Life in Jassy
Posted on UTC 2025-02-01 08:00
Heloise in her 'Family Notes' leaves us with an impression of her miserable life in Jassy, far away (a 12-day coach journey) from the joys of Vienna, the imperial capital, far from her family and friends there, far from her beloved Grillparzer.
The first months of my marriage were the unhappiest and saddest of my life. Had I not loved my Alexander so deeply, I would have died of my distress. My health was already so weakened and my appearance so awful that my husband trembled for me.
Moldavia/Romania was a rural backwater, even more priest-ridden than Vienna, that was only just discovering the modern world. Most of the ordinary people she would encounter, such as her inlaws, spoke only Rumanian. The educated classes would speak her languages, German or French. The 'Family Notes' does not spare us her shock and isolation as a stranger in a strange land.
On the whole, the memoir Heloise wrote for her son Alexander is a distressingly sad work. If we just read the 'Family Notes' at face value we would be left dispirited by the shock of her transfer from the bright lights of Vienna to the rural twilight of Jassy.
For five years, apart from the occasional ray of good fortune, her life is a sequence of painful pregnancies, stillbirth and ailing and dead infants. Her death comes after another difficult pregnancy.
Highlights are restricted to the arrival of babies, usually followed shortly afterwards by setbacks and disasters of one sort or another.
Anyone who read this document without further reflection would put it down in a haze of dark thoughts about her life and the hard times in which she lived.
But does this tale of misery really reflect her life in Jassy? Was her life there really a concatenation of pain and disaster until her own death, in yet another childbirth?
The rustic backwater
It has to be said, though, that Heloise's first impression of Jassy and environs as a rustic backwater, at least in comparison to Vienna, was quite correct. Since the beginning of the last millennium the eastern edge of the empire has been divided up into regions such Transylvania, Moldavia, Bukovina, Wallachia and Bessarabia, which were dissolved, overrun, merged or reinstated.
Russians, Hungarians, Bulgars, Goths, Mongols, Greeks, Ottoman Turks and of course the Hapsburgs all staked their claims at various times to various bits and left their marks.
At the beginning of the 19th century there was no Romania as we now know it. The territory we now call Romania only began to settle down into some form of normal statehood by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Politically, the region was on the fault lines between four great tectonic plates: the Hapsburg, the Russian, the Greek and the Ottoman Empires (with occasional interventions by the French). It was also on the religious fault lines between the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Ottoman Mohammedans. A series of battles along these faultlines would play their part in keeping western Europe Christian and preventing its fall to the encroaching Mohammedan hordes.
These are the conditions of turmoil in which feudal societies flourish – territorial ownership bound together by obligations of agriculture and mutual defence. An industrial revolution cannot take place under such conditions, lacking capital, security and an urban, educated population.
Thus, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the region was, in comparison to the nations of Western Europe, extremely backward. It was a feudal and agrarian society that had experienced no trace of the industrial revolution.

Moldo-Wallachian peasantry, 1853 Image: The Illustrated London News, 20th August 1853, p.140.
There had been attempts by the Hapsburgs to introduce the Catholic Church, and at one time various Protestant faiths were represented, but the area remained substantially a fiefdom of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which even today can count on the adherence of about three-quarters of Romanian citizens. Romania never had the benefits of a religious Reformation as the West experienced it, where new ideas and new beliefs played their part in restructuring Europe culturally and politically.

Auguste Raffet (1804-1860), Famille tsigane en voyage en Moldavie, 'A family of gypsies travelling through Romania', 1837. Image: PD.
An educational system barely existed. The aristocracy had its children educated privately, the church educated and trained its priests, the peasantry had no need of education. Western Europe had been in a similar educational situation a century before that, but the Enlightenment and the competition for technological and industrial progress led to the development of universal education. The Romanian region began this process a century later.

Kauffmann/Rey, The Good Friday Fair in Iaşi, 1845. Diversity before it became a thing: Turks, Greeks, Jews, Romanians, Gypsies; merchants, beggars, peasants. It's certainly not Vienna: no trace of Biedermeier frocks and complex hairdos, let alone tight-waisted young men in toppers. This is a gateway to the East. Image: PD.
The 'Romanian Renaissance'
As it happened, Heloise arrived in Jassy just as the first effects of a modernising wind of change began to sweep through the region. She may not have realised it at the time, but she and her husband were in the central vortex of that wind, which was a result of the vision and energetic efforts of mainly one man: Gheorghe Asachi.
Heloise's 'Family Notes' say nothing of this historical situation. Asachi had sent Alexander Costinescu to Vienna for three years of advanced study; he had got him his professorship at the newly founded Academia Mihăileană in Jassy – he was, in effect, Costinescu's patron. Why is Asachi never mentioned in the 'Family Notes'?
However, Asachi's life and work is the key to understanding those hints and the social environment in which she must have lived.
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