Why and who writes letters to Mihai Eminescu’s Lover in over a century? Does the man choose the poem or does the poem choose the man? How can we see ourselves with our eyes, but from aside? Are the Moldovans a controversial nation hunted by chimeras and errors? Why haven’t the Moldavans found yet a political and geopolitical benchmark and how long will our wandering still last? How long will the ‘Transnistrization’ of Transnistria last and how are Moldovan unionism and unionists perceived from a distance? One can learn about these and other profound things in an interview given to Valeriu Vasilică by Vadim Bachinski, writer and journalist from Odesa who is naive of the Republic of Moldova.
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- Vadim, hi! I do not use to treat my interlocutors informally, notwithstanding their age, but I think we will both feel uncomfortably if we address each other formally after knowing each other since common student life. It’s true that we didn’t see each other after graduation, but I follow your poems that I intuitively, without much special training, consider ones of the best in our area and this is the first of the reasons of our interview.
The truth is IPN News Agency would like to get your consent to have a part of your older and future poems published on our new website that will appear soon. This way we would like to somehow humanize the “News Home” that “volens-nolens” has exact rules and structures that are sometimes even rigid. We would like to offer our readers, in the same space, the other perspective of life, the lyrical one.
On the Romanian version of our website, we will publish a part of the verses included in the manuscript of placket “Letters to Veronica” that was prepared for printing, while on the Russian version several translations into the Russian language. I presume you don’t yet have poems translated into English, for example.
For readers from other countries who speak other languages, I will specify that “Letters to Veronica” was inspired by the correspondence and life of the two great lovers of the nation - Poet Mihai Eminescu and his Big Love Veronica Micle. For those from home, please tell us why do you believe in poems and why should others believe in them? What are our nation’s relations with poetry?
- Not I believe in poems and not I am their master. They are above me and they probably believe in me. When I was in Moldova, and after I moved to Odessa, there were years, even dozens of years, when I wrote no verse. During the past three-four years, I finished several manuscripts as I collected hundreds of poems. I would not risk to pronounces on others and poetry. There are others who can do it. Our nation and poetry? I don’t know. We are a nation hunted by so many controversies, chimeras and errors.
As to the given manuscript, it contains about 100 poems, approximately 20 of which are imaginary letters to Veronica. These are poems about love and the destiny of the poem and the poet, from the past and from the present, about the man’s purpose on earth.
- Another reason for the interview is the fact that you turn 60 tomorrow. Half of these years you didn’t life in the Republic of Moldova. I yet know you are sufficiently interested in what is happening here at local and national levels. That’s why I would ask you to help us look at us with our eyes, but from aside, if this is possible. I think a man who writes so profound poems can see the others things in profoundness too. I have many unclear things that bother me here, at home.
One of them is: You left home in the period of great sociopolitical turbulences in Moldova, at the end of the 1990s. Where were we heading for then and where did we get to?
- There were serious manipulations of KGB type then too, at the start of the sovereignty of the Republic of Moldova. The weight of the fable about the People’s Front alone is rather significant. Similar manipulations exist nowadays. There were then personalities from among intellectuals who speculated on the ideals of independence and obtained strictly personal benefits. There are now such personalities too, from among bandits and mafia clans. Then and now too, the crowd plays the role of a flock that is going in the direction indicated by the shepherd. In essence, I think nothing changed and everything remained stagnant, no matter what the appearances are. The provinces like the one between the Nistru and the Prut, situated on the border between civilizations (Europe and Asia). cannot have another destiny than that of buffer zone kept to play this role and engaged by the big powers in geopolitical games.
- Another one: Where do the oscillations in the political preferences of Moldovans, who haven’t yet found a benchmark to understand what they want from the political class, every one-two electoral cycles come from and where can these take us?
- I think these all come from identity uncertainty and chaos first of all. They speak about national interests. And what is the nation? Moldovan? National awards are offered at the highest level. There is a Romanian nation of which the Moldovan Bessarabians form part. We should start from here to bring things if not to normality, at least to something that lacks fakes and makeup.
- The same question, but about the geopolitical oscillations of Moldovans between the East and the West?
- This is a very dangerous dilemma. The East remains Communist, Stalinist in its essence. The West? We see what the European Union did of Romania even if it pumped billions of euros in it. The country is managed by criminals and does not actually belong to itself. Illusions appear in fact. Those who choose the East, do it because when they were part of the East (in the USSR), they were young and the sausage was cheap, while a loaf of bread cost only 16 kopeks. Something like this no longer exists. Those who now see themselves in the West prefer not to notice such processes as certain turning of Europe into Islamic land and clear demolition of moral values there, especially of those related to the traditional family. We like to speak about European values and standards. This is also an illusion. Current Europe belongs to multinational corporations, not to Europeans, and double standards prevail there actually.
- As you live in a region that faces and continues to face the danger of ‘Transnistrization’, what do you think happens and will happen to the Transnistrian issue and the people in that region?
- The Transnistrian conflict remains topical, especially after Putin created one more Transnistria in Lugansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine. The fire will be moldering in both of those places. Moscow will stir things up whenever it needs it and none of the great powers of the world will seriously dare to face the Kremlin for the sake of these territories.
- What do you think about our unionism and unionists (Moldova’s union with Romania, e.n.)?
- I don’t see personalities able to reunify the Romanian countries among them. I see only leaders of parties, movements, platforms and others, astute persons who now “focus on projects”. I see duplicitous persons who lack vigor. I even see pitiful, pale and anemic beings. I see no meritorious personalities. They are not convincing in what they do. It seems that they don’t have enough energy. I probably think so because the Union cannot be a business. In my opinion, the union is first of all an act of morality, to put it this way. In Chisinau, we have a number of sorts of unionist and some of these are not even unionists and this dispersion is false, I think. It is fatal already as the people become increasingly disoriented, disappointed. The unionism kitchen in Chisinau now looks more like the split of the national renaissance movement at the start of the post-Soviet sovereignty of the Republic of Moldova. This is absolutely evident.
- What do you think about the current political situation in the Republic of Moldova and the results of the upcoming parliamentary elections?
- I don’t know what to think. A firm solidary opposition is needed, consisting of honest people with pure moral principles. These could probably demolish the oligarchic, mafia system step by step.
- Why aren’t the Moldovans like Germans in such issues as respect for the law and order and cleanness in public areas and what should be done for these to be so?
- I think this is a matter related to culture, to education and to century-old traditions.
- A particular nation needed 40 years of wandering to become what it is now. The 27 years of independence form part of such a wandering period and 13 more years remained or this cannot be applied to Moldovans? How will you native village Recești look like in ten years, for example?
- The place of the current Republic of Moldova is surely in Romania. But current Romania, as I said, is ruled by criminals. It is a country with the most important branches of the destroyed economy, with sold land, a part of which to foreigners, with natural resources captured also by foreigners, with national values that are annihilated in parts, with an Eminescu whom many hate and criticize. What future can the Republic of Moldova have in such a Romania? This is the question. For Bessarabians, the wandering can last for more than 40 years. Surely, if a planetary disaster does not bring earth to an end.
My village Recești is a depopulated locality without a school and a house of culture. It has only a church for burying the dead ones in a Christian way. There are fewer dead people there. In ten years my village could look deplorably.
In another development, I would like to thank you for asking an interview from me. It probably happens something under this sky if we met in 40 years and had this dialogue starting with “Letters to Veronica”. I thank you sincerely and wish you good luck in what you do!
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IPN note:
Vadim Bachinski was born in Recești village, currently in Șoldănești district, on November 1, 1958. Since 1987 he has lived in Odessa town. Ukraine. A journalist and a writer, he graduated from the State University of Chisinau, the Faculty of Journalism, in 1980. He is a member of the Writers Union of Moldova and a laurate of the Award of the International Forum of Romanian Journalists (2014) and of the Poetry Festival “Ion Vatamanu or the Apple’s Morning" (Chisinau, 2015). He is the author of ten book titles (poems, history, journalism). Among his last issues are the poetry books “Elegies from the outskirts of Recești" (Tipo Moldova Publishing House, Iași, 2015) and “Requiem for Frumușica" ("Armanis" Publishing House, Sibiu, 2016).
