Obiceiurile de căsătorie ale țăranilor români (1837): O lucrare necunoscută a lui Mihail Kogălniceanu și soarta ei

At the age of only nineteen, while still a student in Berlin, leading Romanian historian and politician Mihail Kogălniceanu (1817-1891) published three pioneering works: an outline survey of Romanian language and literature; a sketch of the customs, history and language of the Roma people; and the first volume of his Histoire de la Valachie, la Moldavie et des Vlaques trans-danubiens (1837), widely regarded as the first modern synthesis of Romanian history. This article presents a fourth, previously unnoticed work from the same year, namely a study of Romanian peasant marriage customs published in February 1837 in the “Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände” [Morning Paper for the Educated Classes]. This was Kogălniceanu’s second ever publication in any language. The German original is transcribed and a Romanian translation is provided. Kogălniceanu’s work is shown to be partially derivative of previous descriptions taken from the works of Dimitrie Cantemir and Damaschin Bojincă, but also original in its critical account of contemporary marriage ceremonies.
The work’s genesis is placed in relation to Kogălniceanu’s friendship with the German novelist Willibald Alexis, dating from the summer of 1836, but also in the context of his known interest in folklore and popular culture, and of his broader conception of history, which extended beyond the narrowly political to encompass cultural, social, economic and religious life.
Kogălniceanu’s text was then translated twice, in both cases without attribution: first into French in “Revue du Nord” (October 1837), and then into German in “Ost und West” (October 1840), probably from the French version, which also circulated in Russia.
Kogălniceanu developed his view of rural marriage customs in his 1840 Romanian-language sketch Scene pitorești din obiceiurile poporului [Picturesque scenes from the customs of the people], which can now be understood as a revision of his earlier publication in accordance with newer trends within European Romanticism. This text is shown to have influenced the accounts of Moldavian marriage customs given by foreign writers such as Frenchman Jean Alexandre Vaillant and German Wilhelm von Kotzebue, who are known to have been in contact with Kogălniceanu.
Scene pitorești in its turn benefitted from a French translation in 1854, hitherto misattributed to its translator, Ioan Voinescu II. This version likewise influenced several foreign writers, including Frenchman Abdolonyme Ubicini, and American author James O. Noyes, who reproduced a segment of it in Roumania (1857), the first book-length account of the country to be published in the USA.
These new findings show how materials about Romanian popular culture circulated during this key period of the national revival, and how Kogălniceanu put them to use, including as an instrument of social criticism in the context of his views on the position of women in society.