In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.
Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,” he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.”
The enchantment with papilionoidean genitalia seems fitting. Blinding, Cărtărescu’s trilogy that critics voted Romania’s novel of the decade in 2010, is conceived as a butterfly in shape, with the first and third parts the wings and the middle book the body. In The Left Wing, the first volume which Penguin is publishing almost 30 years after it appeared in Romanian, there are butterflies fluttering on every other page. But they are rarely ethereal beings.
Part memoir, part dreamscape, one characteristically surreal scene sees a group of medieval villagers discover a swarm of gigantic butterflies frozen under the ice of the Danube river like woolly mammoths, 20 paces long and 40 paces wide. They marvel at the insects’ beauty – and then proceed to hack away the ice and boil them like lobsters, for a sumptuous feast.
“Nabokov was a fine artist, but he had fewer connections with fantastical literature and surrealism than I have,” says Cărtărescu in a video call from his flat in Bucharest. “The image of the huge butterflies under the ice of the Danube could have come from Salvador Dalí or from Giorgio de Chirico, artists with whose imagination I have always felt a kinship.”
The Blinding trilogy has been described as doing for Bucharest what James Joyce’s Ulysses did for Dublin, turning the author’s home city into a character in its own right, but it’s the kind of character one might discover engaged in some unspeakable act in the corner of a Bruegel painting. From his fifth-floor apartment overlooking the Ştefan cel Mare boulevard, Cărtărescu’s narrator fantasises about the city’s green bronze statues descending from their plinths to copulate with limestone gorgons. A tower block on Strada Uranus appears to him as “the city’s penis, red and erect”. These books are not love letters to his birthplace. “I took a stylistic and literary revenge against the people who stole my youth.”
* * *
Born on 1 June 1956, Cărtărescu grew up in a communist state within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, even if Romania’s status as a satellite state was notoriously non-docile. His father, the subject of the Swiftian third part of Blinding, played an active if minor role in the administration of the communist regime, and was devastated when the iron curtain came down in 1989. After hearing the news of president Nicolae Ceaușescu fleeing the country in a helicopter with his wife, Cărtărescu recalls: “He went to the kitchen and put his red party book on the fire. He was crying all the time because he believed in communism and now he saw that everything was a lie.”
Cărtărescu junior felt differently. As a young man, he was already a key figure of the beatnik-influenced cultural movement known as the “blue jeans generation”, who listened to Beatles records bootlegged in India and knew Allen Ginsberg’s Howl off by heart. “It was a tongue-in-cheek term: we all wore blue jeans, not original Wranglers but primitive blue jeans made in some cloth factory in Romania.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union felt for him like a liberation. “After the revolution I became a citizen of the universe,” he recalls. Though now based in Romania again, he has by his own estimate spent a third of his post-cold war life living abroad, and wrote only the first few pages of the Blinding trilogy in Bucharest. The rest of the 1,400-page work was completed over a period of 14 years in Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest and Stuttgart. His favourite butterfly, he tells me, is the monarch butterfly, because it migrates thousands of kilometres every year.
In recent years, his books have started to enjoy the universal status to which the author aspires. His novel Solenoid was longlisted for the International Booker this year; German news magazine Der Spiegel included The Left Wing in its list of the 100 best books in the world; a new translation of the work was also published in France this year.
The fact that he has been considered a serious contender for the Nobel prize in literature for the last 10 years may be a factor behind the revival: in 2023 and 2025 his odds with the bookies were 11/1, as promising as those of one of his other great idols, Thomas Pynchon. Is he tired of waiting for the call from the Swedish Academy?
“I never waited for a call,” he says. “I’m grateful to the people who consider me worthy of it, because to be seen as worthy of the Nobel prize, even if it’s only a rumour, is an absolute honour.”
This year’s win for László Krasznahorkai, from neighbouring Hungary, may have somewhat dented his chances: there may only be so much appetite among the Academy for another eastern European with a taste for apocalypse and travelling circuses. Then again, literature from the borderlands between Europe’s east and west is flourishing. Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and Bulgaria’s Georgi Gospodinov are not just admired by critics but fervently read. “I think you can talk today of a sort of a boom of eastern writers, which I’m very proud to be part of,” Cărtărescu says. “You could compare it with what happened in the 1960s and 70s with writers from Latin America like García Márquez, Vargas Llosa or Borges.”
What makes eastern European writing so fresh? “Many are absolutely non-commercial writers,” he says. “They never thought of making money or getting prizes; they were people who really loved literature. They are totally devoted to their art.”
* * *
Though critically acclaimed, Cărtărescu has never been entirely embraced by the literary establishment: earlier this year, Cărtărescu was controversially denied membership of the Romanian Academy by a single vote in its general assembly. One of the Academy’s elderly members said his work simply wasn’t up to scratch: “In Dostoevsky there are dozens of characters, in Thomas Mann there are dozens of characters”, Nicolae Breban told Romanian media. “In Mircea Cărtărescu there are three characters: daddy, mommy and Mircea.” He insists he is emphatically unfussed by the snub. “I was rather relieved that I didn’t make it at the end. I think I’m not fit for it – there’s nothing academic in myself.”
Yet for all his outsider status, there are distinctly Romanian aspects to his books. Their treatment of religion, for one. Like elsewhere across the eastern bloc, church activity was suppressed in Romania during the communist period. “When I was a kid we never went to church and we didn’t have a Bible in our home,” he recalls. “Up to the age of 30 I thought that the Bible was just a collection of sermons.”
But if some regions east of the iron curtain are now the most secular parts of Europe, such as the former East Germany, the Czech Republic and some of the Baltics, in Romania the church has roared back to life: according to the 2021 census, more than 73% of the population here identify as Orthodox Christian. “When someone first gave me a Bible, I was reluctant to look through it, but when I started reading I couldn’t stop. I noticed it wasn’t just a holy book but the greatest novel ever written. My whole mind was impregnated with the expressivity of the text, with the fantastic poetry of the prophets and the extraordinary parables of Jesus.”
One of the most striking scenes in The Left Wing is an epic, Avengers-esque battle between an army of angels with double-edged swords and a horde of horned and winged “cacodemons”, with the monsters eventually driven back into the dark by angelic psalms. “Religions are madness,” Cărtărescu writes, “and yet they are the only way, since they are the only way out of our world the mind can imagine.” Cărtărescu’s ambivalent relationship with his home country may be the most Romanian thing about him. Romania has the largest diaspora in the European Union, with 3.1 million Romanian citizens recorded as living in other EU countries in 2024. Yet at the tense re-run of the country’s presidential vote in May this year, a clear majority of these expats voted for a nativist, Maga-esque candidate.
“For some time, the diaspora were the most democratic and most advanced people, but to our huge surprise they turned completely against it,” he says. “They started to envy the Romanians who lived in Romania when they began earning more money than them abroad. They started to hate actually their own country so much that they wanted to destroy it.”
Still, he insists, Romanians have always been Europeans and will continue to be. “The date in 2007 when they became members of the EU was maybe the most important day in our history. Even if those fascist or extremist movements are very strong in Romania now, we hope that they will diminish.”
• Blinding: The Left Wing by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter, is published by Penguin Classics. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
