Fictions and Facts on the Mysticism of Land-Labor around World War I: the peasants'economy in the Romanian literature (a case study: Ion Agârbiceanu's rural prose)

A “quasi-mystical” understanding of our rural economy (which has always favored propagandist uses) is disseminated through a great number of literary works and political texts, which, before World War I, depict the Romanian village as a place of poverty, misery, abuse and crime. The peasants’ habits of labor and leisure get through to the readers as an architecture of infernal circles, while “rural” psychologies are the epitome of unconscious pulsations, of extreme,self-consuming and undetermined passions. In a nutshell, this literature enhances the view that the Romanian peasant can never be reasonable. A bulk of passions and a brutal body (so, a perfect subject of physical and spiritual toils), this type of man is quite unable to cooperate, to rationalize his labor efforts, thus to integrate his household economy within a higher and more complex economical mechanism, as the doctrinarians of the National Peasants’ Party claim. Invariably, we are introduced to an incessant and wearisome process of labor, whose aims – highly predetermined by an Orthodox mindset – are not to be found or expressed here on Earth, but in the afterlife. Yet, in the context of war dynamics, which brings about demographic mobility, technical input and mentality changes, the Romanian rural economy is substantially changed by the new distribution of land ownership. Observing pernicious phenomena such as property fragmentation and overcrowding of rural areas, economist Virgil Madgearu warns about issues such as labor efficiency and intensive exploitation of agricultural fields. Extremely sensitive to the labor’s ethic (which organizes both his biography and his characters’ fictional biographies) and to the small household’s economy, Ion Agârbiceanu is a writer who records, in a behaviorist fashion, the changes occurring in Transylvanian rural society after the great Union of 1918. His literature is extremely valuable for the way it catches the traits of Romania’s rural areas, especially in Transylvanian villages that are now permeated not only by new habits developed after the war (leisure activities, new types of speculations), but also by a way of conceiving and practicing politics that is coming from the new capital, Bucharest. As Ion Agârbiceanu attests, peasants have to understand not only the social function of land but also the importance of the new owners’ mentality in an emerging rural market