Restitutio Dumitru Caracostea. Archives Documents
Restitutio Dumitru Caracostea. Archives Documents

Summary/Abstract: In the last years there has been a growing attention in the field of research studies on the Romanian culture, censored after 1948. The critic, linguist and aesthetician, Dumitru Caracostea (March 10, 1879, Slatina–June 2, 1964, Bucharest) brought up a scientific controversy with a large audience in the specialists' environments, so that there is plenty of contradictory information about his personality. Our study is dedicated to completing the image of his professional activity and to elucidate some prejudices that still persist, hoping for a reconsideration of this Romanian scholar. With obvious but unrecognized merits in his lifetime, his work has undergone a deepening from the perspective of studying the forms of representation of the Romanian artistic and popular language. Less researched remained his concern for studying the psychology of war, materialized in ten years of courses, held at the Superior War School in Bucharest. The motivation of his choice as a teacher for the officers who had already passed through the experience of the First World War was a solid training in the field of Romanian folklore, including the complexity of folk spirituality as the basis of the fighting forces of the combatants. The complex personality of the ante, inter and post-war period, Dumitru Caracostea left the posterity an ample scientific activity, both in the public space, especially in the literary one. Among the functions he held, we recall the most important: he was a correspondent member of the Romanian Academy since 1936 and a member from 1938; Minister of National Education (1940); General Director of the Union of Royal Cultural Institutions (1941–1944); President of the Romanian Academy Literary Section (1945–1948). His scientific career came to an end in 1948, when he was definitively excluded alongside other members of the Romanian Academy, following the Presidential decree for the purification of intellectuals that no longer met the criteria of the new Academy of the Romanian People's Republic. There were years of troubled for Dumitru Caracostea's life, like other repudiates of the period after 1948, culminating in the imprisonment in Sighet where he spent five years (1950-1955) without being tried but charged with war crimes. In 1990 he was reinstated in post mortem as a member of the Romanian Academy. (1)

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