Mircea Vulcănescu și „dimensiunea românească a existenței”
Mircea Vulcănescu and “the Romanian Dimension of Existence”

Summary/Abstract: A very gifted personality, Mircea Vulcănescu was considered the representative figure of the generation formed around the Romanian magazine Criterion. He was a sociologist, philosopher, professor, writer and publicist. Vulcănescu was part of Dimitrie Gusti’s team of sociologists, who conducted research into the world of the Romanian village. After 1937, he was preoccupied with the elaboration of a model of the Romanian character. Vulcănescu analyzed the Romanian dimension and concluded that the “Romanian soul” is complex and original. The special geographical and geopolitical position – always at the crossroads of empires, on the border of Central Europe, the Eurasian steppes and the Balkans – made the Romanian space both a “corridor of invasion” and a “theater of war”. These specific historical conditions favoured the development of a biological and mental specificity. For Vulcănescu, the westernization represented an anomaly, an “alienation” from the Romanian nature, an interruption of the natural course of things. In the Romanian mentality, everything must be rooted in the order of nature. It is in the part of Vulcan's philosophy in which the most “autochthonous” notes are detectable as well as in his theory of temptations that we particularly perceive the influence of some ideological ferments which agitated the Romanian culture in the interwar period. His reflections are, in fact, in line with the preoccupations of his time.

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