The directory «Plots»

Dumitriu Petru
(1924—2002)

Petru Dumitriu was Romanian writer. Theologians are stern guardians of their own views on faith and dogma, and are often the most daunting and inhuman of religious interpreters. In his great, self-questioning book Au Dieu inconnu (1979, To the Unknown God), the Romanian dissident writer Petru Dumitriu quotes a Viennese coffee-house philosopher: "Theology is the first step towards atheism." Later, he describes as a devil the theologian who forgets to pardon, to humble himself, to bow his head before others, to confess "I do not know" – and, above all, to shut up. He was born in 1924 in the small Danubian village of Bazias, and started writing essays in French at the age of 13. During the Second World War he studied philosophy in Germany. On his return to Romania, he became part of the movement of Socialist Realism and his writings received many awards of merit. He became a reporter, founded a review, and was elevated to be head of a state publishing house, though he remained a Communist without a party card. Utterly disillusioned by the Iron Curtain regimes and the Iron Guard's atrocities, he fled to the West, where he lived from 1960, and where he composed his remarkable 1962 novel, Incognito (published in Britain in 1978). Then, suffering from the spiritual depressions and pressures of exile and an alien culture, he stopped writing around 1969. His great self-confession, the result of over 10 years of silence, with its Nietzschean title To the Unknown God. In it, he meditates deeply upon the nature of God, and on the possibility of belief in a God who never responds to his appeals for help. He writes in a vigorous shapely style, rich with philosophical allusions and illuminating quotations from his vast reading, all presented with easy scholarship, and interspersed with brutally comic scenes from his childhood on the family farm. His five chapters on the nature of evil are among the finest ever written on this intractable theme.

Rumania, 1957, «Pasărea furtunii» («The Bird of the Storm»)