Adrian Păunescu: literary, journalistic and political activity

Abstract

The article aims to give an overview of the whole range of literary, journalistic and political activities of Adrian Păunescu. Our endeavor is structured in five sections and constitutes a presentation of the poet’s life and literary activity, his publicizing and social-political involvement in the Romanian landscape, with a focus on the problematic and thematic of his poems. The article attempts a delimitation of the poetic work under the incidence of two great political periods, marked in its literary direction by the turning point represented by the 1989 Revolution, a decisive moment in terms of freedom of expression. In the first period we can distinguish a first stage, that of youthful creation, and a second, from which a new vision of poetry and the world emerges. We therefore examine the development of poetry, in two stages, in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s and that after the 1990s, from the perspective of censorship, the political influences of the communist regime and freedom of expression. We devote a separate section to the period marked by the emergence of the “Cenacl Flacăra”, a young and nonconformist cultural movement created by Adrian Păunescu as an ideal space to promote poetry on national and patriotic themes. We will highlight some information on Adrian Păunescu’s political activity and how his political objectives evolved in relation to the regime change.

Keywords

• adrian păunescu
• poet
• poetry
• cenacle
• censorship
• journalist
• politics
• freedom
• communist regime