ANDREI CODRESCU’S IDENTITY MASKS: PSEUDONYMS AND HETERONYMS
ANDREI CODRESCU’S IDENTITY MASKS: PSEUDONYMS AND HETERONYMS

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on Andrei Codrescu’s multiple pseudonyms and heteronyms, and on their connection with the identitary issues they reveal. While he was still living in Romania, the former Andrei Perlmutter, aspiring teenage poet of Jewish descent, was suggested to select a Romanian-like pseudonym, in order to comply with the unofficial, but imposed social requirements of the period. Subsequently, after his departure from Romania – first to Italy, then to his new country, the United States –, Codrescu would constantly imagine and use a large number of pseudonyms and heteronyms. It is our opinion that this constant and persistent mask-changing and name-playing perpetuated by Codrescu represents an attempt to playfully undermine the restrictive definition of unique identity and the preconceptions associated with it. The tragicomic story of the first pseudonym adopted by the future Andrei Codrescu, as well as the long series of pseudonyms and heteronyms he later used, both as a Romanian and American writer, are presented here in association with his multiple identity and intermediary position, as an outsider-insider in both Romanian and American cultures.

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