LEUL ALBASTRU DE D. R. POPESCU ȘI HERMENEUTICA SUSPICIUNII SUB COMUNISM
LEUL ALBASTRU AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION IN COMMUNISM

Summary/Abstract: This article proposes a new-historical perspective on a canonical text of contemporary Romanian literature: the story "Leul albastru" by D. R. Popescu. First published in a periodical in 1965, banned from censorship, it would borrow the title of a volume of short stories from the 1980s. The history of its publication and reception is symptomatic, therefore, in the context of the Ceausescu regime, nicknamed at that time the "golden age". In reality, the ideology of power does not change throughout the period, what changes are the rhetoric and narrative structure, which also enters Romania, under the sign of historiographical metafiction or historical fiction. The paranoia of censorship and the instigation of the proletariat (but, unfortunately, also of the students, whose "revolts" to order end with the removal of G. Călinescu and a whole pleiad of distinguished university professors) against intellectual elites weakens under the impact of translations from literature magical realism and national creations of the same kind, which generate a massive corpus of texts in which the fantastic element, superimposed on the realistic ones, is no longer necessarily interpreted as subversive political allusion, as Aesopian literature. The chronodiegetic level of the story no longer refers to social reality, but to acts of language, to artifacts. The protagonist dislocates the memories of his biographical past by filtering them through almost fabulous representations, such as monkeys (political puppets) or the lion in a cage (arrested intellectuals).

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