Ficţiunea puterii şi puterea ficţiunii în „Creanga de aur” de Mihail Sadoveanu
The fiction of power and the power of fiction in Mihail Sadoveanu’s “The Golden Bow”

Summary/Abstract: Traditionally, literary critics have read ”Creanga de aur” [The Golden Bow], Mihail Sadoveanu’s novel, as a utopia, foregrounding its fairy-tale structure, a feature of the narrative discourse that no one can deny. Written in the hostile context of the interwar years of the 1930s, a time of great unrest when the author went through some traumatic events, the book is nevertheless a story of love’s capability to endure, a story of an initiation, of a belief in an ideal of morality, order and reason. But it is also a bitter meditation on power, as Irina, the Byzantine Empress, rules over a space of continuous deceit. The story follows Kesarion Breb, the Dacian magus, sent by his master on an initiation journey –first to Egypt, then to Byzantium– to bring back the answer to two major questions: if people living under the new (Christian) law are happy and if these new rulers of the world bring about an increase in wisdom. In order to gather knowledge, Breb also assumes the responsibility of finding the chosen future wife of Constantine, the Empress’s vicious son. Thus the story has a remarkable resemblance to the Cinderella archetype as it has long been observed. Yet ambiguities overturn the meaning of the story into a dystopia, as the above-mentioned archetype turns out to be a political frame, a fiction told for the masses in order for the empress to damage the image of her son (made to look as if he had inherited the demons of his father) and to keep the power for herself. Read this way, Sadoveanu’s novel is an allegory on the power of fiction, one of his favourite themes of his major books.

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