Oameni, destine, istorie
People, Destinies, History

Summary/Abstract: In the ’90s, at the Free Europe microphone, Mircea Iorgulesu had as guests a series of cultural personalities. They related him episodes from their biographies evoking the climate of the recently collapsed society marked by terror and lies – confessions of a doubtlessly documentary value, Most impressive though are their vision of their own lives: illusions, defeats, tenacity, the unforseeableness of destinies, all bearing the unmistakable genuineness of the first person narrator. Whole reading the present confessions, one has the feeling that none of the four interlocutors has neglected William Blake’s warning: you can resist the repression, brutality, unjustness of a political regime, without ever becoming aware that you have adopted its way of thinking, that your opposing it is a proof of the fact that it manipulates you from within yourself. Therefore, four captivating interviews. The critic and literary historian Zigu Ornea talks about his persevering vocation. The Writer Herta Muller analyses from the perspective of her own life experience the relations between literature and dictatorship. The writer and translator Sanda Stolijan dewcribes her adventures to obtain a passport for France and her relations with her country of exile. While the historian Serban papacostea describes step by step the experiences of a student arrested by the Stalinists in 1950 because he had frequented the French Institute library, and who, after 1989, would head succesfully the Institute of Hostiry Nicolae Iorga.

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