Ipostaze ale „loisir”-ului de altădată oglindite în literatura română din prima jumătate a sec. al XIX-lea
Aspects of Past Leisure as Mirrored in the Romanian Literature of the First Half of the 19th Century

Summary/Abstract: The study attempts to reconstruct one of the aspects which can reveal people’s view of their own age and the way in which they adopted a certain lifestyle. To achieve this we shall insist, with justified preference, upon the spending of leisure time, the pleasant activities and the “pleasures” characteristic to the aristocracy of the age. The leisure specific to the high society of the age represents a modality of expressing some mentalities which enable us to reconstruct the general image with its characteristic details. This is a research type by which the multiple faces of human existence, of subjectivity with its constants and mutations can be resuscitated, aiding by this the representation and explanation of the human phenomenon of the age in its entire complexity. Besides other documentary sources, the literature of the age could grasp numerous forms of expressivity of the collective sensibility, but also of individual subjectivity, as well as their constants and mutations, completing the image of a society in permanent change. The innovations took place in a world deeply marked by the Levantine-Phanariote model, upon which Central and Western European values were mimetically superposed. The signs of the new marked stronger and stronger the leisure, which became a veracious and valuable historical and psychological document; a veritable mirror of former times, in which the Romanian world recognizes its face undistorted; a document through which the lights and the shadows, the hopes and disappointments, quests and successes can be resuscitated. Using fragments from the literary texts of the age, the study makes a “journey” in the world of the new fashionable pursuits of the first half of the 19th century. The introduction of foreign models, the influence of the new types of behavior changed the hierarchy of values in the Principalities, the writers of the age being able in this way to describe a heterogeneous picture, in which they rightfully gave special attention to the values “in motion”.

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