RANSYLVANIAN EVIEW Vol. XXV T R No. 2 /REVUE DE TRANSYLVANIE Summer 2016 Contents/Sommaire ROMANIAN ACADEMY Chairman: • Paradigms Academician Ionel-Valentin Vlad Unde Malum? Dualist(oid) and Gnostic Imaginary, from Folk Mythology to Modern Romanian Literature 3 CENTER FOR Nicoleta Popa Blanariu TRANSYLVANIAN STUDIES Director: Edgar Allan Poe: Reflections on Poetry 21 Academician Ioan-Aurel Pop Saša Simović The Barbarianism of the Civilized Man: Literary Allegories 37 Alina Silvana Felea Dompter le modernisme – l’expressivité selon les modernes 48 Marius Nenciulescu The Failed Recovery of Dissidence Literature in Romania: I. D. Sîrbu—An Exemplary Case 56 Anca Ursa • Legacy La fondation de la Société littéraire (académique) et la session de constitution de 1867 65 Dan Berindei • Focus Laudatio 87 Viorel Rujea Discurso de recepción 94 Antonio Gamoneda Antonio Gamoneda: Vida y obra 100 The First Jazz Scholar to Become Doctor Honoris Causa of the G. Dima Music Academy in Cluj 109 On the cover: Virgil Mihaiu CRISTIAN OPRIº Jazz Journeys 112 Român 1999 (Romanian 1999) John Edward Hasse lithography (1999) • Fine Arts Transylvanian Review continues the A New Approach to Arts Management in the tradition of Revue de Transylvanie, Context of the Romanian Contemporary Art Scene 129 founded by Silviu Dragomir, which Florin ªtefan was published in Cluj and then in Sibiu between 1934 and 1944. Dana Altman Transylvanian Review is published Unfinished Measurements I, II, and III 144 quarterly by the Center for Transylvanian Miklos Onucsan Studies and the Romanian Academy. Adrian Ghenie: le travail de la figure 153 EDITORIAL BOARD Laura Marin CESARE ALZATI, Ph.D. Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione, Istituto • Contributors 160 di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, Università Cattolica, Milan, Italy • Illustrations Following Page 160 HORST FASSEL, Ph.D. Institut für donauschwäbische Geschichte Florin ªtefan und Landeskunde, Tübingen, Germany Miklos Onucsan KONRAD GÜNDISCH, Ph.D. Cristian Opriº Bundesinstitut für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa, Oldenburg, Germany HARALD HEPPNER, Ph.D. Institut für Geschichte, Graz, Austria PAUL E. MICHELSON, Ph.D. Huntington University, Indiana, USA ALEXANDRU ZUB, Ph.D. Academician, honorary director of A. D. Xenopol Institute of History, Iaºi, Romania EDITORIAL STAFF Ioan-Aurel Pop Virgil Leon Nicolae Bocºan Daniela Mârza Ioan Bolovan Alexandru Simon Raveca Divricean Florian D. Soporan Maria Ghitta George State Rudolf Gräf Translated by Bogdan Aldea—English Publication indexed and abstracted in the Liana Lãpãdatu—French Thomson Reuters Social Sciences Citation Index® Desktop Publishing and in Arts & Humanities Citation Index®, Edith Fogarasi Cosmina Varga and included in EBSCO’s and ELSEVIER’s products. Correspondence, manuscripts and books ISSN 1221-1249 should be sent to: Transylvanian Review, Centrul de Studii Transilvane (Center for Transylvanian Studies) 12–14 Mihail Kogãlniceanu St., Cluj-Napoca 400084, Romania. All material copyright © 2016 by the Center for Transylvanian Studies and the Romanian Academy. Reproduction or use Printed in Romania by COLOR PRINT without written permission is prohibited. 66, 22 Decembrie 1989 St., Zalãu 450031, Romania [email protected] Tel. (0040)260-660598 www.centruldestudiitransilvane.ro paradIGMS Unde Malum? Dualist(oid) and Gnostic Imaginary, from Folk Mythology to Modern N I co LETA P O PA B LANARIU Romanian Literature “L’inconscience est une OUR STUDY relies, on the one hand, on the identification of a continuity patrie; la conscience, phenomenon in European culture— un exil.” the perpetuation, under various forms, over several centuries, of a paradigm of dualistic-gnostic imaginary—and, on the other hand, on the insufficient, rather sporadic representation of its Romanian component in the reference literature in the field. Dualistic mythol- ogy, once widespread across all conti- nents, subsisted in European folklore until the 20th century only in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, particularly in the Romanian space (Eliade 1995; see also Pamfile 2006; Cartojan 1974). Dualism has stood the test of time over the centuries, until today, being often assimilated by other philosophical and Nicoleta Popa Blanariu religious trends, including the different Lecturer at Vasile Alecsandri University Bacãu. Author of the vol. Când gestul versions of Gnosticism (Bianchi 1976, rupe tãcerea: Dansul ºi paradigmele 1978; Ivanov 1976; Marrou 1983; comunicãrii (When a gesture breaks Jonas 2001; Culianu 2002). We believe the silence: Dance and the paradigms that it is precisely this reminiscent and of communication) (2008). diffuse background of the autochtho- 4 • TRANSYLVANIAN REVIEW • VOL. XXV, NO. 2 (SUmmER 2016) nous mythical mentality that constituted, in the 19th–20th centuries, one of the premises—not necessarily the most relevant one—for the reiteration of dualistic imaginary in the Romanian classic literature, in specific forms (Bogomilism, Gnosticism), contaminated by the Western bookish tradition. Dualistic cosmogonies are the only relict of pre-Christian folk cosmogony in Europe (Eliade 1995). With ancient, yet unsolved origins, spreading over an extremely vast area in cultural geography and history, dualist myths have been traced back to Finno-Ugric, Ural-Altaic, Iranian, Slavic, Amerindian peoples and even later, in the Christian era, to European heretics such as the Bogomils (who contaminated the medieval Romanian spirituality) or the Provencal Ca- thars and their Italian successors, until the 15th century (Bianchi 1976, 1978; Ivanov 1976; Culianu 2002; Culianu 2005; Eliade 1995). In the form that they assumed within the “Western dualistic gnoses,” dualistic myths resurfaced in the 18th century with Goethe, Hegel, Sturm und Drang and the Romantics— themselves “creators of apparently gnostic myths” —, and in the literature of the 20th century (Culianu 2002, 2005; Bloom 1996). Ugo Bianchi was the first to highlight this “enigma of the history of religions,” consisting of the “repeated reactivation,” after the 1st century A.D., of ancient pre-Christian dualistic myths within those mythical-religious systems that Ioan Petru Culianu designated by the term “dualisms of the West” or “dualistic gnoses of the West” (Culianu 2002; also Bianchi 1976, 1978). Finding the continuity of these mythical-im- agistic structures, from ancient Gnosticism to the Romantics and later, Harold Bloom diagnoses a “purified Gnosticism” that almost turned, over time, into “a literary religion,” “an aesthetic and, at the same time, spiritual discipline” (Bloom 1996, 33). Like the other Western dualistic trends, Gnosticism is a “phenomenon of counterculture” (12). We should mention the fact that our interest lies not (necessarily) in the religious dimension of Gnosticism, but—as more appropriate to our corpus of analysis—in its functioning as an intellectual and existential paradigm. Our intention is to identify and analyze, in the wider context of the history of ideas and mentalities in Europe, the persistence of these ancient dualist(oid) structures of the imaginary in the work of representative authors of Romanian classic and interwar literature, as well as of the postwar diaspora. We have al- ready explained part of our conclusions and arguments in previous contribu- tions, hence we shall not repeat them in detail, but we shall rather attempt to complete and nuance them (Popa Blanariu 2008, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). Such a mythical-imagistic paradigm, of a dualistic-gnostic type, may be iden- tified in the work of Goethe, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Leopardi, Baudelaire, with the Russian symbolists, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and existentialists, with Beckett, Thomas Mann, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Thus, it has been confirmed that “the PARADIGMS • 5 modern intellect resorts to old ways of thinking” which “confirm its laceration” (Friedrich 1969, 44; Pagels 2013, 204–206; Culianu 2002, 41–56; Culianu 2006; Bloom 1996, 2007). In Romanian literature, reminiscences and allu- sions to the dualistic-gnostic imaginary or even explicit references may be found with Mihai Eminescu, Alexandru Macedonski, Lucian Blaga, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco and, to a certain extent, with Ion Barbu or Mihail Sadoveanu (see Blaga 1969; Balotã 1976; Culianu 2006; del Conte 1990; Cifor 2000; L. Petrescu 1992; Petreu 1991; Borbély 2003; I. Em. Petrescu 1993; Paleologu 2006; Laurent 2015). It is interesting to note that—as a symptom of the interwar intellectual context in Romania—in his lectures on metaphysics delivered at the University of Bucharest, Nae Ionescu, the mentor of the gen- eration of intellectuals that emerged between the two wars (with everything, good and bad, that this quality contributed to Romanian culture and history), analyses Faust by Goethe from a dualistic perspective (N. Ionescu 1996). In our opinion, the works of Eminescu, Macedonski, Blaga, Eliade, Cioran, and Ionesco illustrate, in various ways and to different degrees, the actuality in litera- ture of a dualistic Weltanschauung, especially Bogomilic or gnostic, that is one of the “paths of utopic imagination” (see Wunenburger 2001, 227–228). Without dualistic motifs having a relevant presence in his work, Tudor Arghezi nevertheless unmasks the “jester,” the “juggler,” the “crazy” God (One Hundred Poems), who displays a family similarity with the trickster, the “evil,” “charlatan,” “rogue” Demiurge from dualistic mythology. Published during the rise of proletcultism and “marked by the fingerprint of time: war, draught, con- frontation