LENA CONSTANTE. CONFESIUNILE UNEI FIINȚE INDESTRUCTIBILE
LENA CONSTANTE. CONFESSIONS OF AN INDESTRUCTIBLE HUMAN BEING

Summary/Abstract: Lena Constante’s post-carceral confession - ”The Silent Escape” - remains one of the most shocking testimonies of the last century against totalitarianism. The writer (also a visual artist) x-rays the whole carceral metabolism from a unique perspective. Lena Constante, like most of the prisoners of Romanian totalitarianism, has undertaken three stages of temptation: doubt, freedom and suicide. The trauma renders the narrative voice a broken aspect in the first part, attenuated as the confession unfolds, able to be tempted by new zones: of style and of autofiction. Apart from political aspects, the most violent plot of the book is the bystanding of the separation from herself in the body. This is an experience more intense than torture, interrogations, hunger, or diabolic people. She learns how to renounce her body, how to dismiss it, as ascetics do, she redefines her body with the help of the mind. During the nine years of solitude in prison, she develops a therapy of the spiritual. She becomes a winner to the extent that she wins over her-feeble-self, over that self afraid of death and agnostic. After going through all the circles of an inferno, in her expressionist poetry of writing, on the flesh of her youth there is an outgrowth of words, prolonged as painted images, either. Her story of words and painted images is the story of an indestructible being, who has overcome the absurd by assuming the costs of metamorphoses.

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