THE FAMILY UNIVERSE FROM THE MOROMETII NOVEL
THE FAMILY UNIVERSE FROM THE MOROMETII NOVEL

Summary/Abstract: The exceptional value of Moromeții consists of the epic density, of the psychological depth and of the novel issue that transforms the novel into an artistic monograph of the Romanian village before and after the war, caught at the crossroads between two social arrangements. The world of the Romanian village in the Danube Plain, the writer’s own universe, is viewed from the outside and from a great spiritual distance: “Scenes from the life of the peasants", these early short stories are, for the most part, snapshots of a hallucinatory relief of some moments of instinctual eruption. The writer evokes a world by describing its physiology, not its inner existence, remaining, due to the effect of distance, mysterious, impenetrable, so that through realistic, extraordinary observation, one reaches the strange and the enigmatic. The material framework remains almost the same, but detachment is replaced by participation: in the novel, the writer moved from “form” to “substance”, intuiting and revealing the soul of a world that had until then been seen in external manifestations. The stereotypical life of the peasants, unfolding in a full succession of events belonging to an ancient order, now reveals a profound affective and spiritual dimension. In Marin Preda’s novel, the world of the village thus ceases to be “rural” in the established literary sense of the term. The village had been, from a literary point of view, a universe of elementary or idyllic existence, picturesque or poetic, of a “natural humanity” or of primitive, undeveloped “human nature”.

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