Archívumokról és könyvekről. Ellenőrzött örvény-gyakorlat
On Archives and Books: A controlled Vertigo Exercise

Summary/Abstract: Over the past ten years, I’ve been researching the family archives of Ioana and Liviu Petrescu. Up to their premature demise, in the ‘90s, they were professors of Romanian and comparative literature at the University of Cluj. The archives went from private into public ownership and are currently kept at the O. Goga District Library in Cluj. Based upon my research, I reflect on the way such private libraries and archives (belonging to the families of Romanian intellectuals under communism) should be saved from dispersal. Having attained public status, they can become thought-provoking objects of our literary history. Such objects allow for the recovery of dictatorship-resisting methods and for uncovering reading practices, the origin and circulation of literary ideas, along with elements of the private life, relevant to what we commonly term “the resistance through culture in communist Romania.”

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