Author(s): Antoaneta Adela Szilagyi / Language(s): English
Issue: 27/2021
The most famous work of the Transylvanian novelist Augustin Buzura and the best-selling Romanian novel of the last half century is the novel Orgolii. Through the analytical courage of interpersonal relationships, and its unique epic formula, it is perceived as an authentic literary event. The novel was re-edited several times after the first edition emerged in 1977, followed by 1985 and 2008. Orgolii explores the vices of the academical world and captures the story of Ion Cristian, a surgeon whose ego orbits around deciphering the idea of truth. The events take place in a medical research facility, nearing the election of a new rector. Ion Cristian is a brilliant surgeon, wrongly imprisoned, who after being released, finds a relative balance in his research work, his ego revolving around the discovery of a cure for cancer. His qualities, reputation, capacity for work and ethics – attract enemies ready to jeopardize him, driving him out of his laboratory mission. Obsessed by truth, the surgeon follows this concept in two areas of his life: socially and scientifically, even if in his personal life, this quest has brought him much suffering. Thus, through his everlasting confrontations with the human limits and alienation, doctor Ion Cristian represents, out of all the Transylvanian novelist’s heroes, the heroic facet of the ethical individual. In the end of the novel, the character analyzes thoroughly all his feelings, successful experiences, and failures, understanding that by using his ego he has managed to attain a lot, but not everything, because the novel is first and foremost the story of a destiny against the bounds of science. The profound analysis of the hero is what transforms the book into the drama of a creative destiny, in a psychological novel that emphasizes every character’s lucidity, the rough realism of events is what drives the reader closer to the inner realities of each individual, alongside each dilemma they face.
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