On the Christhood of Literature. Pretexts and Subtexts of Reflexivity.

Abstract

After the end of the Second World War, concurrently with the massive arrests of intellectuals, the imposition of false notions and generally valid atheistic behavior, literature--and especially Romanian prose--faced a harsh ideological regulation, being given "major objectives" of combating the bourgeois-landlord scourge, on the one hand, and glorifying the unshakable alliance between the worker and the Soviet farm-worker on the other. Any deviation was severely rebuked from the very beginning, the literary censorship and political propagandists of the proletarian ideology would despotically control every sketch, story, short story, novel (alongside with their authors). Under such conditions, the theorization of the narrative model of the prose writer Fănuș Neagu can outline a critical synthesis image of the entire Romanian post-war prose--or of a spectrum as wide as possible--the lasting element of which is lyricism, as the main feature of the Romanian novel of that period, an epic species nourished artistically from the balladesque tradition of the folk literature, on the one hand, and from the "taking over" from and "fitting" to the narrative techniques of European literature, especially the French one as well. The rise in Romanian literature of Fănuş Neagu symbolized the "necessary adjustment" (Eugen Simion), the illustrious revenge in front of the totalitarian stigma, just as the debut of Ion Druţă in the ankylosing landscape of Bessarabian literature meant the proof of firm qualities of deep renewal of the undisguised epic, definitively abandoning the straitjacket of communist ideology. Fănuş Neagu, as Ion Druță, abolished the "ideological front", "unslaved" the post-war prose and removed the rigid dogmatic barriers.