Family values, customs, traditions and ethics of the Russian family in Bessarabia (the interwar period in Romanian literature)

The article analyzes the essays “Bessarabian Roads” by Mikhail Sadoveanu, written in the genre of ethnographic fiction, and the moral-descriptive novel by Georgy Bezvikonny “The Last Superfluous Man”. Our selection of works was based on the representativeness of these sources for the announced topic. M. Sadoveanu recreates a phantomatic picture of the micro-space of the Russian noble family of Madame Panina (1920s); the system of the images of these essays clearly reveals the atmosphere of social disorientation of the Russian population, as well as the manifestation of clear trends of integration into the Romanian social space. However, the family values, customs, traditions and the morals of the Russian family in Bessarabia during the interwar period retain some elements of continuity. G. Bezvikonny in details recreates the spirit of the era, its historical flavor, retrospectively reflects the life of a typical Bessarabian family with a high social class status (the so-called “Russian boyars”); in his novel, the biopsychological portrait of the family, constituted over generations, emerges in the detailed aspects of family values, customs and traditions. The above mentioned works also substantively consider the issues of “Bessarabian identity”, which were especially relevant in the aspect of studying the Russian family in the interwar period.

Memory and Fiction: Trauma in Contemporary Romanian Literature

The studies of memory (memory studies) have developed a connection to the concept of trauma (trauma studies) and its manifestations. The literary field became a proper medium of evocation and testimony of past traumatic events. Therefore, social manifestations, traumatic measures of political regimes have all been integrated into literary works as a manner of attesting both their physical and psychological implications. Talking about the traumatic events of the Holocaust, James E. Young views such literary works as “documentary narrative” or, more specific, literature of testimony. Literary (and artistic) works related to the Holocaust are also object of Marianne Hirsch’s studies. In her view, evoking and narrating traumatic events implies the usage of postmemory. Past could also be evoked, as Michel Foucault considers, through literature on the basis of counter-memory. Taking into consideration different manifestations of memory in literature, the present study aims to analyse some of the Romanian contemporary works tackling on the remembrance of the traumatic ideological intervention on the female body that the prohibition of abortions represented during the communist regime. Corporal and psychological traumas that the 770 Decree caused are related in Corina Sabău’s novel And the Crickets Were Heard and also in the testimonial collective volumes Comrades of journey. The Feminine Experience in Communism (edited by Radu Pavel Gheo and Dan Lungu) and Mihaela Miroiu’s (ed.) The Birth. Lived Stories. Thus, literary materialisations of memory would be observed, in order for the contemporary reader to understand the severe traumatic implications of an abusive ideological prohibition of abortion.

Reminiscences – a space of memory (Based on the film Childhood Memories by Elisabeta Bostan)

Ion Creangă’s “Childhood Memories”, the most complex and significant work of the classic of Romanian literature, has so far known a single screening, that of the director Elisabeta Bostan from Romania. The film, with the same title, highlights a landscape as authentic as possible of the time, morals, customs and traditions and reflects the national identity. Or else, the memories of the writer, the main character of the film, about his childhood, his native village, villagers, etc., remain a living expression of the time. The drama organically combines two timeframes and spaces: that of Nică’s childhood, spent in the picturesque landscapes of Humulești, and the second that of the writer Ion Creangă, who listed his memories in the “bojdeuca (hut)” from Țicău. The director remains faithful to Creanga’s text, to the same colorful language full of expressions characteristic of Moldovan speech, and creates a universe similar to that of the mid-nineteenth century. The film Memories from Childhood (1965), considered by critics to be the “bridgehead of screening”, remained “in the English Academy and the Los Angeles Museum of the Arts – as a reference film in the field of screenings”.

Cosmopolitanism and Planetary Studies: Paradigms for Rewriting the Past

This paper discusses recent models of world literature rewriting in light of the 2018 Romanian Literature as World Literature, which remaps some of the most representative Romanian authors and movements according to the intersectional frameworks advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systemstheory, Pascale Casanova’s world republic of letters, and others. In their plea for what the book’s editors call planetary, cosmopolitan studies, the sixteen contributors reread canonical Romanian texts and advocate for a new literary world order, within which Romanian literature is regarded in a less hierarchical/dichotomic fashion, as a literature of the world. This initiative seeks to reposition Romanian literature as a diverse, active, and dynamic partner in the world’s cultural dialogue. My essay addresses a paradox which is very much at the centre of the book: how can one promote intercultural, non-hegemonic models of dialogue when translation and marketability still restrict the participation of “marginal” cultures in the planetary, cosmopolitan exchange of ideas?

La feredeiele Borsecului: șprițuri/ macmahoane/ mișmașuri în literatura începuturilor

The present study unfolds on several layers.In the first place, it propounds a history of the relationship between the alcoholic drink that is popularly known as „spritz” and Romanian literature, illustrated with examples from the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Secondly, it restores a terminology area, determining the first usage of the word (with all its synonyms) and what prominent or less-known authors have frequently utilized it. Thirdly, it inspects documentation data which thus reinstates two potential forerunners of this interstitial phenomenon: Anton Pann and Daniil Scavinschi. In the fourth place, it exposes a series of thresholds in the evolution of the Romanian mentality, based on the level of tolerance or disapproval that writers have expressed, when confronted with this liquor.

Genurile romanului românesc (1933-1947). O analiză cantitativă

This article puts forward a quantitative account of the subgenres of the Romanian novel during the 1933-1947 period. It shows the massive domination of the social novel and the Bildungsroman and analyzes the dynamics of genre and popular literature – adventure novels, detective fiction, SF, etc. – within the first period of massive literary production in Romanian literature. The article is the result of the MDRR (Muzeul Digital al Romanului Românesc – The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel) projects, set out to archive the Romanian production of novels from 1845 (the year of the publication of the – arguably – first Romanian novel) to 1947, right before the establishment of the communist regime. The first part is a quantitative analysis of the novels according to DCRR (Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc – The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel). The second part analyzes the “dynamics of popular subgenres,” meaning adventure novels, policiers, SF novels, and children’s literature. The third part envisions “the social novel” as a predilect genre of the interwar period, the fourth occasions a reading of the “historical novel,” while the last two sections describe the evolution of sentimental and psychological novels.

Vladimir Beșleagă’s dream journal (manuscript): introspective views on our own existence

The article analyzes Vladimir Besleaga’s dream diary, an original manuscript, unknown to the wide public, which can be consulted at the National Museum of Romanian Literature “Mihail Kogalniceanu”, the collection of “Manuscripts”. The manuscript was offered by the author to the researcher, PhD in philology Ana Ghilas and the undersigned, in order to explore the depths of the creative imaginary of the nonagenarian Bessarabian writer. Thus, in the diary we will recognize some recurring images impregnated in the literary creation of Vladimir Besleaga – village, house, mother, water, father etc. The usual area and childhood experiences are for the author of this diary (with the title of manuscript Dreams of night and day (diary ante- anti- octogenate)) an endless source of miracles that helps him to renew his creative impulses and to put in order his ordinary, profane human condition with sacred elements from the abyss of being.

Primul mythos de stânga al literaturii române contemporane

Mihai Iovănel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 is the first leftist major narrative of Romanian literature – and the shockwaves it generated were due even more to this firm ideological option (the first such one in the history of major Romanian literary histories) than to its literary content proper. The present article aims at asserting the main three accomplishments and shortcomings generated by this ideological option – namely that: i) it succeeds in coalescing the first coherent narrative of the last three decades of Romanian literature; ii) it sometimes turns from an ideological option into an ideological bias – and modifies the factuality of Romanian literature, eliminating important writers, exaggerating the qualities of some other ones, searching to distribute merits (to leftist writers) and punishments (to right-wing ones) according with their political option, and not with their literary qualifications; iii) it is an impressive stylistic achievement in itself, even though quite ironically its author disregards the virtues of aestheticism.

Contemporaneitatea literaturii – o chestiune de metodă

The following article critically deals with Mihai Iovănel's Istoria literaturii române contemporane. 1990-2020 [The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature. 1990-2020] (Polirom, 2021) from three different, yet intertwined, perspectives, namely 1) the methodological turn, highlighted by an overt post-Marxist attempt at interpreting contemporary Romanian literature, 2) the question of what is - or if there is any - literariness in Istoria literaturii române contemporane. 1990-2020, 3) the issue of transcending normative aesthetics into post-aestheticism as a last resort or perhaps as a new dead-end. Finally, the ideological threshold that divides - or rather emphasis - local national literature as substantially distinct from global literature will be tentatively broached.

The Challenges of Writing a National Literary History in the Era of Transnationalism: Insights from a Peripheral Literary Space

It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is re-thought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015).