The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

by Matei Calinescu, Breon Mitchell (Translator), Norman Manea (Introduction), Adriana Calinescu (Translator)

Overview

A new translation of the only novel by lauded Romanian literary critic Matei Călinescu

An NYRB Classics Original

It was the late 1950s and the Communist regime of Romania was at its most punitively unforgiving when Matei Calinescu, who had just graduated from the University of Bucharest, conceived of Zacharias Lichter. “I must create a myth,” he jotted in his diary, “and become its hero—that’s my idea! . . . [A] Judeo-German metaphysician, descended as if from the XVIIIth century (or that’s how he likes to think of himself) [who talks] about responsibility, about a dialogue of purity with God, about perplexity facing the void.” In the following years, Zacharias Lichter— madman, fool, philosopher, and the weirdest of rebels without a cause—would come to life in Calinescu’s fictional account of his life and opinions, a book written for his private amusement since he assumed the censors would never permit its publication. He was wrong about that, however. The censors were completely oblivious to the subversive humor and intent of his book, which became a cult classic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681371955
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	03/20/2018
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Matei Calinescu (1934–2009) was a literary critic and professor of comparative literature at Indiana University. Born and educated in Bucharest, he immigrated to the United States in 1973. He wrote several works of nonfiction, including Five Faces of Modernity and Rereading, and was a Guggenheim fellow (1976) and Woodrow Wilson Center fellow (1995–96).

Breon Mitchell is a scholar and translator of several works by various authors, including The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, and The Silent Angel by Heinrich Böll. He is a professor emeritus of Germanic studies and comparative literature at Indiana University.

Adriana Calinescu is the Thomas T. Solley curator emerita of ancient art at Indiana University's Eskenazi Museum of Art. She has written widely on the subject of ancient art and is the editor of Ancient Jewelry and Archaeology. Her translation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the standard text in Romania.

Norman Manea has written numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the acclaimed memoir The Hooligan’s Return and the novel The Lair. He has been awarded several prestigious literary prizes, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Guadalajara International Book Fair’s (FIL) 2016 Literature in Romance Languages Award. He is Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Editorial Reviews

"A literary jewel of eccentricity seen as an ethical provocation, which created an unforgettable shock at a time when the mental stereotype imposed by the dictatorship was dimly trying to find the first slits for a breakthrough....The writer summons, in an artistic undertaking that is ever vigorous and vibrant, the fundamental questions of existence, the ephemeral and the transcendent stimulating each other in a dynamic exchange of energy, with original and seductive accords of lasting resonance." —Norman Manea

"For students of Iron Curtain-era Eastern European letters, a lost treasure." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2017-12-24
A once-subversive, picaresque life of an imagined philosopher who speaks in torrents and trades in absurdity.Given history, it's unfortunate that Calinescu, a Romanian novelist who published this book in 1969 and then spent his later years as an expatriate in Indiana, should have decided that his Romanian-German-Jewish protagonist, Zacharias Lichter, be "so ludicrously ugly he produces a strong impression on even the indifferent observer"—and with a "peerless Semitic nose" to boot. Lichter may be hideous and ill-dressed (to convey, Calinescu ventures, the Platonic ideal of poverty), but he is also exuberant and irrepressible, given to waving his hands around wildly while putting the finer points on arguments that are blunt-force weapons. Where Kierkegaard spoke of the elevated triad of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres, for instance, Lichter intones that the proper hierarchy for our day is "circus—madness—perplexity." That fits because, he adds, all people are clowns, if delayed in their recognition of their essential clownness; moreover, he later holds, "words no longer mean anything," they "are mere vehicles of a reality beyond signifiers." Lichter would be as goofy as Vonnegut's Bokonon, a kind of pastiche iek, if Calinescu did not invest in his philosophy a commitment to human freedom, and for this reason it's easy to see why the book should have been a favorite of Romanian dissidents on its publication in 1969, a dozen or so years after Calinescu began writing the tales of his antiheroical philosopher. Sometimes Calinescu/Lichter is wonderfully prescient, prefiguring Susan Sontag when he writes that in our era "a kind of a debased religion of health, of ‘normality,' has been created, obsessed with the problem of illness." Mostly, though, the free-wheeling Lichter, who sometimes delivers his pronouncements in indifferent poetry, lives up to what an acolyte and apprentice of his calls "a pedagogy of beguilement."For students of Iron Curtain-era Eastern European letters, a lost treasure.

Kirkus Review