Tragedy in Romanian Literature: Some Conceptual Delimitations

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This article examines the presence and manifestation of tragedy as a literary genre in Romanian literature until the establishment of the communist regime. My analysis begins with an overview of the arguments that various critics, playwrights, and essayists have invoked in trying to explain the alleged absence of tragedy in Romanian culture and continues with a discussion about the errors and confusions inherent to such a position. Starting from these misconceptions, I propose a new definition of tragedy as a dramatic/theatrical genre and then employ that definition in identifying the most important tragedies in Romanian literature from the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The conclusion of my article, strongly contradicting the dominant idea in the history of Romanian drama studies, is that tragedy not only existed in Romanian literature, but that the genre represented a fundamental coordinate of the Romanian cultural tradition.