DELIRIUM, INSANITY AND ECSTASY IN ALECSANDRI’S THEATRE
DELIRIUM, INSANITY AND ECSTASY IN ALECSANDRI’S THEATRE

Summary/Abstract: This article proposes a comparative approach to carnival in its various guises, charged by Alecsandri with the aim of truthfully portraying contemporaneity. His characters are often suffering from psychic mutations and pathologies of thought, which reside in the poverty of the spirit and the undisguised resistance to the current of change. Like Molière, for Alecsandri the fundamental condition of using theories and instruments of drama is that they produce laughter. The effect is, paradoxically, that of a literary dignity reserved, until that moment, essentially for tragedies, the alchemy of the human psyche being triggered against the background of feverish consciousness and the identity division of the spirit. Using syllogistic reasoning, we formulate the premise that Iași in carnival constitutes a reply that Alecsandri gives to Shakespearean theater and French satire and, through the comparative and symbolic analysis of the functions of burlesque in the exploitation and exorcism of eternal human vices, we demonstrate that the role of carnival remains that of diagnosing the individual's inadaptation to evolution, the incompatibility with a society self-denounces itself to the comic with fine irony. Consequently, madness appears more as a pretext for contextualizing an era in which reason exists only outside the sphere of the subjective and debates, in its deficient core, political, social, economic issues with a great capacity of influencing the public spirit.

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