The Figure of the Literary Critic in Diaries and Dialogues (Outlines of a Self-Portrait)

Abstract

In most of his books (Timpul trăirii, timpul mărturisirii. Jurnal parizian, Sfidarea retoricii. Jurnal german, Fragmente cririce, Ficțiunea jurnalului intim, Genurile biograficului), Eugen Simion focused on the essential theme of the ideal critic and that of the aesthetic criticism. How did he managed to get closer, as time passed, to what he understood of these notions, to what he wished, first from himself, as an author, we find, as well as from his books, also from few interviews and also from his volumes of Dialogues with Petru Dumitriu and Dialogues with Andrei Grigor. This way, we find out from the confessions of his journals, but also from the dialogues with other writers, how the critic Eugen Simion sees/analyses himself, how he looks at himself in relation to the others and, especially, what he understands by the critic’s mission/the destiny of the literary critic, into an outline of self-portrait that mirrors the profound self versus the biographical self.

Keywords

• diaries
• autobiographical essays
• interviews
• diary
• metamorphosis on the way of the act of work
• the deep self vs the biographical self
• the mission of the writer/literary critic