Oleg Serebrian intends to launch soon a new book – the novel “Woldemar”. This is a follow-up to the novel “Song of the Sea” and some of the previous characters can be found in the new book, after 33 years. “Writing a novel about children for adults is an ambitious task and I don’t know how well I managed to carry it out. The readers and critics will pronounce. I hope the readers will love Woldemar and this will have a very long life,” Oleg Serebrian stated in an interview for IPN.
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– This is a new novel. Can you tell us about its message? Who is Woldemar?
– The protagonist is a boy aged 7-8, the grandson of the main character of my previous novel “Song of the Sea” Marta Skawronski. In a way, “Woldemar” is a follow-up to the “Song of the Sea” and some of the characters from that novel can be found here, after 33 years. As in the “Song of the Sea”, this is an atmosphere novel as I try to paint the daily reality in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1970s, but the main theme is the early genesis of a complex personality that is much more different than those around. From this perspective, the text is provocative in parts and I did this not for “commercial reasons”, to launch a novel about which they talk or to follow the fashionable tendencies in contemporary prose writing. I wanted to test another type of “provocation”, which is docile and discreet and almost “innocent”.
The main narrator is Woldemar himself, who freshly graduated medicine at the Charite University of Berlin. He tells us about his childhood from the perspective of the year 1997, but one third of chapters are related by his grandmother Marta Skawronski.
Woldemar is the son of a famous pianist – the second daughter of Filip and Marta Skawronski, who left him in the care of her sister Iuliana and emigrated to Belgium when the boy was only four months. The abandonment and very difficult relations between him and his adoptive mother, as the relationship between her and her own mother, persist throughout the narration.
Iuliana, the head of a large forestry company in the Carpathian Mountains in Bucovina, is an eccentric woman with evident personality disorders that derive from a childhood traumatized by the years of Stalinist dictatorship. She lives with the feeling that her parents would have always preferred her sister Laura and treated her as a reject. The adoption of Woldemar seems to be a subtle act of revenge taking on her own sister. She loves the child because this was “abandoned” as she was, but never forgets that the boy is the son of her biggest rival. These two contradictory feelings coexist and confront each other permanently.
The crisis at the age of seven depicted in the novel is the crisis of the “social ego”. The atmosphere in which Woldemar grows is complex and unordinary, with many advantages and as many disadvantages. His grandparents are very cultivated and their apartment is an island of the interwar world, of what Cernăuți was once. He speaks several languages since a child, plays the piano, travels and reads a lot, but the nostalgic atmosphere in the grandparents’ house, their regrets and memories lead to the deformation of the sense of reality in boy Woldemar. As Marta admitted, Woldemar grew up involuntarily in the interwar world at a time when there was the Soviet Union outside. Not even the environment created by the family of his adoptive parents, at a forest canton in the Carpathian Mountains in Bucovina, offers only positive features: he lives relatively well and enjoys nature, but practically has no contact with other children. Iuliana protects through him all her ruined dreams and wants to see him achieving what she didn’t manage to achieve and aims to give him the attention of which she was striped, but does it incapably.
Woldemar meets with difficulties in understanding who his family member are, what his ethnic origin is and what his homeland is. There is a flagrant contraction between what he is told at home and what he learns at school and this makes him more confused and distrustful. His most serious problems are those related to social adaptation and accommodation to the world outside, whose existence is sometimes questioned. There is also the subject of “non-love”. He suspects that no one loves him truly and this makes him have many questions: why the people don’t love Romanians or Germans (he has Romanian-German-Ukrainian origins) or why girls are more loved than boys. The question he never asks, but that permanently bothers him is: “why did you create me if you don’t love me?”. Implicitly, he has a feeling of empathy for all those who are not loved, like him, dragons in fairytales or an oligophrenic girl classmate of his. The theme of non-love makes him have depressing questions about devil: “why did God create him if he knew it will be like this”. Boy Woldemar also has many questions about sexuality, which are normal for his age, but some of his preoccupations appeared too nearly, while others obviously too late. He started to realize the physiological differences between men and women only at the age of seven and learned how children are born only at the age of seven and a half.
Woldemar develops rather disproportionately. Intellectually, he is three years ahead of his mates, but in many regards he is one-two years late owing to that isolated existence and lack of contact with other children. He lacks the ability of having social contact and thus prefers to have an “illusory friend”, Peter Pan. This appears as a substitute of his friend and his brother whom he misses and wants to have. As any child at his age, he needed a friend, but had a confused understanding of what a friendship relationship is so that none of the candidates met the “ethical and esthetic” criteria for being a “real friend”. Implicitly, Woldemar becomes more attached to Peter Pan, whom he can model as he likes, according to his own expectations. The contact with the real world, at school, scares him. The reality is so strange that he finds refuge in books and invents the own worlds that he prefers to contemplate in solitude. The meetings with the real world make him be afraid of life and maturity. At one of the lessons he even confessed that he wanted to remain a child forever. A pathological sensitivity to time, which is a clear form of cronofobia, developed swiftly in him. “I lost my childhood when I understood what a second is,” he stated. The theme of time is recurrent: he counts his days, draws up sophisticated tables with hours. As Marta said, Woldemar permanently recorded his existence.
Writing a novel about children for adults is an ambitious task and I don’t know how well I managed to carry it out. The readers and critics will pronounce. I hope the readers will love Woldemar and this will have a very long life.
– Does the novel contain autobiographical elements or situations?
– The protagonist of the novel is very different from me as a personality. He lives in a different environment and has experiences that I didn’t have. For example, I had a very good relationship with classmates, both boys and girls, and with teachers and also different relations with my parents. There is only one situation related in the last chapter that comes from my own experience. There are also some small coincidences and that’s all. For example, the novel “Piter Pan” was the first book I read, but not at the age of seven, but at the age of eight. It was the favorite book of my early childhood. I read all the books mentioned in “Woldemar”, but at older ages. I also learned by heart some of the verses mentioned here, such as “Letter to Mother” by Yesenin, but at another age and in different circumstances. When I turned seven, I also received the portrait of Yesenin engraved in wood as a present, but it came from my father. I admit that this was a “deliberate parallel” because the novel was dedicated to my father and that portrait of Yesenin is still in my former room in the parental house. I was also born at 1pm as the hero of the novel, but he was born one year later and one day earlier than me. I spent my first spring vacation, as Woldemar, at my grandfather’s bother in Moscow and I also went there together with my grandmother. Woldemar likes football and admits that he never liked a team sport. I can say this about me too, but the sports of which Woldemar is fond weren’t close to me either. So, the coincidences stop here.
“Woldemar” is not an autobiographical novel and wasn’t inspired by own experiences, but I hope a lot that despite the complexity of the “case”, I managed to give birth to a credible or even “hyper-realistic” character.
– The launch is to take place in Bucharest on November 16, as part of the Gaudeamus fair. Why Romania? Why this event? Where and when can the readers from Chisinau buy the book?
– The Gaudeamus fair is the most important event of the kind in the Romanian language area. It is a very suitable occasion for launches. A lot of authors and literary critics from Romania, the Republic of Moldova and other countries gather together there. Surely I will stage several launches in the Republic of Moldova too and also in Cernăuți next year. I hope “Woldemar” will become available from the Cartier bookstores in Chisinau the coming days or definitely before the book fair of Bucharest. I don’t know the print run of the book, but I’m sure there will be enough books for everyone.
Elena Nistor, IPN
