A Forgotten Figure in the Promotion of Romanian Culture in France: Marcel Montandon and His “Lettres roumaines” in Mercure de France (1905–1914)

From 1896 to 1940, the “Lettres étrangères” section of the Mercure de France magazine presented foreign literatures and cultures in the form of more or less regular columns aimed at a cultivated Frenchspeaking readership. Romania made its debut in 1905 under the pen of Marcel Montandon, a Swiss art critic and columnist born in Bucharest and living in Munich, who delivered 38 in-depth and regular articles until 1914. The presentation of this little-known corpus and its author provides an insight into the wealth of Romanian cultural production during this period, the arguments of the time and the choices and opinions of the author, standing as a cultural mediator between two intellectual worlds.

Biography and Fiction. The Contradictions of Panait Istrati – Traps for Exegetes

The proposed text is an excerpt from a larger study devoted to the writings of Panait Istrati. It aims to highlight the importance of literary history for a more accurate understanding of the reception of Panait Istrati in Romania, especially in the interwar period, taking a critical distance from the thesis of the author’s “marginalization” in Romanian and French literature. By researching Istrati’s articles from several decades and his correspondence with Romain Rolland, the study describes the contradictions of the author, the process of fictionalization of his biography, the invention of “roles” and the construction of a “personal myth”.

Anti-Modern Femininity and Vampiric Masculinity in Sorana Gurian’s Short Story “Vila Myosotis”

In Sorana Gurian’s early French and Romanian writing, feminine subjectivities are pushed into an anti- modern position by an oppressive modern discourse, resulting in feelings of displacement and trans- planting that lead to a paradoxical posture which is both progressive and reactionary. Through Vila Myosotis ([1939] 1946), Gurian explores the possibility of reconciling with oneself by returning to the past. However, her escape into the world of dreams awakens repressed desires and origins. This reactionary tendency seeks to establish empathy in the face of progress and modernity, and it allows for the creation of an autonomous female subjectivity that challenges the dominant discourse of masculinity, portrayed here through vampiric imagery.

The CONVULSIVE Beauty and the Convulsions of the Surrealist Novel. Nadja (1928, A. Breton) and Zenobia (1985, G. Naum)

The article examines some of the communicating vessels (« vases communicants ») between André Breton’s theoretical surrealism and Gellu Naum’s neo-surrealism praxis. The focus of the analysis is also on the intersection points among the two novels, Nadja (1928) and Zenobia (1985), defining moments of beginning and of the last surrealism. The aim is to determine the synthetic (theoretical and practical) manifesto of Breton’s novel, Nadja, and the pure poetic act of the last European surrealist novel, Zenobia. Although the correspondences seemed clarified by Romanian literary criticism, the present article offers a new, in-depth and contrastive perspective on the « convulsive beauty », from theory to practice.

“The War Generation” – the Poetry of Trauma, the Trauma of Poetry

The article discusses the poetry of the Romanian War Generation, proposing to reread the ‘transitive’ poetry of ‘Albatross’ group (Geo Dumitrescu, Dimitrie Stelaru, Ion Caraion et al.), in order to show how this literature develops the traumatic experience of the Second World War. The analysis focuses on the stylistic consequences of thematising the war, given the obvious distortion of poetic language in accordance with the deformed world it tries to codify. Therefore the approach is less interested in the capacity of poetry to represent, on aesthetic criteria, a resistance knot against terror, and more interested in poetry’s capacity of reinventing itself on ethic bases, as an insurgent response to the violence of History.

The writer Petru Popescu (born 1944) entered Romanian literature in the late 1960s and almost immediately gained the interest of critics and readers. His novels were innovative not only in terms of bold themes but also of narrative strategies. This article focuses on Petru Popescu’s work written in exile in English, i.e., from the late 1970s until 2009. His texts vary significantly, as Popescu tried his hand at several literary genres, from popular novels (Before and after Edith, In Hot Blood), travelogues (Amazon Beaming), adventure novels (Almost Adam), and adolescents’ literature (Footprints in Time) to his memoir (The Return) and the more stylized memoir about his parents-in-law (The Oasis: A memoir of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp).

* The paper was created within the framework of Cooperatio, a programme for the basic institutional support of science and research at Charles University, in the field of Literature.

The Strategy of Self-referentiality in Dumitru Crudu’s Poetry

Surfacing Dumitru Crudu’s poetry from his first books, published before the emergence of the new fracturist movement in Romanian literature, the strategy of self-referentiality will gradually become the author’s trademark. This strategy has a double functionality, representing both a renunciation of the postmodern poetical discourses of the 80s and an embodiment of the desideratum of poetic individuation. Throughout self-referentiality, Dumitru Crudu repositions the world towards the poetic self by fragmenting it into a spectrum of personal reactions.

Between a Folkloric Topos and a Cultural Myth. A Few Glosses on the Ballad “Master Manole”

The folkloric topos of the walled-up woman, present in several variants in South-Eastern Europe, has a special status in the Romanian culture. The “Legend of Master Manole” from which it originates, along with “Miorița”, has become a canonical literary text. Considered by G. Călinescu as a “cultural myth”, one of the four essential Romanian myths, in the interwar and communist period, it was intensively exploited ideologically and politically. Interpreted by writers, either as a sample of Romanian creative genius, or as an example of dedication to the work of building the new world, the topos has long overgrown its initial condition as a simple motif of popular culture.

*Această lucrare a fost sprijinită de Narodowe Centrum Nauki [National Science Centre in Poland] rin proiectul The Topos of an “Immured Woman” in the Cultures of Southeastern Europe and Hungary, no. 2020/37/B/HS2/00152.

The paper focuses on the ideological shift after 1989 that determined the nature of the debates over the role of Ana, the female character of the Legend of Master Manole, and her sacrifice. Until 1989, her perspective was widely ignored because the canonical interpretation of the ballad emphasized the male perspective of Manole and his sacrifice for the act of creation. After 1989, the feminist discourse argued that the symbolic structures perpetuated by this myth were reinforced in Romania by the communist regime. The main aim of the article is thus to present how the newly formed feminist critique employed one of the canonical Romanian texts to show the functioning of the model of a self-sacrificing woman in the social imaginary.

* This research is funded by the National Science Centre in Poland under the project: The Topos of an “Immured Woman” in the Cultures of Southeastern Europe and Hungary, no. 2020/37/B/HS2/00152.

Lexicalization of Definite Article in Polish Carpathian Vocabulary of Romanian Origin

The conditions under which the borrowing and diffusion of Carpathian vocabulary of Romanian origin in the mountain dialects of Lesser Poland and the Sub-Carpathian region, as well as the morphological properties of Romanian nouns, seem to favor the phenomenon of agglutination (integration) of a definite article in loanwords. The study of lexemes (common nouns and toponyms) considered by some linguists to be of Romanian origin has led to the conclusion that the agglutination of the Romanian definite article is a sporadic phenomenon in the case of toponyms present in the Polish part of the Western Carpathians (region of Polish dialects). As for the common nouns, none continue the Romanian articulated form, and the endings that can be confused with the masculine definite article are Polish suffixes of Slavic origin.

Religious Terminology in Romanian and Confessional Divisions – the Orthodox and Greek Catholic Versions of the Divine Liturgy

The articles presents some differences regarding the terminology used by the Romanian Orthodox Church, on the one hand, and the Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-Catholic, on the other. The analysis is based on the text of the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. The differences concern not only strictly religious terms, but also neutral words. This seems to be the result of a deliberate linguistic policy of the Greek Catholic Church, which often uses different terms than the Romanian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox terms in question were borrowed from Slavonic or Greek, while the Greek Catholic terms are Romanian words inherited from Latin or recent loanwords from Latin and modern Romance languages.

An Overview of the Hungarianisms in the Transylvanian Dialect of Boyash Romanian in Croatia

The aim of this paper is to research, based on our own linguistic material, as well as accessible publications, the influence of the Hungarian language on the Transylvanian dialect of Boyash Romanian in Croatia or, more precisely, to identify Hungarianisms that appear in the lexicon. In this regard, it is necessary to distinguish between at least two main categories of Hungarianisms – those that are present also in the Romanian language from Romania and those that are specific only to the Transylvanian dialect of Boyash Romanian spoken in Croatia.