COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY IN ROMANIAN FICTION: OVIDIU PECICAN, „LUMEA CARE N-A FOST. O ODISEE ÎN SCRISORI ȘI DOCUMENTE MOLDOVENEȘTI DIN PRIMA PARTE A SECOLULUI AL XVII-LEA”

Abstract

If history is a matter of narrativity, then counterfactual histories are nothing but the evolving of plots which work out hypotheses about the nature of society and the condition of man, dystopic predictions, parallel narrative trajectories launching speculations about possibilities rather than actualities in the world around us. Ovidiu Pecican, a distinguished Professor of History, affiliated with the Babeș-Bolyai University, and a writer who got several awards from literary societies has managed to fuse history and fiction into a type of discourse which a reviewer (Doru Pop, see Annex 1) unambiguously associates with New Historicism. Ovidiu Pecican is a historian of the relativist school, who sees his discipline as being permanently in the making, depending on the discovery of other historical traces, as he says in the Introduction to his alternative history, Lumea care n-a fost (The World that Never Was, 2018). The statement is true in itself, but Pecican engages here in a playful, mock academic comment on the possibility of getting a more relevant picture of the past through insights into the private lives of the people who lived back then.

Keywords

• new historicism
• literary studies
• counterfactual histories
• metalanguage
• letter-writer