Dimitrie Cantemir între alegorie şi basnă: două moduri de a nara istoria
Dimitrie Cantemir between Allegory and Tale: two Ways of Narrating History

Summary/Abstract: The study elucidates the relationship between fiction and reality, between lived history and imaginary past, through an exegesis focusing upon what the author calls „narratology”. Consequently, it is an investigation into the historian’s laboratory of creation, looking for the impulse that generated his work. Consequently, he selected out of the whole Cantemirian work The Hieroglyphic History and Hronicon, an allegorical novel and an erudite writing, in order to analyse „the tale” about the Moldavians’ origin. In both cases, the author insists upon the fictionalizing of the past through the narrative. In the first case, Cantemir did not have the intention of a heroic history, but of a history where he wished to reveal the mechanisms oh power. In the second case, the Hronicon, following his predecessors, Cantemir is undertaking, by different means, an ample research in the historical sources, called to dismantle the legend propagated by Simion Dascălul. The study tries to discover the historical kernel of the legendary narrative. The author of the study thinks that Cantemir initiated the pamphlet in the Romanian literature, a source imbued with the Enlightenment rationalism that the prince was announcing.

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