The supreme Euphuism: Death as a Biedermeier Allegory.

A mid-19th Century Romanian Case

CAIUS DOBRESCU

First published in an 1852 collection of folk poems printed in Iaşi, back then
the capital of the Ottoman-ruled autonomous principality of Moldova, the ballad
Miori a was blessed, in time, with a flabbergasting cultural career. The title, quite
literally, is the diminutive form for “young female sheep”, and has been translated
in English as “The Ewe” or “The Ewe Lamb”.
What makes this product of the allegedly popular Romanian imagination so
eccentric was the fact that, from the point of view of its narrative structure, it is so
unexpectedly imperfect, that it can hardly be called a ballad at all. In a nutshell,
Miori a is a pastoral drama implying the criminal plot of two shepherds, identified
by their provinces of origin, Vrancea (approximately: East of the Carpathians
curve) and Transylvania, against their Moldovan peer, much better endowed ac-
cording to the standards of their millennial trade. The potential victim is warned by
one of his sheep, the magic ewe mentioned in the title of the poem.
Up to this point, everything stays within the limits of a traditional ballad,
which currently admits fantastic superimpositions, such as the interference of a su-
pernatural „helper”.1 The unexpected occurs in the last part of the poem, which turns
from the epic to the lyrical. Instead of experiencing a basic male confrontation, the
reader is confronted with the soliloquy of the endangered shepherd, a melancholy
monolog which contains the extended allegory of death presented under the guise of
a cosmic wedding. As for the epic development, the best that could be said about it is
that it vanishes without a trace. As curious as it may seem, Miori a is an unlikely
sample of completely open-ended folk epic poetry.
In the course of an intensive nation-building process, the folklore specialists of
the newly proclaimed independent Kingdom of Romania – 1881 – (which resulted
from the unification of Wallachia and Moldova) brought to the fore a large number of
variations of Miori a spread all over the territories inhabited by Romanian ethnics.2
This area included, for instance, the province of Transylvania, then part of the Aus-
trian-Hungarian empire, and territories south of the Danube where dwelled the so-
called Macedo-Romanians, a population speaking a Romance idiom described by the
academic authorities of the „motherland” as a dialect of the Romanian language.
1
Propp 1968.
2
Fochi 1964.
 In other words, the wide interest for Miori a was an effect of the cultural
policies directed at shaping a pan-Romanian sense of identity. The replication of
the same themes and motives throughout the rich and diverse traditional poetry of
rural communities spread over a rather large geographical area. The slightly modi-
fied histories were enthusiastically greeted as an indication of a deep-structure eth-
nic homogeneity.3 As the wide majority of East-European and Balkan nations
emerging in the 19th century, the Romanians (to be precise, not the illiterate peasant
masses, but the modernizing nationalist elites) also searched in their rural traditions
the symbolic resources of a political legitimacy that couldn’t be construed through
the elements of recorded history. Since not much of what counted as high culture in
medieval times could satisfy their need for European prestige, the modernizing el-
ites of the area felt compelled to turn towards the previously ignored or despised
ethnic folklore, in order to build a millennial „grand narrative”4 exposing the antiq-
uity, unity, durability, and irreducible specificity of their nations.5
Despite the context of being an open-end ballad, Miori a sky-rocketed to the
status of an emblem of the Romanian spirit. Even if the theme of the poem was some-
thing as seminal as death, this was not heroic death, at least not in an explicit form.
This aspect may be disconcerting, provided that it seems commonsensical that heroic
death is part of an effective national epos. But such a judgment ignores the fact that
heroism was subordinated, within the compound of 19th century nationalism, which
merged energetic voluntarism with Christian humanitarianism, to the symbolic sphere
of the sacrificial.6 The apparently pacifist myth of the shepherd facing death with an air
of pantheistic apathy was to be perceived as denotative of an attitude of latent martyr-
dom. A symbolism which could accommodate, in the imagination of the Romanian
generation that was heading towards World War I, a sense of national pride with a
slight tinge of fin-de-siècle heroic decadence. It is important to remember that this was
a generation that grew up with the model of the national poet, Mihai Eminescu (1850-
1889), who, in his major works, combined, in a rather Wagnerian manner, a revival of
medieval heroics with radical philosophical pessimism.7
The aftermath of WW I brought to the Kingdom of Romania not only the
provinces of Banat, Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, but also a new gen-
eration of intellectuals with a radical, even if hardly coherent, sense of mission.
Their interest in Miori a was fueled by the intuitionist, vitalist, Dyonisian cultural
fashion of the epoch. The most important moment in the philosophical distillation
of the myth is the elaboration, by Lucian Blaga (1895-1961), of the concept of
„spa iu mioritic”, mioritical space, a category meant to express the sum of space-time

3
Densusianu 1893.
4
Lyottard 1979.
5
Sugar 1995.
6
Zamoyski 2000.
7
Dobrescu 2004.

261
transcendental determinations thought to have molded over the ages the Romanian col-
lective mind.8 But Blaga’s philosophy, which could be seen as the metaphysical pa-
nache of the intense integrationist policies of the 1920s and 1930s, did not have much
to do with the central thanatic theme of the ballad. This was, instead, very prominent in
the messianic ideology of the “League of the Archangel Michael”.
Within this ultra-radical milieu, the thanatic content of Miori a was put to the
highest use. The extreme ethno-Christian-Orthodox ideology of this trend was centered
on the cult of martyrdom, of the transfiguring and revelatory powers of death, some-
how reminding of the contemporary Islamist suicide bombers. According to this strand
of apocalyptic hermeneutics, the comprehensive attitude towards death in Miori a,
which in the meanwhile had become the nation’s representative folk myth, was seen as
an anticipation of the role asserted by divine Providence to the Romanians in a univer-
sal scheme of salvation from the moral collapse of secular modernity.9
At the more academic and rational end of this generational infatuation, Miori a
was associated with the general interest of the inter-war epoch for the survival, in
modern guise, of archaic mind forms, of ritualism and animism, of initiatory sacra-
ments. The most elaborate expression of this search can be found in the work of
Mircea Eliade (1919-1986), an exile Romanian scholar who, after World War II,
founded the famous chair for the history of religions of the University of Chicago.
Eliade tested his theories on the fear of death as phenomenological quintessence of
religious experiences on Miori a and lent his prestige to the idea that the ballad pre-
serves some spectacular elements of the pastoral sacrificial rites of archaic ages.10 A
perspective that seemed to encourage the inclusion of this poem, next to, say, the
Stonehenge complex, in the very core of European Neolithic heritage.
In Romania, after the Stalinist phase of the local communism, Miori a was
restored to the forefront of Romanian symbolic identity, as part of a more general
nationalist revival. Under the new circumstances, much of the energy of its phi-
losophic interpretations went to arguing that it did not express a state of morbid
paralysis in the face of death, but, on the contrary, a moral vigor and a sense of
cosmic confidence, which rhymed with the compulsory optimism of the national-
ist-Communist ideology of the Ceauşescu era. On the other hand, Miori a was
highly praised as a proof of the ancientness of the Romanian people and of its ex-
ceptional cultural identity, within official forms of worship that fused together an
exorbitant cult of the supreme ruler with mass rituals of ethnic self-idolatry.11
Another line of evolution of the Miori a theme connects it to the spirit of the
counterculture of 1960s, with its blend of environmentalism, fascination for old
esoteric practices, and belief in the inherent innocence of archaic cultures and

8
Blaga 1944.
9
Oişteanu 2002.
10
Eliade 1970.
11
Klingman 1988.

262
communities. Romanian artistic and intellectual milieus profoundly resented this
influence. Actually, they revived the inter-war theories of the Romanian spirit as a
cultural synthesis between the West and the East, but from a new perspective, in-
fused by the Buddhist rock-and-roll culture tolerated by the Communist rulers as a
side-effect of the cold war relaxation of the mid-1960s. This evolution created the
background for a new interest in the archaic authenticity attributed to Miori a.
This epoch of relative liberalization allowed the outside world to get a
glimpse into the Romanian mythical mind. W.D. Snodgrass, the renowned Ameri-
can author and 1960 laureate of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, discovered the envi-
ronmentalist-esoteric call of the ballad and provided the beautiful English transla-
tion we will constantly refer to in this paper (a cultural achievement that did not go
unnoticed by the Ceauşescu regime, which, in 1977, offered him the Centennial
Medal of Romania).12 Later on, the archaic poeticity of Miori a and its integrative
cosmic attitude was praised by the Romanian born American neo-Avant-garde au-
thor Andrei Codrescu.13
The present paper is not meant to spoil the game of those interested in experi-
encing the esoteric and archaic strata of Miori a. But it decidedly states that this is not
the only, or the most interesting perspective of looking at this ballad. By closely con-
sidering the conditions of its emergence into the Romanian urban/urbane culture of the
19th century, we could discern a kind of European relevance that has, until now, con-
stantly gone unnoticed. In order to do this, we have to start from the fact that, unlike the
philosophers and the doctrinaires that took the poem at face value, as a direct and un-
problematic expression of the Romanian mind and spirit, the professional cultural an-
thropologists repeatedly warned that the standard form under which the story of the
magic ewe became famous was the product of Romantic dilletanti, with no scientific
scruples regarding the data of field research. Such cautious and non-ideological inves-
tigations showed that none of the attested popular recorded variants of Miori a could be
said to overlap with the poem made famous by the 1852 anthology.14
The main assumption of the present paper is that we should move from read-
ing Miori a almost exclusively against its archaic pastoral background, towards a
more attentive scrutiny of the personalities of the original collectors of the ballad.
Then, we should further investigate into the values and spirit of the social milieu of
which they were a part. The collection of ballads and folksongs that represented the
launching pad of the Miori a myth is the work of Vasile Alecsandri (1818-1890),
the most influential poet of the 1848 generation. But reliable historians of literature
established that the discovery as such of the ballad and maybe even its first elabo-
ration was due to Alecsandri’s friend, Alecu Russo (1819-1859), a less vocal public

12
Snodgrass 1980.
13
Codrescu 1990.
14
Amzulescu 1975; Pop & Rux ndoiu 1978.

263
intellectual, nevertheless noted for its essays alternating sharp social irony with
dreamlike personal intimations.15
Beyond the quarrel of the experts with respect to the contribution of each of
the two friends to the final version of the poem, of interest for the present inquiry is
that both Alecsandri and Russo belonged to the same social group and shared not
only political and aesthetic ideas, but also a common cultural code. Actually, they
were both offspring of the Moldavian social elite. During the period of their some-
what erratic university studies, Russo, in Switzerland and Austria, and Alecsandri,
in France, acquired the distinct mental characteristics of the European revolution-
ary intelligentsia. However, in a manner typical of the spirit of their whole Molda-
vian generation didn’t break in any radical way with the attitudes and values of
their conservative genitors.
This might count as especially surprising if we take into account that this
group of young, educated members of the high upper-class is credited with having
sponsored ideologically and politically the upsurges of 1848 in the Ottoman Da-
nube Principalities. This attribution seems more plausible for the Wallachian
branch of the generation, who managed to conquer political power and hold it for a
couple of months, but even in Wallachia, with scarce exceptions, the influence of
French messianic liberalism did not force a profound generational gap, at least not
one even remotely comparable with the graphic self-hate of the contemporary Rus-
sian radical intelligentsia of aristocratic origins.16
Often enough, the vendetta-like modernization conflicts of Wallachia opposed
not the old and the new generation, but groups of interests rooted in the tradition of
medieval feuds between the boyar families, which activated strong transgenerational
loyalties (e.g. the eventual Hindu- or Pakistani-like permanentization of the Br tianu
dynasty at the head of the Wallachia-based National-Liberal Party, actually up to the
Communist overtake of 1947). In Moldavia, the tendency towards social-cultural com-
pliance of the young generation of the mid-1800s was even more evident. Vasile Alec-
sandri himself, in his influential comedies, ridiculed not so much the conservative
mind, as the side-effects of the hasty Westernization of Moldavian social life.
Even if the emancipatory ideology of the Western-educated generations was
theoretically incompatible with the dominant political cultural of the Danube Prin-
cipalities, the private domain of personal interaction represented a field of pre-
dominantly benevolent social interaction. This process of comprehensive interrela-
tion did not imply a nativist conservative perspective and an internationalist civili-
zational commitment. The two mindsets that interfered were far more complex. On
the one hand, there was the old-style cosmopolitanism of social elites that were
partaking in the Greek network of cultural, economic and political power permeat-
15
Faifer 1979/b, p. 759.
16
Ivianski 1988, p. 129-149.

264
ing the Ottoman world-empire (with important extensions towards all the major
European cities, which all hosted active colonies of Greek expatriates). This culture
was a historical blend of the refinements of Byzantine court manners (which, of all
the Christian lands dominated by the Turks, survived only in the autonomous Mol-
davia and Wallachia) and the cosmopolitan experience of the post-Byzantine
Greek-Ottoman commercial elites.17
On the other hand, there was the modern European cosmopolitanism,
brought into the Danubian Principalities by a generation of Western-educated local
aristocrats. This was a rather complex mindset itself, apparently rooted in the
Enlightenment rationalistic universalism, filtered through the Romantic taste for
local color, but, in fact, coming from a long gradual blend of courtier-aristocratic
and bourgeois-commercial sociability.18
Consequently, the benevolent ambiguity generated by the interference of this
two registers of cosmopolitanism within the social network of the Moldavian-
Wallachian elites amounted to what we could call the „velvet revolution” of Ro-
manian modernization during the second half of the 19th century. This process is
the first background against which we will situate the selection and stylization of
Miori a as an expression of the Romanian high-culture of the early 1850s. It is im-
portant to note that almost from the beginning of his long career, Vasile Alecsandri
postured as a public poet, but one who, after a short infatuation with hard-line de-
mocratic radicalism, cautiously avoided being perceived as „public” in the sense of
partisanship, and sought, consistently and with remarkable success, a status equiva-
lent to the British „poet laureate”. Which means that he explicitly acted on the
premises that his work should be socially cohesive.
The 1852 anthology of folksongs represented a similar attempt of self-
justification as a poet capable of assembling the educated public around an ideal rep-
resentation of the national character. The almost ostentatious decoupling of death, as
a metaphysical theme, from the representation of heroic violence, the strategy under-
taken in his version of Miori a, is particularly relevant for Alecsandri’s self-styling as
a herald of civility and civilization. The ballad was meant to function as the pastoral
disguise of a socially cohesive ethos of benevolence capable of imposing the cultured
containment of domination instincts and conflict of interests. Actually, Alecsandri
dramatized, under poetic garments that could be perceived as ethnic and traditional,
an allegedly modern gentlemanly attitude towards death, which implied the presence
of mild heroics and an aura of personal elegance.
In order to better understand the manners and psyche of the social group to
which Alecsandri belonged we have to understand that, through a Westernization
which was often initiated at a very early age, being dispensed, for both sexes, by
17
Zakythnos 1976.
18
Dobrescu 2001.

265
private professors of Western European origin, it was intimately inserted in a pan-
European network of bourgeois private sociability.19 The emotional culture of the
mid-19th century was mainly the result of an accelerated diffusion of a life-style
and social mentality that in Germany was named after a character invented in 1855
by Adolf Kussmaul and Ludwig Eichrodt, the good-natured but somehow narrow-
minded Bavarian petty bourgeois Gottlieb Biedermeier.20
Radical cultural critics and historians have traditionally used the label Biedermeier
in a sarcastic turn of mind, intimately connected with Heinrich Heine’s notion of
Spießbürger, meaning philistine bourgeois. However, contemporary scholars have used
the concept as a neutral, purely descriptive denominator of a state of mind that prevailed
everywhere in Europe, beginning with the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars.21 The speci-
ficity of the Biedermeier spirit resulted out of an intersection between, on the one hand,
the intensification of a drive towards non-violence, mutual benevolence and mild man-
ners in the family and social life of the European literate elites, and, on the other hand, an
evolution of the artistic tastes and intellectual attitudes that the Romanian-American cul-
tural historian Virgil Nemoianu has called “the taming of Romanticism”. In Nemoianu’s
view, the wave of revolutionary and esoteric utopianism of the so-called High Romanti-
cism is followed by a counter-wave of sentimental social compliance and reclusion into a
protective and evermore comfortable and sophisticated privacy characteristic for the
Biedermeier Romanticism.22
The notion of Biedermeier culture tries to seize the chemistry developed be-
tween what Judith Shklar once called a “liberalism of fear”23, an ethos grounded not
in ideal and heroic dispositions of the soul, but in a modest and pragmatic effort of
consistently avoiding cruelty, and what might be perceived as a dilution of the Ro-
mantic secular mystique and apocalyptic expectations into patriotic and sentimental
mannerisms. The “dilution” theory is characteristic for the radical trend of social
criticism born at the mid-19th century, which ostentatiously refused the civility con-
sensus and accused the rising bourgeoisie of a conspiracy against the ideals of lib-
erty, equality and fraternity.24 The artists that joined this radical line of argument

19
Ionescu 2001.
20
Nemoianu 1998, p. 9.
21
As for the upper limit of this cultural epoch, there is a wide variaton of opinion among specialists.
The German tradition considers that this limit is established by the 1850s raise of literary and intellec-
tual trends inspired by the evolutionsit breakthroughs of the biological sciences. But more flexible
interpretations accept that from this point of view there is no discernable synchronism between the
different European cultures, and that the new Realism or even burgeoning Naturalism can often be
contained within a moderate Romantic worldview, so that in many cases the upper limit of the
Bidermeier epoch could be pushed towards the 1870s.
22
Nemoianu 1998, p. 5-61.
23
Shklar.
24
Seigel 1986.

266
added to the usual anti-bourgeois claims the charge of what in our days will come to
be termed “the commoditization of art”. Mainstream painting, architecture, music or
literature were blamed for their lack of emancipatory content, for their aesthetics of
menial harmony allegedly intended to hide the consequences of class privilege.25
Less ideologically prone cultural historians argued that this type of culture
had its own complexity, subtlety and depth. A perfunctory judgment is not more
possible or acceptable with respect to a consensual, meliorist, prudent, evolutionary
(as opposed to a revolutionary) type of attitude than it is for any other relatively
cohesive historically consecrated cultural frame of mind, be it ancient, medieval or
early modern. It has been argued, for instance, that the sophisticated and highly
protective social and intellectual environment of Biedermeier Romanticism repre-
sented, in many respects, the seminal bed of the fin-de-siècle aestheticism.26
The profile and heritage of the Biedermeier epoch remains, of course, open to
scientific debate, but in the present context we will use this notion not in a judg-
mental, but in a descriptive, value-free manner. Once we have made this point clear,
it is of real interest to notice the paradox that the period we have approximated as the
age of mildly mannered bourgeois benevolence is marked by a political outburst of
European scope and import: the revolutions of 1848. This incongruity between what
we have depicted, up to this point, as a kind of democratization of cultured sociabil-
ity and the reality of radical political events is dealt with explicitly by Virgil
Nemoianu. In his understanding, the very propagation of politically minded pro-
grams of social and institutional change is an expression of the alteration of the
original High Romanticism, who aimed not at a restricted, criteria-bound social
transformation, but at a form of spiritual liberation.27
This form of emancipatory enthusiasm, with a tamed core of refined socia-
bility, was also the spirit of the collectors of Miori a (Vasile Alecsandri and, alleg-
edly, Alecu Russo), and the public who read it, as we shall see, as an epiphany of
its cultured „better self”. For the Romanian social stratum who was in the process
of affirming its civilized identity, (which, at the middle of the 1800s, necessarily
commanded a Biedermeier-like refinement of feelings and manners), dealing in the
proper manner with the basic theme of death represented a cornerstone of its spiri-
tual upgrade. But before focusing on the last segment of the present essay, which
directly touches on the theme of death, it is important to add two more elements to
the cultural background that we configured up to this point.
On the one hand, we have to stress again the deep insertion of the Romanian so-
cial elite, few as they were as contrasted against the bulk of the local peasant popula-
tion, into the mid-19th century civilizational network. This could be difficult to con-

25
Graña, 1964.
26
Callinicos 1989, p. 64.
27
Nemoianu 1998, p. 25.

267
ceive considering the dominant Western stereotypes of the Balkans, which construe
this area as the land of unredeemable barbarianism.28 But the fact is that the young
Romanian urbanites of the mid-19th century had already lived in a small but rather
compact Biedermeier universe, with a cultural feeling centered on Romantic comfort,
compassion, and tenderness: a sociability tissue that developed simultaneously with the
expansion of an ideology of liberal reform. But, as previously seen, the ambiguity that
encompassed the decorum of Biedermeier emotions and a sense of liberal and democ-
ratic fervor could be encountered all over Europe.
The second observation is that despite the fact that the Westernized urban el-
ites of mid-19th century Moldavia and Wallachia were not actually alienated from
their conservative parents, they were nevertheless quite distanced from the tradi-
tional culture of local rural communities. In spite of their nationalist infatuation,
their understanding of local folk culture was very limited. Actually, they looked at
their rural co-nationals through the bucolic perspective of Western Biedermeier
Romanticism, being attracted not by the possible revelation of archaic myths and
rituals (as it would have been the case, provided they had borrowed a High Roman-
tic emotional pattern), but by what could be construed as ornamental and pictur-
esque. In a nutshell, we could say that the spirit of Vasile Alecsandri’s investiga-
tion into the poetry of his peasant countrymen was very close to that of contempo-
rary British tourists coming to Romania to witness the preservation of a pre-
technological “rural lifestyle”.
It is therefore understandable that, in spite of the folk furbishing of Miori a,
the interpretation of its central theme and motives belongs not to an archaic pastoral
culture, but to the Biedermeier sensitivity of its educated and urbane author.

All the phases of our discussion up to this point have actually served as a
preparation for approaching the core theme of Miori a, a poem that we have seen
as a lyrical symptom not of the quintessential Romanian ethnicity, but of the habits
of the heart of Romanian Westernizing elites of the mid-19th century. This theme
represents the obvious reason for including the present essay in a collection of
thanatological studies. As it is clear even from the most oblique reading of the
poem, the main concern both of its alleged popular author, and (which is far more
consequential for the present analysis) of its modern interpreter(s) is death, as a
personal, social and cosmic event; a fact which places the poem among the quite
rare European creations from all the walks of the Biedermeier fine arts and letters
with a dominant and elaborate thanatic imagination.
This doesn’t mean that death was completely and intentionally absent from
the regular artistic communication of the epoch, but it should be noted that the

28
Todorova 1997.

268
treatment of this theme was strictly confined to sentimental Christianity, classical
allegory, and sacrificial nationalism with a medieval tinge.29 It is difficult to speak
of thanatic Biedermeier representations outside this rhetorical sphere. The reason
for this scarcity is that, being dominated by gracious feelings, wit, miniaturization,
mannerisms, and an all-pervasive domestic decorum, the Biedermeier spirit is gen-
erally based on the consensus of obnubilating all, or most of the aggressive, sordid,
or painful aspects of human existence. This is not simply a side-effect of “tamed
Romanticism”, but the consequence of a long-term process of softening the social
mores, implying a gradual removing or reduction of physical violence and physical
pain from the public sphere.
This is a process that could be traced back into the 18th century tendency to-
wards avoiding violent scenes, (even explicit images of the Passion of Christ), in
public display of religious representations.30 During the second half of the 18th cen-
tury, the public punishment by torture of criminal offenders completely disappeared,
and at the beginning of the 19th century, death sentences in general were not carried
out in public any more.31 Modern medical policies were as effective in rationally cir-
cumscribing and obscuring the most shocking expressions of the pathological degra-
dation of the human body as was the modern public and family education in the con-
tinuous obnubilation of the natural degradation of corpses.
These cultural processes were the expression of a new state of mind which
looked upon the sensitivity of the soul and the outspoken manifestation of compas-
sion not as weaknesses, but as cardinal moral virtues. The responsibility for this
evolution has been asserted to different causes. According to a famous theory be-
longing to German social historian Norbert Elias, the general mildening of the
moral climate of bourgeois Europe was a consequence of the long term diffusion of
the values and rules of the aristocratic courtier culture.32 Others have taken into
account the intellectual influence of the Enlightenment awe and despise for all the
forms in which brutality and violence supplanted the allegedly genuine rationality
and benevolence of natural human interplay.33 The more pragmatic-minded have
argued on the positive influence of the growth of industrial capitalism, with its
corolary of commodities and domestic facilities, and of the breakthroughs of the
modern medical sciences on an ever-increasing middle-class and on significant
parts of the urban working class.34 Finally, from the field of political sciences came
the theory of the democratization wave that affected 1848 Europe and a large part

29
Čelebonović 1982.
30
Pomeau 1969; Gay 1995, p. 343-351.
31
Foucault 1975.
32
Elias 1994.
33
Gay 1995.
34
Fourastié & Fourastié 1973.

269
of its former or actual colonies, contributing to a global diffusion of egalitarian and
humanitarian values.35
But however debatable the origins of this historical processes are, there seems
to be no significant doubt among historians that, throughout the 19th century, in spite
of some revolutionary interludes, the dominant tendency of the literate classes was to
shift the focus of their existence from the public towards the domestic realm. A realm
that was perceived as being blessed with all the modern comfort and with the refine-
ment of manners and emotions.36 It is from these sanctuaries of privacy that a sense
of philanthropic humanitarianism was extended over the public sphere, mainly
through the agency of the press, of the public system of education and, last but not
least, through the ever more popular Biedermeier fiction and fine arts.
The impact of this new sensitivity can best be measured against the amplitude
and intensity of the counteractions it generated. From the political radicals came the
accusation that the bourgeois claim to universal human sympathy was only a disguise
for the most aggressive egoistic acquisitiveness.37 The emerging, still largely intui-
tive biological evolutionism was extrapolated over the social world, and translated
into the anxiety that, once humanitarian principles triumphed over the natural adapta-
tive and selective mechanisms of society, the way was cleared for the irreversible
degeneration of man as a species.38 Last but not least, dissenting artists were counter-
ing what they resented as the phony mild Romanticism of the dominant social psyche
with what will come to be called the “aesthetics of ugliness”.39
However, as already suggested, these fringe contestations were part of a so-
cial and cultural unfolding that had at its core a domestic utopia of gracious self-
containment, of spontaneous interpersonal harmony, of tenderness and comfort,
both ambient and moral. It is understandable that death had a very small place, if at
all, in this cast of mind and sensibility. The characteristic rhetorical figure of this
universe of temperate passions and caring dispositions was the euphuism. Actually,
euphuism was more than a figurative means, more than a rhetorical instrument; it
was the epitome of the Biedermeier ethos – an ethos that comes to an original and
sophisticated allegorical expression in Alecsandri’s Miori a.

It is obvious that the pace of social reform and change of values was not the
same in Western as in Eastern Europe or, for that matter, in the Balkans. Yet it is
equally obvious for any specialist of the latter areas that they have not been left un-
touched by the social and cultural evolutions described above. Even in the Ottoman

35
Huntington 1991.
36
Williams 1995, p. 312; Sennett 1996.
37
Billington 1980.
38
Nye 1985, p. 49-71.
39
Shattuck 1968.

270
Empire, the Westernizing elites were importing, in the sphere of private social rela-
tions, much of the tamed Romanticism that seemed to express the spirit of modern
civility.40 In the process of opening the Ottoman Empire to the influence of the
Western world, the Danubian principalities have been playing a strategic role, all
along the 18th century. During this period of time, they were ruled by Greek Istanbul-
born princes who, with the tacit sponsoring of the Grand Porte, experienced different
legal and institutional reforms ranging from a certain rationalization of the taxation
system to reducing the physical brutality of judicial penalties.41
The Ottoman Empire was not the only one to turn Moldavia and Wallachia
into the testing ground of more humane institutional arrangements. During the
1830s Russian occupation of the area, under the guarantee of all the other European
powers, embryonic deliberative structures were created in both Moldavia and Wal-
lachia, which in time came to be seen as the origins of a local constitutional and
parliamentary tradition. This historical picture expresses a softening of the legal
mores, which, in the private and domestic realm, was closely paralleled by the in-
troduction of Western bourgeois forms of benevolent sociability.
An interesting side of the matter, that opens the gate to vast speculations in the
field of cultural anthropology, is whether the assimilation of this style of benign do-
mestic privacy and social interaction was somehow stimulated by the surviving tradi-
tion of the Byzantine symphonia, frequently evoked with respect to the mutual com-
mitment to harmony of Church and state, but which, in fact, expressed a much
broader ideal of communal sympathy somehow reminding of today’s “corporate cul-
ture”. Of course that, even if convincingly argued, this fact would not alter the evi-
dence that the Moldavian and Wallachian societies couldn’t display a convincing
equivalent of the European standards of rationality and civility. But it is also a fact
that the social and economic backwardness did not prevent the urban and educated
local elites from undergoing a rather thorough Biedermeier refashioning.42 It is not
only poetry that stands for this turn of sensitivity, there are also the taste for inner
decoration of domestic habitats, the interest in Western clothing fashions, the lan-
guage of the private epistles, the rules of politeness, the nature and style of gender
relationships.43 And, last but definitely not least, the way of looking at death.
This is where Vasile Alecsandri re-enters the stage. Alecsandri was the most
praised poet of the new generation of local Moldavian-Wallachian elites, first of all
because, in everything he wrote, in his comedies and dramas, in his novellas, in his
travelogues or in his poetry, which included his very personal stylizations of folk-
songs and ballads, he embodied an ideal of moderate dandyism, lighthearted social

40
Ahmad 1993.
41
Zakythnos 1976.
42
Manolescu 1990, p. 167-171.
43
Ionescu 2007.

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philanthropy, and genuine sentimentalism. Alecsandri’s lyrics managed to strike a
very sensitive cord in the soul of the social groups that articulated the public opin-
ion during the second half of the 19th century. That is to say that he captured the
emotional beat of the emancipated boyars, but also of the burgeoning urban
classes, the administrative clerics, the public intellectuals, and, what was of for his
prodigious posterity, of the educators.
It should have become obvious by now that the 1852 folksongs collection
could in no way be separated from the didactic and sentimental artistic philosophy
of the poet, and that the folk lyrics on which Alecsandri elaborated were, in the
end, completely severed from their original cultural background and turned into the
carriers of the moments’ sentimental urbanity. The dominant funeral theme in
Miori a cannot be seen as an opportunity of communication, at the deepest level of
human metaphysical anxiety, between an archaic pastoral society and a modern
culture, of feeling and emotion, but rather as the marker of the profound internali-
zation, of the Romanian educated classes of the epoch, not only of Biedermeier
emotional dispositions and Biedermeier lifestyle, but also of a rather articulated
Biedermeier worldview.
We have stated above that at the core of the 1850s sociability lies the rheto-
ric device of the euphuism. We have also noticed that, for the radical enemies of
the 1850s social consensus, euphuization was a clear indication of moral decay, a
sort of ostrich policy which intimately blended fraudulent and manipulative politi-
cal intentions with a sentimental propension for self-delusion. The main claim of
the present essay is that Alecsandri’s Miori a, a representative emblem of European
Biedermeierism, since it touches in an elaborate and original manner on the most
profound thematic level of literature and art, the thanatic one, could also count as a
test-case for the genuineness of the Biedermeier ethos.
We will dispute that an attentive contextual reading of the poem raises the ques-
tion of the moral significance of a discourse which, taken at face value, obviously
counts as both delusion and self-delusion. It is so because the story of the menaced
shepherd and of his magical ewe could be easily construed as being about avoiding the
evidence of death. Especially since what is in question is not natural death, which could
have been successfully contained within a Biedermeier combination of more or less
artificially appeased religious and rational convictions regarding the overall harmony
of the universe. Nor is it a heroic, sacrificial death, which could also have been con-
tained within a comforting Biedermeier nationalist rhetoric. The theme of the ballad is
violent and accidental death, which affects not a person who has gone full sway in
terms of a social and biological destiny, but a human being whose existential prospects
are supposed to be annihilated in a sudden and brutal manner. Violent and accidental
death (accidental reads here as “improbable” and “unforeseeable”) should theoretically
represent the absolute limit of the Biedermeier euphuization capacity.

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 At a psychological level, which must be taken into consideration since we
are speaking not about a rural ritualized culture, but about the mind of a social
group who highly valued emotional life, the apathetic reaction of the shepherd
counts not as stoic self-containment, but rather as the manifestation of a profound
fear that makes the consciousness incapable of dealing directly with the sudden
revelation of death. In a genuine pastoral society, the directions that the shepherd
gives for the fulfillment of his own funeral rites (“There, beside me lay / One small
pipe of beech / With its soft, sweet speech, / One small pipe of bone / With its lov-
ing tone, / One of elderwood, / Fiery-tongued and good”), would indicate the exer-
cise of mental habits culturally patterned so as to avoid personal anxieties and to
counter physical fear. But this was the case of neither Alecsandri, nor his reading
public, whose threshold of resistance to emotional stress and physical pain was, in
all certainty, that of modern urbanites. It is more likely that, from a Biedermeier
perspective, transmuting an explicit threat of physical eviction into metaphorical
symmetries, poetic ritual and allegoric narrative is rather expressive of an almost
instinctive avoidance of a traumatizing emotion.
If we considered death as the psychological theme of Miori a, we could ex-
plain why the attraction for the poem increased with its next generations of readers,
who experienced the gradual extinction of the Biedermeier sense of harmony and
satisfaction and the progressive instauration of what fin-de-siècle moralists and
psychological scientists liked to diagnose as an era of “nervous anxiety”.44 But, at
the middle of the 19th century, educated Romanians were still largely unaffected by
the mal du siècle and did not experience death as a diffuse and continuous threat of
dissolution from within – as “nervousness” could be described in a nutshell. It is
likely that their violent death anxiety would have rather been part and parcel of
their distinctly Biedermeier revulsion against everything perceived as insensitive,
distasteful, or non-hygienic.
But let us consider now death not as a semantic assembly point of uncon-
scious or unarticulated impulses, but as an explicit concern of the poem. Let us try
to understand Alecsandri’s “corrected” ballad from the intentional perspective of
death treated as an ethical theme. Considered from this perspective, the problem-
atic core of the poem lies with the meaning that could be asserted, or that could be
reasonably presumed, that the author and his contemporary audience asserted to the
central euphuism of Miori a, the allegory that turns death into a cosmic wedding.
This allegory is exposed in its entirety in the medial segment of the poem, where
the shepherd makes provisions with respect to how his herd should be spared the
terrifying news of his extinction: “How I met my death, / Tell them not a breath; /
Say I could not tarry, / I have gone to marry / A princess - my bride / Is the whole

44
Gay 1984.

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