The Detention Biography of Alexei Marinat (The Reclusion Diary 
Travelling Around the Man) Cover Image

Biografia detenției lui Alexei Marinat (jurnalul recluziunii Călătorii în jurul omului)
The Detention Biography of Alexei Marinat (The Reclusion Diary Travelling Around the Man)

Author(s): Svetlana Melnic
Subject(s): Cultural history
Published by: Editura Muzeelor Literare
Keywords: Detention biography; communist regime; memoirs; confession literature; drawer literature;

Summary/Abstract: Following the establishment of the communist regime in Bessarabia after 1940, the memorialist Alexei Marinat refuses to accept the Soviet dictatorship, suffering from professional humiliation and political persecution. The recognition of the communist dictatorship is unacceptable to the ambitious diarist who is later sentenced to ten-years’ imprisonment in the Gulag re-education camps. Named “Solzhenitsyn of Bessarabia”, Alexei Marinat succeeds in completing the image of an inferno of the dictatorial torture that haunted the Romanian society between the Prut and the Dniester. The reclusion diary “Travelling Around the Man”, published in 2004, for which he was granted the Writers’ Union Award in Moldova, registers the itinerary of the former intellectual who did not accept the ideological authority. The confessional work of the memorialist, significant in describing the repressive condition of the individual, and illustrating the incarceration, the torture, and the psychological violence, provides a convenient framework for the reconstruction of a living portrait of the common oppressive structure, behind which, a rich moral universe of dissidents is discovered. The experience of the Gulag, in all its complexity, and the autobio-graphical study offered by the diarist are precious historic prerequisites aiming at revealing the crimes of the oppressive Soviet regime.

  • Issue Year: XIII/2020
  • Issue No: XIII
  • Page Range: 94-102
  • Page Count: 9
  • Language: Romanian