The Socialist Realist Structure of Marin Predaʼs Moromeții

Abstract

Taking into account the two Romanian modernities that alternated, and clashed throughout the twentieth century – the capitalist, and the communist, respectively –, with their different public assessment, the paper analyzes realist patterns emerging in the post-1945 Romanian narrative. These patterns did not only concern new characters and topics, but also the shaping of a new, mass-scale, intensively cultured reader. To the same extent, the respective age saw the replacement of traditional bourgeois narrative voices with rural and proletarian viewpoints (in a marked shift from the simply rural or proletarian characters). I will explore this new ideology of the narrative voice, and its indebtment to the socialist realist paradigm, in Marin Predaʼs landmark novel Moromeții. The case analyzed proves how Romanian postwar fiction helped naturalize socialism, and how this very ideological backbone might strengthen the value of the novel in the long run.