The “Elsewhere” as a Personal Semantic Matrix in Vasile Alecsandri’s Travel Writings
The “Elsewhere” as a Personal Semantic Matrix in Vasile Alecsandri’s Travel Writings

Summary/Abstract: A literary and spiritual document, Vasile Alecsandri’s travel writings constitute the subject of this paper. Apart from their value in terms of education and pleasure, they reveal the psychological structure of the traveler, his attitude towards life, as well as his capacity to artistically transform the real events he experienced. Moreover, travel writings attract interest from an esthetic point of view; thus, given that the pilgrim Alecsandri maked the genre flourish, it marked an important sector in the literature of the 1848 revolutionary period. The present analytical-interpretative study of its most characteristic aspects highlights descriptions, portraits, the writer’s irony, lyricism, his talent and, even more importantly, his constant involvement in the national and social struggle of this agitated epoch – the involvement of a patriot devoted to his country. All the reasons stated above suggest that Alecsandri’s prose constitutes a major chapter in his creation, travel memoirs being the most significant part of this prose. Writing about Alecsandri as a prose writer means, first and foremost, considering the interpretations of memoir literature, on the one hand, and the constants of its subject matter, on the other.

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