Lena Constante

22 juillet 2008

Lena Constante, Roumanian artist, essayist and memoirist, known for her work in stage design and tapestry, was born in Bucharest, daughter of an Aromanian journalist (immigrated from Macedonia) and his Roumanian wife, in 1909. Her family's peregrinations during the First World War took her to Iasi, Odessa, London and Paris. She returned to Romania after the war and studied painting at the Royal Art Academy in Bucharest. During this period, she became sympathetic to left-wing politics and joined the sociological project initiated by Dimitrie Gusti, aiding in the creation of comprehensive monographs on traditional Romanian society; her visits to various villages acquainted her with traditional folk art with which she was fascinated, especially religious icons, which she later used as inspiration in her work.

After 1945, she was employed as a stage designer by the newly-founded Ţăndărică Theater, where she met Elena Pătrăşcanu, Lucreţiu's wife. In early 1946, when Pătrăşcanu, who was Romania's Minister of Justice, decided to go against the will of his party and intervened in the standoff between King Michael I and the Petru Groza executive (greva regală – "the royal strike"), she mediated between him and two well-known anti-communist figures Victor Rădulescu-Pogoneanu and Grigore Niculescu-Buzeşti, in an attempt to ensure their support for a political compromise.

Together with many others, she was implicated in Pătrăşcanu's 1954 trial, and sentenced to twelve years in prison on trumped up charges, on the initiative of none other than the Securitate deputy chief Alexandru Nicolschi. During repeated interrogations by the Securitate, Lena Constante tried to fend off false accusations of "Titoism" and "treason", but, the victim of constant beatings and torture (much of her hair was torn from the roots), and confronted with Zilber's testimony which implicated her, she eventually gave in to the charges.

Throughout the rest of her life, she maintained a highly critical view of Zilber, and expressed her admiration for Pătrăşcanu, who had for long resisted pressures and had been executed in the end.As she stated in 2004, "I did not know him too well. It was not..... him that I went to jail. Neither was it because of Mrs. Elena Pătrăşcanu. His friend, Belu Zilber, made us go to jail, me and my husband. Zilber was never pleased with all the things he kept inventing in his confessions and he would concoct some stuff that aimed to please the interrogators. To please Gheorghiu-Dej."

For much of her time in prison, Constante was kept in virtually complete solitude, a special regime which she later attributed to her earlier refusal to confess. Repeatedly beaten and again tortured during her stay in special prisons for women, she much later confessed that she was never able to forgive the people responsible for her plight. She was freed in 1962, before the end of her sentence, due to an amnesty; in 1963, she married Brauner, also released. They both were rehabilitated during Nicolae Ceauşescu's campaign of reviewing Romania's history under Gheorghiu-Dej (1968).

Lena Constante pubished two books of prison memoires. The first one, Silent Escape, was written in French and published in 1990 by La Découverte Publishing House and compared to the works of Marguerite Buber-Neumann. It received the ADELF Award, as well as the literature Lucian Blaga Award from the Romanian Academy. The book was translated into English by Philip Franklin and was launched in 1995 by the University of California Press. The second volume, Impossible Escape: The Political Prison For Women, Miercurea Ciuc, 1957-1961, came out in 1993. In 1997, Constante starred as herself in Nebunia Capetelor, a film by Thomas Ciulei based on The Silent Escape; Ciulei had originally intended to cast Maia Morgenstern as Constante, but ultimately decided to pay a special tribute to the book's theme ("I wanted to force the spectator to build himself an imaginary space, as Lena Constante had done when she was in her cell").