Romania orientale

Filiation endeuillée : figures, styles, politiques de l’héritage dans la culture roumaine

Laura Marin — 2023-12-23

Hériter, transmettre, regarder. Dialogue avec Georges Didi-Huberman

Georges Didi-Huberman — 2023-12-23

«Héritiers en mal d’ancêtres». L’art des archives et le récit de filiation

Laura Marin — 2023-12-23

This article proposes an analysis of several photo projects by visual artist Andrei Nacu, who works with photography, the family album, and the family archive to rework experiences from the past. Simultaneously, it reflects on the interactions between image, history, and memory. The analysis employs the vocabulary of filiation, transmission, and inheritance commonly used in the humanities and the social sciences to understand contemporary ways of mourning related to catastrophes of the 20th century.

Spaces of Drift: Unreconstructed Pasts in Șerban Savu’s Paintings

Calina Parau — 2023-12-23

This paper analyses the metaphorical and structural idea of broken filiations and explores the possibilities of representation conveyed by a heterogeneous historical position in post-communist Romania and, more generally, on the globalized scene of transitions. It tries to look at the discontinuous relation with the past from two dimensions: the re-negotiation of cultural identity in a post-industrial setting marked by a modernizing drive, drawn on the metaphor of the ‘orphan’, and the turn towards a classless world of the masses, generating conflicting forms of memory and representation. This broken cultural geography of linearity and genealogies dismantles the old structures that yielded place-bound identities, generating an interstitial sense of temporality shaped by new forms of cultural mediation. The visual artistic language of Șerban Savu is illustrative for these theoretical ideas that try to comprehend the crisis of the subject at the dawn of a new globalized world, ‘fathering’ a present in ruins, marked by an underlying sense of inhabiting disinherited spatial and temporal frames.

Hélène Vacaresco pour les siens. Une histoire d’héritage, dette et culpabilité

Ligia Tudurachi — 2023-12-23

The text proposes an analysis of the destiny and activity of Elena Văcărescu, the last descendant of the “family of poets” considered to be the founder of Romanian culture – as an exemplary illustration of how a creative life can be affected, in its entirety, by accepting a legacy. From the first moment when, still a teenager, she begins to write verses in French and sees herself sanctioned, through an anathema, by Eminescu, as an unworthy heir – and until the end of her career as a poet in France (distinguished twice with the Award of the French Academy), Elena will only deepen, always reformulating, the consciousness of guilt towards her family, and, through it, towards Romania. This guilt makes her never be able to project herself in relation to her native country, other than in the modest positions of “messenger” and cultural “mediator”, while her adopted country enshrines her as a “poet”.

The Adopted Child of the Latin Gens: Genealogical Imagery in B. Fundoianu’s Work

Stefan Firica — 2023-12-23

Revisiting the dual, bio-cultural, imagery ingrained in B. Fundoianu’s essays, engendering a genealogical narrative of literary history, may help us re-evaluate B. Fundoianu’s vision on the Romanian identity, too hastily explained by the “selfcolonizing” metaphor. A double perspective, euchronistic and anachronistic, will be engaged to render the complexities and contradictions of his approach. While the biologist vocabulary sends back to the 19th-century essentialist philosophies of identity, the focus on the East-West encounters resulting in the hybridization of cultural heritages invites fresher re-readings from the standpoint of transnational theories.

Mihail Dragomirescu și dialogurile morților: în căutarea poporului care lipsește

Adrian Tudurachi — 2023-12-23

Romanian critic Mihail Dragomirescu (1868-1942) chose to present his philosophical system in the form of dialogues of the dead. The book appeared in 1929 under the title Philosophical Dialogues. Integralism, and contains 44 numbered dialogues with 8 interlocutors. Other dialogues, however, had been published seven years earlier in the cultural and political press, covering topics related to polemics, critical debates, or even satire. The study focuses on the complex issues involved in the revival of an ancient genre invented by Lucian of Samosata and developed in the form of ephemera, pamphlets and colportage literature between the 17th and 18th centuries. The main question concerns the role that the dialogues of the dead play in problematizing a changing society in the context of post-World War I Romania. Emphasizing the significance of time and anachronism in the dialogues of the dead, the paper investigates, based on the reflections of Giorgio Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman and Vinciane Despret, the elaboration of perspectives on the common and the imaginary deployment of a “People”.

Starting from Forgiveness – a Prospect of Archiving the Troubled Past

Raluca Bibiri — 2023-12-23

Taking a controversial documentary film as a case study, the article considers forgiveness as a social practice, proposing an alternative to social antagonism between victims and perpetrators. The following chain of reflections is a direct consequence of the violent reactions to a documentary that was intended to give the public access to what had been on the minds of Secret Service officers during an extremely repressive political regime in Communist Romania. The press interpreted the documentary as an attempt to “whiten” the Communist secret service police, which was detrimental to the victims. In line with new theoretical directions that raise the possibility of a peaceful configuration that serves both parties, our approach examines the wider social shifts necessary to provide trans-generational amity through reconciliation and cultural repair.

Invented Genealogies, Forgotten Genealogies, Repressed Genealogies, Recovered Genealogies. A Survey About the Romanian Genealogical Knowledge

Filip-Lucian Iorga — 2023-12-23

I will try, in the following lines, to present a brief history of Romanian genealogical knowledge and the successive losses that have marked it. In my view, these losses, these successive mournings influence even today the way we relate to our own ancestors and, more broadly, the way we relate to the memory of the community and to each other.

The Genealogical Aura of the Davila Family

Alina-Gabriela Mihalache — 2023-12-23

One of the long-lasting narratives developed around a family involved in the establishment of Romanian modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries is that of the illustrious physician Carol Davila. Of uncertain descent, most likely abandoned at birth and adopted by an Italian family from which he takes his name with heraldic-ornithological resonance (d’Avila), the founder of the Romanian school of medicine invents a fantasy family genealogy, combining famous European biographies, memory lapses, and Romantic melodrama. This illegitimate legacy will leave its mark on the activities of the next generation, on the one hand, enabling a calling to implement Western ideas in Romanian institutions and, on the other, stimulating a quasi-patriarchal cult for memory constructs, equivalent to the fabrication of what Paul Ricoeur called “a prior real”. This paper aims to look at the ways in which an identity complex remains engraved in public and private acts of memory.

Genealogy and Degenerescence: the Culture of Decadent Legacy

Angelo Mitchievici — 2023-12-23

Starting with the considerations formulated by the philosopher Maël Renouard in his essay Nostalgie et mélancolie regarding the both material and symbolic meaning of a heritage and from Nietzsche’s reflection on the connection between heritage and memory, we analyzed this topic from the conjugate perspective of decadent aesthetics and philosophy of decadence as approached by theorists such as Mario Praz, A.E.Carter, Richard Gilman, David Weir, Barbara Spackman, Matei Calinescu and philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, or Emil Cioran and degenerationist theories of heredity from the late 19th century. From the perspective of heritage as cultural memory and defective heredity correlated with the decadent theme of the last living scion of an aristocratic family or of genius as a “superior degenerate” in Cesare Lombroso’s terms, we approached two relevant texts in this sense: the novel Against the Grain by K.-J. Huysmans and the short story Remember by the Romanian writer Mateiu I. Caragiale. The decadent aesthete type becomes the depository of an extended cultural memory, a living library/pinacotheque, at a time when the heritage can no longer be passed on but only exhibited for the last time.

Literary Modernism and Modernity in Romania. Recomposed Community and Past/Present Filiation Models

Amalia Cotoi — 2023-12-23

Drawing upon Modernist and Kinship Studies, this essay argues that nowadays community is not dissolved by modernity, nor was it century ago. Literary modernism is one of the places where the modern urbanized community starts to be reassembled based more on ties of affinity than on consanguinity. Even though today this regrouping is more apparent due to the practices of digital coexistence provided by social networks, it was not less of a reality one century ago. Dezrădăcinare [Uprooting] (2022) by Sașa Zare, and Rădăcini [Roots] (1938) by Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu have more things in common when it comes to memory and filiation than could be visible to the naked eye.

Revisiting the Interwar Period. Imitation, Synchronism and the Archive in the Films of Radu Jude

Cezar Gheorghe — 2023-12-23

The theory of synchronism was one of the most influential ideas in the Romanian interwar period. Eugen Lovinescu championed the powers of imitation as a means of development for Romanian culture and society. At the same time, it was a case of illegitimate filiation that led to the uncritical importation of several types of ideas from Western European culture. By analysing Radu Jude’s found footage montage films, I argue that not all versions of imitation are in fact as positive as Lovinescu considered and speak about a newer concept of genealogy, one that relies on archives and that constructs a new regime of knowledge in the case of the representation of recent history.

Filiaţie obligată. Eminescu în biblioteca interioară a Anei Blandiana

Ioana Bot — 2023-12-23

This study proposes a reflection on a poetic lineage (both difficult to circumscribe and unanimously accepted in the history of Romanian literature) between the Romantic Mihai Eminescu (object of a real cult of the “national poet”, but also a poet of the First Modernism) and Ana Blandiana, one of the most important figures of Romanian Late Modernism. I am resuming, on this occasion, some critical considerations I wrote some 30 years ago, on the “Eminescianism” of Ana Blandiana’s poetry, manifested mainly at the level of the literary imaginary – in order to add a few new examples and recontextualize it all, both from a theoretical point of view (intertextuality? imaginary libraries? affective stylistics?), as well as in terms of the clarifications offered, in the last three decades, by the poet herself.

Lettere, documenti, volumi: cartografando la genesi di Eminescu o dell’Assoluto

Jessica Andreoli — 2023-12-23

Starting from the bibliography of the volume Eminescu o dell’Assoluto and using Rosa Del Conte’s papers conserved in her Archive (Milano), I will reconstruct the main lines of study followed by the philologist, evoking the main features that link the study published by Rosa Del Conte to the Eminescology school of Cluj, determining the genesis of her research and the methodology adopted by the scholar in recovering an originality that is first and foremost a legacy.

Biografie degli autori

Editorial Staff — 2023-12-23

Alex Drace-Francis, Istoria mămăligii. Povestea globală a unui preparat național, tr. Anca Bărbulescu, Humanitas, București 2023

Eleonora Sava — 2023-12-23

Daiana Gârdan, Între lumi. Romanul românesc în sistemul literar modern, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca 2023

Madalina Agoston — 2023-12-23

Arina-Codruţa Neagu, Scrierea tăcută, scrierea imposibilă, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca 2022

Jessica Andreoli — 2023-12-23

Marius Popa, Andreea Bugiac (coord.), L’animal en littérature, entre fantaisie et fantastique, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca 2022

Jessica Andreoli — 2023-12-23

Ruxandra Câmpeanu, Dincolo de regulile jocului: trepte și limite ale compromisului intelectual în perioada 1948-1964: Mihai Ralea, G. Călinescu și Tudor Vianu, Corint, Bucureşti 2022

Bianca Paulet — 2023-12-23

Călina Părău, Discursul incomplet: uitare și rest, Tracus Arte, Bucureşti 2022

Vasile Gribincea — 2023-12-23

Tradiția „ospitalieră” a povestirii în Hanu Ancuței de Mihail Sadoveanu

Paul Cernat — 2023-12-23

This paper aims to discuss and analyse the relation between the art of fiction and the hospitable identity in Hanu Ancuței (1928) by Mihail Sadoveanu (1880-1961) – a Romanian novel that celebrates the tradition of the Moldavian oral storytelling. We will analyse the topics and the intertextual patterns of this book (famous frame stories of the Orient and Occident like The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Margueritte de Navarre’s Heptameron, Sindipa the Wise or The Thousand and One Nights Tales, related novels of the Balkans like The Inn at Antimovo by Iordan Iovkov and The Bridge of the Drina by Ivo Andrić, as well as previous writings of Sadoveanu himself, like Crâșma lui moș Precu). We will investigate the subtle relations between myth, magic, legend, and history in the tales of the guests, focusing on their mindsets and social identities. In fact, the ceremony of storytelling is a way to share different identities and values under the sign of convivial hospitality and tolerance. Finally, we intended to highlight the fictional archaeology of the Moldavian tradition and Sadoveanu’s “art of branding” in this literary masterpiece.

Nicolae Iorga, Doctor Honoris Causa dell’Università di Roma La Sapienza

Mihai Stan — 2023-12-23

Nicolae Iorga, Romanian historian, politician, and literary critic, was awarded a Honorary Degree by the University of Roma (Faculty of Letters). This study aims to chronologically reconstruct the events, from the proposal to the awarding of the academic honour to the Romanian President of the Democratic Nationalist Party on 31 January 1933, through documents, press articles and photographs found in the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (Italy), in the Archive of the University of Bucharest, at the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History (Bucharest), and at the “Nicolae Iorga” Memorial Museum (Vălenii de Munte).

Il dizionario giusto al momento giusto

Nicoleta Nesu — 2023-12-23

The present text aims to give a brief description of the recent Valentina Negritescu’s Dictionary, published by the Hoepli publishing house in Milan this year. A real editorial event, structured on 1648 pages, containing more than 70,000 title-words, with more than 140,000 meanings and more than 250,000 translations, for all those interested in the study of the Romanian language and literature: teachers, translators or simple readers, both Romanian and Italian. After a brief description of the publishing house and its main publications dedicated to the Romanian language, we will focus on the novelties that the dictionary brings. It is also an opportunity to bring back into discussion the role that the dictionary can play in the teaching of foreign languages, in light of the recent coordinates of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages of the Council of Europe.

Cartea numerilor di Florina Ilis

Mauro Barindi — 2023-12-23

Like her previous books, Florina Ilis’ latest novel, Cartea numerilor [The Book of Numbers], is a book-flow, a total-book, due to its dimensions, where the narrative becomes epic and where the author paints broad frescoes of Romanian history, culture, and society in which fiction and reality coexist harmoniously or are combined to elevate rather than confuse. Here, Florina Ilis “plays at home”. The narrated events are set against the backdrop of the author’s native Transylvania over a period of time that spans from the First World War to the present day, passing through the years of the communist dictatorship. On the one hand, everything revolves around the events of a village commemorating its 500th anniversary since the first attestation and, on the other, around a family saga, together creating a complex puzzle of collective memory within the larger historical framework that connects tragedies and dictatorship-era atrocities.