Pagini de corespondență: Sașa Pană – Maia Radovan (Ariadna Șalari)

Abstract: The letters and correspondence of the writer Ariadna Șalari represent a segment that has not been exploited so far. We focused specifically on the letters she received from Sașa Pană in 1950, a former avant-garde poet and editor-in-chief of the literary magazines “Orizont” and “Flacăra”, magazines with which Ariadna Șalari collaborated in her first literary period. The five letters sent by Sașa Pană and recently published by Seneca Publishing House in a Latin edition of the novel “Labirintul”, demystify the speculations that have circulated in the literary community for about half a century and confirm the veracity of the love story between these two personalities and justify the veracity of what is narrated in the autobiographical novel “Labirintul”. The analysis of these correspondences will help us to create an overall picture of the relationship between these two personalities.

Keywords: letter, correspondence, Sașa Pană, Maia Radovan, Ariadna Șalari.

O geometrie a tandreţei. Romanul ca pact thanatografic

Abstract: The third and most powerful novel written by Romanian mathematician Liviu Ornea, A Geometry of Tenderness, is preceded by two mottos in French (one from Jacques Brel’s La chanson des vieux amants and the other from Louis Ferdinand Céline’s L’Ecole des cadavres). More than setting the intertextual stakes of the book, these mottos announce two of its narrative strands. The first seems to be represented by endless but inconsolable love, whose experience and representation will truly shape the existence of the characters. The second concerns Jewishness and presents various dimensions, coordinates and valences that have been attached to Judaism over several decades. Indeed, the hero, a sexagenarian professor with multiple intellectual preoccupations and writerly ambitions, who assumes the nominal alterity of Marcel Cohn, has an existential evolution marked, symbolically, by these identity nuclei. The narrative plot relies heavily on the issue of Jewishness, which Marcel will become increasingly aware of, until he decisively assumes – either as an essential datum, or as a legitimizing discourse of suffering taken over transgenerationally, or as the prompt individual reaction to the encounter with the narrative of a burdensome singularity.

However, the book can be read in multiple keys. Because, having reached the beginning of old age and faced with traumatic losses, the hero finds salvation in the very book he is writing. His own work in progress becomes an opportunity to question the purpose of the novel as a mature textual form, capable of both giving expression to individual destiny and encapsulating, in a well-defined spatial extent, the axioms, theorems and conjectures of the entire World. In short, ”a geometry of tenderness”. Starting from these premises, my study will focus on a few possible readings, following A Geometry of Tenderness as a metatext, a novel of (un)assisted extinctions, and a thanatographic pact.

Keywords: ”A Geometry of Tenderness”, Jewishness, figures of the Other, heterotopy, metatext, thanatographic pact.

Le lac Blanc – istoria unei (auto)traduceri uitate

Abstract: The article below brings into discussion a forgotten text: the French translation of Vasile Alecsandri’s story 24 de ceasuri la Balta-Albă, a text written by the author, both in its original and its translated version, with the purpose of engaging in a dialogue with the metropolitan cultural space and with an international audience. Published serially in the prestigious French journal L’Illustration, under the pen name Basile Alecxandri, the text aimed to question the colonial discourse that positioned Wallachia, one of the emergent European countries — peripheral, yet still European — as an „external Other.” For this reason, the modifications the author brought to the original are intended to soften the process of denouncing this colonial discourse, which is much more evident in the Romanian version, and to place Wallachia on a much more clearly defined fictional and political European map. In this way, Alecsandri sought to mark not only a shift in paradigm — the orientation of the Romanian Principalities toward a new cultural center —, but also the affirmation of the European identity of a peripheral, yet unquestionably European, culture.

Keywords: Vasile Alecsandri, autocolonization, cultural paradigm shift, (self)-translation.

Modele tradiționale ale cercetării traumei în literatură. Cathy Caruth – rănile minții și adevărurile de nerostit

Abstract: This study proposes a re-examination of Cathy Caruth’s theory of trauma, aiming to highlight concepts that could serve as a foundation for future research in this area. From obscurity to ubiquity, the notion of ‘trauma’ has undergone a significant evolution, acquiring increasingly complex meanings that reframe both personal and historical events. Its profound impact and relevance across various fields – clinical, pedagogical, historical, cultural, psychological, social, political, identitary, and artistic – make it a concept of undeniable significance. In light of the proliferation of traumatic events – from World War I and World War II, the Holocaust, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, forced displacements, exile, racism, human rights violations, and abuses under totalitarian regimes, to more recent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine – and their representation in literature, there has emerged a pressing need to develop interpretive models capable of decoding human suffering without diminishing it within the grand narrative of history. Literature thus offers a means of giving voice to previously unspoken truths, accompanied by a system of interpretation that must be not only rigorous and current, but also deeply grounded in the realities of our contemporary world in order to function properly.

Keywords: Trauma, Cathy Caruth, Sigmund Freud, History, Memory.

Exilés et autres voyageurs roumains pendant la seconde moitié du XXe siècle

Abstract: In this article, we revisit a certain type of traveler: Romanian intellectuals exiled from 1945 to 1989, whose journeys were often without return. We will show how their ideology, sometimes rigid and reactionary, prevented them from intellectually benefiting from their expatriation, especially in the case of the first wave of exiles. We will also show, through a reading of the diaries of two exiled intellectuals, how the Romanians who had not chosen the path of exile but managed to travel abroad during the last decade of communism were perceived by the two diarists.

Keywords: exile, anti-communism, ideology, Romanian writers, diary.

Umanismul sub semnul postmodernismului. Biografismul ca formă de manifestare a noului umanism în poezia românească a ultimelor decenii

Abstract: This paper seeks to explore the evolving representations of the human figure in literature over the past few decades. It focuses on how the postmodern paradigm has contributed to the emergence of a new humanism—one that places the ordinary individual, preoccupied with the trivialities of everyday life, at the heart of artistic expression. Within this framework, biographism emerges as a key mode of literary engagement, particularly in contemporary poetry. The study examines how poets from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have responded to and shaped this new way of portraying the human subject. By turning to biographism, these poets blur the boundaries between artistic creation and lived experience, thereby narrowing the distance between the metaphysical self and the biographical self.

Keywords: humanism, biographism, postmodernism, Romanian poetry, contemporary Literature.

Manierism și baroc în literatura dramatică: de la rigoare clasică la exuberanță

Abstract: The transition from classical ideals and rigors to the promotion of the individual and his sensibility, bears the signs of Mannerism, culminating in the Baroque. Among these trends, baroque stands out as a new and revolutionary attitude, positioning itself against the classical idea of beauty, balance and perfection. If Mannerism marks the beginning of distancing from classical ideals, through Baroque drama will experience a reinvention, a reconstruction. It is the historical moment through which new horizons of theater are set.

Keywords: Mannerism, Baroque, Trauerspiel, sensibility, labyrinth.

Conflictul individ-comunitate ilustrat în Când ne vom întoarce de Radu Mareș

Abstract: This literary analysis aims to portray how individual experiences are inevitably lost in the grand scheme of history. In Când ne vom întoarce by Radu Mareș, the conflict between the individual and the community is intricately explored through the experience of Gavril M., a young Romanian agronomist trying to assert himself in a diverse, ethnically complex Bucovinian community. This struggle unfolds across multiple levels: ethnic prejudice, the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the rise of nationalist movements. This protagonist faces skepticism and resistance from the local population, who question his capabilities due to his background. His idealism and desire for change clash with an entrenched mindset, embodied by figures like Onofrei, a character who represents outdated imperial values. Through this nuanced portrayal, the novel examines the limitations of individual agency in the face of powerful historical and social forces, shedding light on the challenges of transforming a society steeped in prejudice and division. Mareș uses this conflict to propel the narrative, turning Gavril’s journey into a reflection on the complex interplay between personal ambition and collective identity.

Keywords: Radu Mareș, conflict, Bucovina, community, Gavril M.

Dinamica faptelor particulare în romanele lui Camil Petrescu

Abstract: The study presents the transposition into Camil Petrescu’s novels of philosophical and scientific theories that first promoted psychologism, only to then aggressively delegitimize it. The European novelists of interwar modernism take up the epistemological model specific to scientific knowledge of the entire 20th century, based on analytical thinking and applied in two stages: there would be a first stage of observing particular facts, after which, in the next stage, the inductive leap from the particular to the general should be made, for the formulation of the norm, of the universal law (Hintikka 1981). The epistemological model based on the exploitation of particular facts is specific to Camil Petrescu’s novels and follows a specific behavior. The particular fact on which the writer relies is the psychic fact, because the objective pursued is the knowledge of what he himself calls “psychological reality”. Following the recommendation of Bergsonian philosophy, a good number of post-Proustian writers, including Camil Petrescu, privilege the psychic ego in self-knowledge and use introspection as a general method of psychology for putting psyche into the forms of language. Introspection operates according to a generous but unsettling axiom: the experience of consciousness represents in itself a science of consciousness. Such an axiom presupposes sincerity and total transparency of consciousness towards itself. The psychic fact must be known in detail, in all its particularity. The novelist engages in a true science of the particular.

Keywords:  psychologism, modernism, antipsychologism, knowledge, nihilism.