THE EXPERIENCE OF TRAVELLING REFLECTED IN VASILE ALECSANDRI’S PROSE
THE EXPERIENCE OF TRAVELLING REFLECTED IN VASILE ALECSANDRI’S PROSE

Summary/Abstract: Vasile Alecsandri, as a young student, being overwhelmed by the romantic feeling of escaping, leaves the country in August 1834, to continue his studies in Paris. His literary debut takes place in 1840, in the Dacia Literară magazine, with the poems ‹‹Buchetiera de la Florenţa›› and ‹‹Propăşirea›› (1844). He also continues with the publication of his travel memories. He writes poems as well, but his literary activity which he performs most and foremost is that related to the theatre. After some trips, he and Alecu Russo undertook in the villages and in the mountains of Moldavia in 1842, Alecsandri writes his first poems in the Romanian language: ‹‹Baba Cloanța››, ‹‹Sara and the thief››, which appear afterwards in the magazine Propășirea (1844). Alecsandri’s prose belongs to the common narrative type, which we usually call literary account. When we talk about the writers’ journeys from 1848, we could not avoid referring to the Western romanticism, which used this genre a lot. The geographical spaces explored, the wish for travelling, the spirit of this displacement are more different for the Romanian writers than those from Western Europe. The reason concerns not only this sector of the prose, but also the relations between the Romanian literature and the Western romanticism. In this way, the travel journal gets an epistolary character of intimate writing or of agreeable causerie, as the poet used to say. Another sector of Alecsandri’s prose, of the same value as the travel notes or the memoir writings, is that of epistolary form. The biographies written by Alecsandri belong to his literary prose, as long as this is a literary one, because it represents either memoir writings (‹‹Nicolae Bălcescu in Moldavia››, ‹‹Constantin Negruzzi››, ‹‹Alecu Russo››), or travel notes (‹‹Prosper Mérimée››). In the exchange of the literary epistles with Ion Ghica, the poet’s contribution was somehow reduced. However, Alecsandri takes great pleasure in this remembrance of the facts and of the words, thus succeeding in blessing their names and their memory.

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