Diversitate si Identitate Culturala in Europa (Nov 2016)
LITERARY DEBATES IN THE ROMANIA’S NINETIES CONSEQUENCES AND ASSESSMENTS
Abstract
Social systems undergo inevitable turning points in their evolution. These changes may be caused by either progressive accumulation or a major crisis. The latter applies to Romania, who - after being a communist country - grew into a democracy as a result of a popular uprising. The dictatorship and its effects became the favourite topic of discussion in many debates - political, economic, social, or cultural - whose protagonists asserted their various opinions in the name of democracy or general usefulness. The participation in these debates was also exceptional – from well-meaning but resentful people, lucid and/or visionaries, to crypto-communists, apocalyptic and even alienated people. That explains the absence of consensus. The respective period of time was coined as “an endless transition”, a term which covered all the masked avatars of Romanian society (and of the literary phenomenon, too). Confrontations were particularly illustrative within the printed media in the field of culture, which beside tackling the general problems also focused on specific guild issues: the repercussions of the dictatorship on literary life, the writer’s status, the effects of censorship and the freedom of expression, the ethical and moral criteria, the literary canon, the future of publishing houses and literary publications, the very existence of the Writers’ Union of Romania, the literary exile and the ‘inner exile’ (of writers from the Republic of Moldova). The topics above polarized differently, in opposite directions, which could be summarized as follows: in our country, culture was as a form of resistance during communism when Romania was ‘a Siberia of the spirit’. The passing of a quarter of a century from the 1989 popular uprising now facilitates a retrospective overview of those particular times.
