Young Man Goga
Young Man Goga

Summary/Abstract: About the end of the century, a generation of young people witnessed a series of cultural mutations that altered the traditional ways of thinking society. Modernity, urban life, social immobility, political corruption, populism, militant literature, cultural nationalism, revolutionary art, etc. were quite a few ingredients of their experience. Ready to challenge the world view inherited form their parents, eager to ask for a more prominent role and leadership, they enrolled themselves in new cultural currents and political movements disseminating an illiberal and eventually authoritarian ethos in the name of their people. This happened all over Europe in the last decades of nineteenth century. In Transylvania, this generation experienced a particularly painful experience due to the specific mixture of ethnic and social cleavages, of liberalism and corruption, of political passivism and cultural radicalism. This paper analysis the literary beginnings of Octavian Goga, an prominent figure of this generation who was considered a symbol of the new aspirations nurtured by the young people in the first years of the twentieth century. It argues that the enthusiasm of the young generation for new forms of expressing themselves about the current public issues of the time was deeply rooted in a crisis of identity, which was solved in a manner that offered the fertile soil for radical ideologies and extreme movements of the next decades.

• Details
• Contents