From Romantic Nationalism to National Communism. Marx, Anti-Russianism and the Romanian Cause in 1855 and 1964
From Romantic Nationalism to National Communism. Marx, Anti-Russianism and the Romanian Cause in 1855 and 1964

Summary/Abstract: The article analyzes the 1964 Romanian edition of Karl Marx entitled Notes on the Romanians in the attempt to recover its contexts and significance. For that, it focuses on two distinct historical moments. First, it analyzes from a genealogical perspective Marx’s annotations on the Romanians and detects their origin in the Romanian Romantic nationalists’ historical narrative concerning the politics of tsarist Russia vis-à-vis Romanian Principalities in the nineteenth century. Secondly, it examines the instrumentalization of these annotations by the Romanian official historiography at the beginning of the 1960s, focusing on the new political stakes that were in play at that particular moment in the Communist block. Spanning almost two centuries of charged history and various intellectual spaces and traditions, the article methodologically recovers a case of ‘entangled history’ – or ‘histoire croisée’ – that eschews attempts of unilateral appropriation.

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