G. CĂLINESCU ŞI CRONICARII LITERARI AI PERIOADEI INTERBELICE
G. CALINESCU AND THE INTERWAR ROMANIAN CRITICISTS

Summary/Abstract: Our study is a follow up and, concurrently, an addendum to the research of G. Călinescu’s critical work, research that we have carried out in the book G. Călinescu. A cincea esenţă (G. Călinescu. The Fifth Essence) (Publishing House Cartea Românească, 2009). In this book we have analysed, among other aspects, the relationships existing between the author of Principii de estetică (Principles of Aesthetics) and his most important predecessors in the Romanian cultural field (Titu Maiorescu, Mihail Dragomirescu, N. Iorga, G. Ibrăileanu and E. Lovinescu). Nevertheless, we think that an adequate understanding of Călinescu’s criticism cannot elude its relationships with the critical discourses situated in its immediate contemporaneousness. The study of these interactions may contribute not only to the more precise circumscription of the critical position supported and represented by G. Călinescu during the era, but also to a broader investigation of the literary background of that time. For this reason, we will focus our approach on G. Călinescu’s rapports to the other important critics of the interwar period: Pompiliu Constantinescu, Şerban Cioculescu, Vladimir Streinu and Perpessicius. We have limited the reference area of our study to the time interval up to the institution of communism (1948), since this period brought about a fundamental change of the rules of the literary game in Romania. As a matter of fact, following this date, not only had G. Călinescu stopped writing about any of his competitors (with the exception of, perhaps, Perpessicius, but he returns in Călinescu’s discourse only as a character of several sketches drafted by his superior at the Institute of Literary History and Folklore), but the articles on Călinescu, which the mentioned reviewers were going to publish during communism, would hold exclusively a conjectural (either reverential or commemorative) character. However, we have retained in this analysis, too, the method used in our 2009 study and taken for its greatest part from Lovinescu’s book Titu Maiorescu şi posteritatea lui critică (Titu Maiorescu and His Legacy in Criticism) (1943). This method equally involves the examination of the manner in which one critic’s image is reflected in the other one’s discourse and the one of the various methodological and analytical convergences or divergences between them. Subsequently, we have started with the polemics mysticism vs. intellectualism in which G. Călinescu involved during 1928-1929 with the editors of the magazine Kalende (Pompiliu Constantinescu, Şerban Cioculescu and Vladimir Streinu) and, throughout our demonstration, we’ve locked onto the way in which such an initial divergence is contextualised through the manner in which the former “Kalendists” analyse Tudor Arghezi’s work (Pompiliu Constantinescu), I. L. Caragiale’s life (Şerban Cioculescu) or Ion Creangă’s work (Vladimir Streinu).

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