re-education and brainwashing torture that the enemies of the regime had to pass through in the Pitești prison. Humanitas gave value and projected, as through a prism, waves of lights upon everything that had been classified as abjection crimes, lies, duplicity, and betrayal for decades. It became the emblem of a collective moral recovery, said Liiceanu. Furthermore, he emphasized the never-ending lines of people looking for these books once they were published in the early 90s. As he expressed himself, the drought in the fields of literature and arts made itself felt as the thirst for knowledge was observed. Insula (The Island) Humanitas – this is how Liiceanu presents 30 years’ worth of hard work in his latest book with the same title, which presents a nostalgic retrospective in the steps that had to be taken for Humanitas to stand with pride on the position that it has today. Insula as in island or also as in the small part deeply located within our brains with cognitive functions? In the daily functioning of our brains, the insula is responsible for our self-awareness, perception of pain, love, emotions, enjoyment, and everything else that is connected to our perceptions. Perhaps Humanitas is responsible for such neurotic synapses and sparks on a higher level. Today envy arises from multiple publishing houses which are striving to achieve such a considerable weight and significance – all of this at the benefit of the reader. In 2020, thirty years later after the privatisation of this political publishing house and its magnificent reorientation, it is wrong to talk about Humanitas as just an ordinary publishing house. Today one of its main bookshops, Libraria Humanitas Cișmigiu represents a veritable book salon, a launching ramp for new authors and a room for discussion. It is a cultural institution, an island of light which actively promotes good literature. Until today, almost 3000 titles and more than 30 million books have been published and lately it aims to publishing even more and in other languages too. It is widely called an alternative pillar to the Ministry of Education due to its significant importance in the cultural life.

“Humanitas gave value and projected, as through a prism, waves of lights upon everything that had been classified as abjection crimes,...”