VASILE ALECSANDRI'S ”OVID” (1885). HYPOSTASES AND SIGNIFICATIONS
VASILE ALECSANDRI'S ”OVID” (1885). HYPOSTASES AND SIGNIFICATIONS

Summary/Abstract: Preceded by a sketch of the critical reception of the last play written by Vasile Alecsandri, entitled ”Ovidiu” (1885), my study explores the possibility of a new interpretation of the provocative drama. This new reading would rely on highlighting the importance that the romantic writer assigns in his late ”Ovid” to the problem of otherness, but also its representation. In this dramatic text, considered one of Alecsandri's failures, traditional criticism has usually identified and harshly judged a single Ovid, the Roman writer exiled to Tomis. But in the textual reality, we can identify several Ovid hypostases, through the use of which the playwright manages to analyze, at the end of the XIX century, more than the condition of the exiled poet, who becomes, prematurely, a ”spectrum in the clutches of death”. I think that this figure of decay and even evanescence can be interpreted in several ways: as a symbol of the perpetual alienation, of the Romantic artist mined by uncertainties or of the human being itself, facing radical experiences – such as death, incurable malady or permanent rupture (by the beloved, by the native country or by its older identities). Regardless of the chosen interpretation key, we must admit that this modern thematicization of the relationship between exile and creation foreshadows the auctorial construction line on which the most successful Romanian fictional variants of Ovid's Tomitan exile will go – such as, for example, the well-known novel ”God was born in exile” by Vintilă Horia or ”Death in Tomis. Ovid's diary” written by Marin Mincu.

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