| Title: | O scurtă introducere în memorialistica detenţiei româneşti |
| Author: | D. M. Cristea |
| Publication: | Philologica Jassyensia, IV (2), p. 25-38 |
| p-ISSN: | 1841-5377 |
| e-ISSN: | 2247-8353 |
| Publisher: | Institutul de Filologie Română „A. Philippide” |
| Place: | Iaşi |
| Year: | 2008 |
| Abstract: | Short literature, the diaries and the memories of those who suffered during the popular democracy, but also the numerous public articles and debates after 1989 made us familiar, at least as witnesses, with the idea of prison and with the prison reality. The prison, which influenced the destiny of so many persons (from political personalities or intellectuals of some notoriety, to common individuals), becomes not only a natural component of every day life, but also a valuable element of it. Thus, paradoxically, the prison appears as a special place which filters the people’s morality and character. Prison has always been a place of abuses, but never these abuses reached such intensity as during the totalitarian dictatorships, when it became a means of annihilation, of repression and besides all, of destruction. This prison invasion in everyday life has totally changed a situation which was considerably different before XXth century and that literature kept at a low level. The memories of the former anti-communists prisoners can be classified, at the existential level, from two points of view: as a physical fight and resistance proof and as inner endurance. The first is epically organized as an adventure novel, while the second is, mostly, a confession text. The Romanian prisoner oscillates between Don Quijote and Iov. These Quixotic forms are nothing but a hectic search of the human, a supreme exercise of the free agency. On the other side, the main form of existence in prison is not action, but reflection. The prisoner doesn’t prove less courage, he is not a timorous person; on the contrary, he lives a real euphoria of accomplishment in endeavor and he is able to face the guardians, to make demonstrative actions, risking in this way very rough punishments. But he doesn’t ”realize” himself as a prisoner and regime enemy by this attitude, but in the way he assimilates intellectually and morally the unique experience that he lived, turning it into a stage towards self-fulfillment. The memories from the prison show something more (and in this point they touch the literary side): that suffering, humiliation, fear, starvation, coldness and torture awake the latency of unconcealed predispositions, of an aptitude for literature (even if many of the writings don’t have a special aesthetic value). From this point of view, the testimonies of the political prisoners from behind the bars during the ”madding Stalinism” produce a new literary and human matter which changes, mostly, the data of the Romanian literature: by discovering the secrets and tortures of the Hell, literature can’t be any longer as before. |
| Key words: | imprisonment experience, punitive practices, imprisonment diary, the historiography of the concentrationary universe |
| Language: | Romanian |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
Citations to this publication: 1
| 0 | Veronica Nanu | The plasticized image of the original place in the carceral writing of Paul Goma | JRLS, 5, 690-698 | 2014 | pdf html |
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