VOICULESCU AND HIS SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE
VOICULESCU AND HIS SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I have framed the fundamental themes (magical practices, rituals and superstitions) that function as cultural models, as an opportunity for the reader to regain the powers and the greatness of folklore. Vasile Voiculescu manages to achieve a series of possible but rare events, making use of a vocabulary full of archaisms and regionalisms that give it a unique tone. The protagonists are described as bearers of mysteries, with their unusual, extraordinary appearance, in a space where primitive popular imagination and modern civilization meet. The two parts propose a type of character initiated in the ancestral mysteries of the symbolic universe. As concrete examples I used the short stories The Last Beer and the Bad Lake. Through the story In the midst of wolves I approached the subject of events beyond nature, that is, the common world, wild animals, magical people, hunters. This is what Vladimir Streinu called in the substantial introduction to the two volumes of Stories from 1966 the pairing of the tribal mentality with modern intellectualism, from which came stories of a fascinating naturalistic and folkloric occultism or ancient magical practices, lost in the modern world, inattentive to them. With the help of the novel Zacchaeus the Blind, I concluded the work by summing up the folk motifs as figures of rhetoric that were also used in the exaltation of some chosen ones of the divinity. In their lives the intervention of the sacred was constantly brought to light by the writer who undertook his work precisely to edify, to fortify piety. The lives of the saints are a mixture of the natural and the supernatural.

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