Two Canonical Romanian Writers Fictionalized: Florina Ilis’s Biofictions
Two Canonical Romanian Writers Fictionalized: Florina Ilis’s Biofictions

Summary/Abstract: The collapse of the Communist regime in Romania in December 1989 triggered a series of fundamental transformations. One of these – the unsettling transition from ideological to postmodern, relativistic truth – only gradually gained acceptance among Romanian intellectuals. Post-1989, contacts between Romanian cultural elites and their Western colleagues intensified, formerly inaccessible domestic archives and hidden library stacks were opened, and Romania itself began living in a new paradigm of truth, whose essence was historicity. Everyone knew that Eminescu, the indisputable Romanian “national poet” had blurry episodes in his biography, or that the Transylvanian poet Lucian Blaga had been persecuted by the Communist regime in the final decade of his life. At the same time, the myths constructed around the two poets continued to grow both in scholarly circles and among the general public. This is the cultural and historic context of Florina Ilis’s two biofictions: the first one dedicated to Mihai Eminescu, and the second one to Lucian Blaga. This article unpacks the relationship between Florina Ilis’ writings and biofiction as a (sub)genre by analysing the two novels in light of the genre’s theoretical framework.

• Details
• Contents