Konstantin Dumba
I discovered Capitol Hill Books by pure chance. It was on a Sunday. I had been at Eastern Market that morning, with no intention of buying anything: a tour through the flea market and the farmers' market, going then inside the building to hang around, passing by the windows full of sausages and cheese, eventually buying a peas soup and a dish based on bacon or something, also a glass of cider, taking lunch at a long rustic table in the yard, thinking what to do next.
As I was going back to the metro station I saw the bookstore: it was on a street very close to the market, close also to the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court.
I entered inside knowing that I was starting an adventure. An antiquarian is a kingdom of moving sands. A book will send you to another book, and this new one to another, in an infinite chain. You can spend there good money, or you can spend all your day, you'll always be sad after: there will be a book you haven't bought and you'll miss it badly for the rest of your life.
The first used books' store in my life was the one on Rue du Cherche Midi in Paris. I was too small to realize what it was: my mother liked to have a look inside, now and then, and I was accompanying her, as a boy of two or three. I entered the store as an adult in 1999. It was close to the house of my first three years of life, and I understood where my passion for antiquarians came from.
We moved to Bucharest, in Romania, and my mother continued to take me to all kind of antiques' stores. She was passionate for old rugs, old furniture, and the like.
As I grew up I became a permanent visitor of a small antiquarian (but all good bookstores are small, isn't it?). For people who know Bucharest, it was in the Scala building, just near the entrance to the movie theater. The store is no more, a jewelry replaced it after the 90's.
It is there that I found old editions of Rabelais and Villon, then all those French authors whose sentence construction I adore, Maupassant, and Anatole France, the Colas Breugnon of Romain Rolland. Then came Montherlant and Malraux, and the other French masters, old and new.
A book sends you always to another book. A volume of essays by Mihail Ralea made me discover Fromentin. I had in my home library old editions of Romanian and French classics, together with manuals of Latin and French. A Romanian version of the Annals of Tacitus (the splendid translation of Lovinescu) was also there, together with Marco Polo (it was in his book that I read about the King-Prester John) and Sven Hedin (which opened for me Tibetan and Indian horizons). There was also an edition of Le Petit Larousse from 1916.
One uncle had an edition of a Romanian encyclopedia from 1930 and I was browsing it passionately every time I was visiting. It was this encyclopedia that made me voracious for information about people that had left a trace, any trace, in Romanian history.
As years were passing I started to discover antiquarians also in other cities in Europe, and then in America. I remember the special feeling I had in a small used books' store in Prague, plenty of old editions of German books, with Gothic letters. Or the amazing discovery of Evliya Çelebi, in a bookstore in Greenwich Village!
Well, now I was inside Capitol Hill Books, where all space was full of books thrown in all possible positions. Going straight to a title you had in mind was no way, except if you asked the bookseller who seemed to posses an acrobatic memory.
I suddenly noticed a book, not as much for the title, as for the author's name: Konstantin Theodor Graf von Dumba! The image on the book jacket was showing an aristocrat whose traits were telling some Central European narrative, of the 1890's or so. An aristocrat to be found in the salons of Vienna, or Lemberg, or Czernowitz, Prague, Budapest or in Bucharest, or in the cars of Orient Express traveling in that space.
The name sounded very Romanian and I became excited. There was a mention under the name: he had been the last Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to Washington. I got curious.
The book was about the First World War. It was over other books, in a place where you needed a ladder to get. I asked the bookseller for help and I apologized as I had no intention to buy it immediately. All I wanted was to browse it quickly. He took a small ladder from a corner and handed me the book.
I looked for five minutes in it, and then for other five, then for other five, after on hour I decided to think at it and make a decision for the next weekend.
Finding on the Internet information about Konstantin Dumba was pretty easy, of course. He had been born in Vienna and was of Aromanian origin. His grandfather, Sterios (?) Dumba was from Blatsa, a village now belonging to Greece. Sterios had settled to Vienna in 1817, and his son Nikolaus, born in 1830, became in his life a prosperous entrepreneur. The grandson, Konstantin, was born in 1861. He made legal studies and got a doctorate in law, then followed a diplomatic carrier.
After serving in the Austro-Hungarian missions in London, St. Petersburg, Rome, Bucharest and Paris, Konstantin Dumba was appointed minister in Belgrade, then in Stockholm, and, in 1913, he became the Austro-Hungarian ambassador at Washington. Quite a carrier, only it finished unexpectedly: due to alleged involvement in schemes to sabotage the American munitions industry, Konstantin Dumba was considered no more acceptable by the American authorities and so Vienna was forced tor recall him.
It was 1915. Konstantin Dumba defended his innocence till the end of his life (which was in 1947).
In 1917 he was ennobled: Graf von Dumba. It would last two years: in 1919 the new Austrian Republic abolished all noble titles. Nobody's perfect, not even Austrian diplomats of Aromanian origin, and nothing works for too long, not even Austrian titles of nobility.
But I got a liking for this man, to be honest. Why was that? Was it because of his Aromanian origin and my interest for people leaving a trace in the Romanian history? Well, his trace was in the Austrian history. Had I decided from the beginning to discover an exemplary biography so I was tempted to reject what proved unfit? Or maybe was it because of my admiration for those times and that Central European universe? Who knows?
Here is another image of him:
(http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004668353/)
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
no copyright infringement intended
I came for the book at Capitol Hills the following weekend, to find out that it had been sold. There are still some available copies in other bookstores (as I found on the Internet), only they are placed in very distant places: New Delhi, Durban, Buenos Aires. So it goes.
(Washington, District of Columbia)
As I was going back to the metro station I saw the bookstore: it was on a street very close to the market, close also to the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court.
I entered inside knowing that I was starting an adventure. An antiquarian is a kingdom of moving sands. A book will send you to another book, and this new one to another, in an infinite chain. You can spend there good money, or you can spend all your day, you'll always be sad after: there will be a book you haven't bought and you'll miss it badly for the rest of your life.
The first used books' store in my life was the one on Rue du Cherche Midi in Paris. I was too small to realize what it was: my mother liked to have a look inside, now and then, and I was accompanying her, as a boy of two or three. I entered the store as an adult in 1999. It was close to the house of my first three years of life, and I understood where my passion for antiquarians came from.
We moved to Bucharest, in Romania, and my mother continued to take me to all kind of antiques' stores. She was passionate for old rugs, old furniture, and the like.
As I grew up I became a permanent visitor of a small antiquarian (but all good bookstores are small, isn't it?). For people who know Bucharest, it was in the Scala building, just near the entrance to the movie theater. The store is no more, a jewelry replaced it after the 90's.
It is there that I found old editions of Rabelais and Villon, then all those French authors whose sentence construction I adore, Maupassant, and Anatole France, the Colas Breugnon of Romain Rolland. Then came Montherlant and Malraux, and the other French masters, old and new.
A book sends you always to another book. A volume of essays by Mihail Ralea made me discover Fromentin. I had in my home library old editions of Romanian and French classics, together with manuals of Latin and French. A Romanian version of the Annals of Tacitus (the splendid translation of Lovinescu) was also there, together with Marco Polo (it was in his book that I read about the King-Prester John) and Sven Hedin (which opened for me Tibetan and Indian horizons). There was also an edition of Le Petit Larousse from 1916.
One uncle had an edition of a Romanian encyclopedia from 1930 and I was browsing it passionately every time I was visiting. It was this encyclopedia that made me voracious for information about people that had left a trace, any trace, in Romanian history.
As years were passing I started to discover antiquarians also in other cities in Europe, and then in America. I remember the special feeling I had in a small used books' store in Prague, plenty of old editions of German books, with Gothic letters. Or the amazing discovery of Evliya Çelebi, in a bookstore in Greenwich Village!
Well, now I was inside Capitol Hill Books, where all space was full of books thrown in all possible positions. Going straight to a title you had in mind was no way, except if you asked the bookseller who seemed to posses an acrobatic memory.
I suddenly noticed a book, not as much for the title, as for the author's name: Konstantin Theodor Graf von Dumba! The image on the book jacket was showing an aristocrat whose traits were telling some Central European narrative, of the 1890's or so. An aristocrat to be found in the salons of Vienna, or Lemberg, or Czernowitz, Prague, Budapest or in Bucharest, or in the cars of Orient Express traveling in that space.
The name sounded very Romanian and I became excited. There was a mention under the name: he had been the last Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to Washington. I got curious.
The book was about the First World War. It was over other books, in a place where you needed a ladder to get. I asked the bookseller for help and I apologized as I had no intention to buy it immediately. All I wanted was to browse it quickly. He took a small ladder from a corner and handed me the book.
I looked for five minutes in it, and then for other five, then for other five, after on hour I decided to think at it and make a decision for the next weekend.
Finding on the Internet information about Konstantin Dumba was pretty easy, of course. He had been born in Vienna and was of Aromanian origin. His grandfather, Sterios (?) Dumba was from Blatsa, a village now belonging to Greece. Sterios had settled to Vienna in 1817, and his son Nikolaus, born in 1830, became in his life a prosperous entrepreneur. The grandson, Konstantin, was born in 1861. He made legal studies and got a doctorate in law, then followed a diplomatic carrier.
After serving in the Austro-Hungarian missions in London, St. Petersburg, Rome, Bucharest and Paris, Konstantin Dumba was appointed minister in Belgrade, then in Stockholm, and, in 1913, he became the Austro-Hungarian ambassador at Washington. Quite a carrier, only it finished unexpectedly: due to alleged involvement in schemes to sabotage the American munitions industry, Konstantin Dumba was considered no more acceptable by the American authorities and so Vienna was forced tor recall him.
It was 1915. Konstantin Dumba defended his innocence till the end of his life (which was in 1947).
In 1917 he was ennobled: Graf von Dumba. It would last two years: in 1919 the new Austrian Republic abolished all noble titles. Nobody's perfect, not even Austrian diplomats of Aromanian origin, and nothing works for too long, not even Austrian titles of nobility.
But I got a liking for this man, to be honest. Why was that? Was it because of his Aromanian origin and my interest for people leaving a trace in the Romanian history? Well, his trace was in the Austrian history. Had I decided from the beginning to discover an exemplary biography so I was tempted to reject what proved unfit? Or maybe was it because of my admiration for those times and that Central European universe? Who knows?
Here is another image of him:
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
no copyright infringement intended
I came for the book at Capitol Hills the following weekend, to find out that it had been sold. There are still some available copies in other bookstores (as I found on the Internet), only they are placed in very distant places: New Delhi, Durban, Buenos Aires. So it goes.
(Washington, District of Columbia)
posted by Pierre Radulescu at
3:43 PM
1 Comments:
Fascinating story!
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Anonymous, at 5:36 PM
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