MANUSCRISELE DIN RĂZBOI ALE LUI DUMITRU NISTOR, TUNARUL ROMÂN DIN MARINA AUSTRO-UNGARĂ
THE WAR MANUSCRIPTS OF DUMITRU NISTOR, THE ROMANIAN GUNNER FROM THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN NAVY

Summary/Abstract: To celebrate 100 years since the end of World War I, "O. Goga" Cluj County Library enjoys the existence, within the Special Collections, of a small collection of manuscripts, which represents rare bibliographic documents of high cultural authenticity and expressiveness, through their historical-ethnographic content, but also through the stylistic form they were conceived in. First of all, it is about the increasingly known Diuaru (Diary) of Dumitru Nistor, a manuscript that reflects, in its 160 pages, a whole universe as he perceives it, as the son of a Romanian peasant, a dreamer and an adventurer alike, but also realistic and eager to know his world. Designed as a war diary and, at the same time, with memorial reflections, this Diary introduces the reader in the atmosphere of the Romanian village from the early twentieth century and then into details about the outbreak of the Great War of 1914-1918. The consistency of the document is given, however, by the relaxed but carefully selective presentation of happenings, things and people he met on the way of the warship the author was boarded on, starting from Europe and up to his long captivity in Japan. Alongside this atypical journal, Cluj Library also owns two other manuscripts of the same author, containing personal or collected poems, suggestively entitled - Tinereţa e floarea vieţi / Youth is life’s flower and Dorul alinat, urâtul alungat - The longing and misery chased away - which completes the image of the imprisonment, and especially of the "worlds" Dumitru Nistor goes through and observes with great lucidity. In the context of the events and projects related to the WW1, these manuscripts and especially D. Nistor’s Diary, that has been part of the collections of "O. Goga" Cluj County Library since the 90s, were (re)discovered, being the subject of small exhibitions, studies or articles in the local press. In the attempt to promote these manuscripts, they were entirely digitized and displayed on Europeana 1914-1918 platform, and more recently, included in Transcribathon, a pan-European competition in which young people tried to transcribe them as accurately as possible, trying to get closer to the Romania's and Europe’s history. Therefore, our main objective is to provide a rigorous analysis of these interesting documents and, through them, to get to know the period described by Dumitru Nistor.

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