Mircea Nedelciu
Encyclopedia
Mircea Nedelciu (ˈmirt͡ʃe̯a neˈdelt͡ʃju; November 12, 1950 – July 12, 1999) was a Romania
n short-story writer, novelist, essayist and literary critic, one of the leading exponents of the Optzecişti generation in Romanian letters
. The author of experimental prose
, mixing elements of conventional narratives with autofiction
, textuality
, intertextuality
and, in some cases, fantasy
, he placed his work at the meeting point between Postmodernism
and a minimalist
form of Neorealism
. This approach is illustrated by his volumes of stories and his novels Zmeura de cîmpie ("Raspberry of the Field"), Tratament fabulatoriu ("Confambulatory Treatment"), and by Femeia în roşu ("The Woman in Red"), a collaborative fiction
piece written together with Adriana Babeţi and Mircea Mihăieş.
A follower of trends in avant-garde
literature of the 1960s and '70s, Nedelciu co-founded the literary circle Noii ("The New Ones") with Gheorghe Crăciun, Gheorghe Ene, Ioan Flora, Gheorghe Iova, Ioan Lăcustă, Emil Paraschivoiu, Sorin Preda and Constantin Stan. His integration as an authoritative voice on the Postmodern scene, inaugurated by his presence in the Desant '83 anthology, was complimented by his free-minded attitude and drifter lifestyle. Although Nedelciu's political nonconformism pitted him against the repressive communist system
on several occasions, he stood out on the literary scene for adapting to some communist requirements in order to get his message across. This tendency made Nedelciu the target of controversy.
The final years of Mircea Nedelciu's life witnessed his publicized struggle with Hodgkin's lymphoma
, which shaped the themes in his unfinished novel, Zodia Scafandrului ("Sign of the Deep-sea Diver"). Although the rhythm of his activity slowed under the pressures of infirmity and major surgery in French
clinics, Nedelciu continued his involvement with the literary scene, as both cultural promoter and polemicist, until shortly before his death. His critical posterity is sharply divided on issues surrounding the importance of his work, between those who primarily view him as an eccentric figure and those who describe him as one Romania's major experimental writers.
, Călăraşi County
, where his parents Ştefan and Maria worked in agriculture (Nedelciu's father was also employed by the House of Savings, a state-run bank). The couple's resistance to forced collectivization
had engendered political repercussions, and impacted on the family's standing: Nedelciu's older sister was expelled from university for one year. The family was also periodically harassed by the communist authorities after their son-in-law decided to cross the Iron Curtain
, settling in the United States
.
Mircea Nedelciu attended primary school in his native town and high school in Brăneşti
, and afterward left for the national capital of Bucharest
, in order to complete his studies. A student at the University of Bucharest
Faculty of Letters, specializing in English and French
, Nedelciu was attracted into bohemian
, cosmopolitan
and countercultural
circles, growing his hair long and informing himself on new developments in Western culture
. His time as a student overlapped with an episode of liberalization
which coincided with the early rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu
, and which, as Nedelciu himself recalled, provided young intellectuals with access to cultural items that were less known or were recovering from official censorship
. These included texts Nedelciu read in the University Library: the French journal Tel Quel
and the works of Mikhail Bulgakov
, William Faulkner
, John Dos Passos
and J. D. Salinger
. Nonconformism also impacted on his student life: reportedly, he only attended courses which he found interesting, neglecting all others.
Nedelciu was especially close to his colleague and campus roommate Gheorghe Crăciun and to painter Ion Dumitriu, and vacationed in Crăciun's native Braşov County
. It was also during his time in college that he helped found Noii, which in its original form also comprised Flora and "the three Gheorghes" (Crăciun, Ene, Iova). The club was later joined by Lăcustă, Paraschivoiu, Sorin Preda and Stan. Noii, which for a while published an eponymous student magazine, survived both its members' graduation and the national communist
backlash inaugurated by the July Theses
of 1971, but remained marginal on the literary scene, and discreetly reacted against the new restrictive guidelines by cultivating difference. According to Nedelciu's own recollection: "In all these years down to 1980, the club was a literary life completely separated from the official literary life."
After completing his studies in 1973 and turning down a post-graduate assignment at a school in the remote Danube Delta
, Nedelciu went through several jobs, including that of tour guide
for foreigners. According to literary historian Sanda Cordoş, his refusal of initial employment exposed him to the political regime's suspicion for "parasitism
". Nedelciu was however able to publish his first literary piece, the short story Un purtător de cuvânt ("A Spokesman"), hosted by a Luceafărul magazine issue of 1977.
literary club". Also according to Cordoş, Nedelciu was still being subject to political pressures for his family connections and his refusal to join the Romanian Communist Party
.
With his 1979 volume of short stories, Aventuri într-o curte interioară ("Adventures in an Interior Courtyard"), Nedelciu became a notorious figure among young authors, and earned the Writers' Union
annual prize for debut. He was by then also affiliated with Junimea, a workshop and literary society named after its 19th-century predecessor
and hosted by the influential critic Ovid Crohmălniceanu. Nedelciu followed up on his writing with the short story volumes Effectul de ecou controlat ("The Controlled Echo Effect") of 1981 and Amendament la instinctul proprietăţii ("Amendment to the Proprietary Instinct") of 1983. Owing to Crohmălniceanu's patronage, his prose works were published as part of the critically acclaimed Desant '83 anthology, which set the tone for Optzecişti writings. From this moment on until his death, Nedelciu was at the forefront of debates opposing the Optzecişti to their older colleagues, and stood among those members of his generation who willingly accepted to be called "Postmodernists". A separate and enduring controversy, involving Nedelciu's apparent endorsement of the repressive regime, was sparked in 1982. That year, he signed a lampoon piece targeting anti-communist
exiles who broadcast clandestinely into Romania by means of Radio Free Europe
, and had it published in Scînteia Tineretului (or SLARS), the mouthpiece of Communist Youth
and branch of the main official party newspaper Scînteia
.
Zmeura de cîmpie, Tratament fabulatoriu and the new short prose grouping Şi ieri va fi o zi ("And Yesterday Will Be Another Day"), published in 1984, 1986 and 1989 respectively, were Nedelciu's last volumes to emerge in print before the 1989 Revolution
. The former was published by the Romanian Army's specialized venue Editura Militară
, which commentators have considered slightly unusual, ultimately tying the decision to the text's oblique mentions of World War II
. First issued in 1990, Femeia în roşu was co-written with Anglicist
Mircea Mihăieş and comparatist
Adriana Babeţi. A best seller, it went through a second edition in 1997.
A second revised edition of Tratament fabulatoriu came in 1996. The following year, Femeia în roşu was tuned into an eponymous film, directed by Mircea Veroiu
. It was also at that stage that Nedelciu began collecting his essays of criticism, grouped in the 1994 anthology Competiţia Continuă. Generaţia '80 în texte teoretice ("The Race Goes On: the Eighties Generation in Theoretical Texts"). In 1996, Nedelciu was involved in the open debate organized by the Writers' Union magazine România Literară
and critic Nicolae Manolescu
, whose purposes were defining the nature and expectations of Romanian Postmodernism and allowing its representatives a reply to criticism. A section of the debate opposed Nedelciu to the younger writer Ion Manolescu, the latter of whom had objected to the supposed Optzecişti monopoly on Postmodernist terminology while arguing that a more genuine manifestation of the current was to be found in the emerging forms of electronic literature
. Nedelciu also contributed to Dan Petrescu and Luca Piţu's 1998 anthology of erotic literature
, Povestea poveştilor generaţiei '80 ("The Tale of the Tales of the 80s Generation").
, a rare type of lymphoma
with which he was diagnosed in 1988, and which severely impaired his motor skills. His treatment involved difficult surgery, performed with French assistance; in 1995, he was subject to a bone marrow autograft, carried out in Romania with additional help from Marseille
's Paoli-Calmettes Institute. Although he was eventually forced to use a wheelchair, Nedelciu continued to be active on the literary scene, both through his involvement with the Writers' Union and his founding of Euromedia, a Franco-Romanian company specialized in distributing literature. He also briefly served as editor of Contrapunct, a magazine launched by the Optzecişti, and, after accusing the Writers' Union of "Stalinism
", joined other disgruntled authors in creating the Association of Professional Writers. Late in his life, he also presided over the initiative to monitor book circulations, setting up the external auditor program Topul naţional de carte ("National Book Rankings"). His output was much reduced and his ability to write altogether threatened, but he was still working on Zodia Scafandrului, his final contribution to literature.
After a 1996 treatment session in France, Nedelciu was informed that his life expectation depended on procedures which cost 70,000 American dollars
—a sum described by Nedelciu himself as "huge". Commenting on these developments, he indicated having resolving not to accept either "capitulation" or "the solution of humiliation", and declared himself optimistic about the possibility of collecting funds in dignity. His efforts were supported by the literary community, who organized a series of fundraiser
s, the collection being supplemented by government authorities. In late 1997, Nedelciu applied for a visa
in order to get treatment in France, but it was not granted. This prompted indignation on the Romanian literary scene, and press campaigns criticizing the French Embassy in Bucharest. In November of that year, while participating in the Gaudeamus Book Fair, Nedelciu was able to collect the endorsement of various local cultural personalities for his own manifesto, which demanded "freedom of movement
throughout Europe for those who are in need of it". The French authorities eventually rescinded their decision, and the writer left for Marseille, where he underwent an intervention to improve his mobility.
Mircea Nedelciu died on July 12, 1999, and was buried at Bellu two days later. His tombstone bears the title of one of his books, "And Yesterday Will Be Another Day". In a short memoir of the event, his Noii colleague Stan commented on the "subtle irony" of his burial having taken place on Bastille Day
, France's national celebration.
, metafiction
and autofiction
. Inside Noii, he reportedly cut the figure of an innovator, a promoter, and the club member most interested in literary theory. This verdict was partly backed by Alex. Ştefănescu, who remarks: "Like other authors from his generation, Mircea Nedelciu took care to define himself his own manner of writing, before literary critics did". According to critic Adina Diniţoiu, the period of "theoretical effervescence", in which Nedelciu assimilated inspiration from diverse sources, was followed by a "growing preoccupation for language." Writing during the second part of his career, Nedelciu reflected back with self-irony: "the writer's childhood diseases are [...] the wish the theorize and the baroque
. Which shall the disease of old age be? I do not know. Probably monumentality, classicization!"
Owing to their secondary nature, that of literary tests, Nedelciu's works abound in references and compliments to, as well as borrowings from, various authors. Names critics cite in this context include Romanian classics such as Ion Luca Caragiale
, Mateiu Caragiale
, Mircea Eliade
and Marin Preda
. Nedelciu's narratives were overall significantly indebted to American fiction
, and in particular to J. D. Salinger
, in whose Catcher in the Rye
he reportedly found the first model for his own autofictional style. He is also known to have reworked and blended into his own texts various themes borrowed from Ernest Hemingway
. The Anglosphere
became the Romanian author's primary cultural reference, and, according to researcher Caius Dobrescu, Nedelciu was one of those "fascinated" with the ideas of Canadian
essayist Northrop Frye
on "the constant degeneration of the character" in Western literature
. His inspiration sources also covered French authors associated with the May 1968 movement. Primarily related to his interest in the textuality
and intertextuality
techniques of Tel Quel
theorists, French echoes are ranked by Diniţoiu as secondary in Nedelciu's work. The author did however make extensive use of constrained writing
techniques popularized by France's avant-garde
, stating his admiration for the lipogram
s of Georges Perec
. According to a testimonial by his friend Gheorghe Crăciun, Mircea Nedelciu also adopted "action writing
"-like techniques, "without prior minute elaboration", displaying "that science of controlling one's own text bear-handed." Diniţoiu also mentions the "passion [...] for exact science
" as a distinct trait of Nedelciu's experimentation, accounting for his "stylistic rigor".
Nedelciu equaled his integration into the Desant '83 group with an affiliation to Postmodernism
, an interpretation of positioning which came to divide the Optzecişti camp. Mircea Cărtărescu
, another member of this faction, referred to his colleague as "the uncontested prose leader of the 1980s", while Mihăieş acknowledged in him "the true leader of our generation, whose rule was naturally acknowledged, indisputable and therefore not at all constrictive." In tandem, author Daniel Cristea-Enache retrospectively referred to Nedelciu as a "Pope
of Romanian textualism" whose "strongest asset" was literary theory. The main meeting point between Nedelciu's style and Postmodernist tenets is provided by his attachment to reinterpreting literary conventions, often with the introduction of self-referential
material or provoking artistic license
.
approach to Neorealism
, which linked him directly to fellow Optzecişti Ioan Groşan, Cristian Teodorescu and Sorin Preda. For the author himself, Postmodernist-textualist practices and the tradition of literary realism
were complementary, in that the former meant "the realism of attitudes toward the real", a conclusion to which he added: "The document, the act, the direct transmission of an event that has actually happened may enter a literary text's economy, where they are no longer 'artistically transfigured' but authenticated [Nedelciu's italics]." According to literary critic Mihai Oprea, who builds his comments on terms introduced by essayist Monica Spiridon, Nedelciu's textualist approach to literature as its own reality actually followed a middle course between "referential verisimilitude
, preoccupied with retracing reality" and a "cultural verisimilitude", whose characteristic is "a world of objects already interpreted and ideologically formed by a certain culture." Cristea-Enache also discusses the impact that the interwar
Romanian Social Realist
Camil Petrescu
had on Nedelciu's style, where it resurfaced in an adapted form. Essayist Genţiana Moşneanu, who defines Nedelciu's prose as being dominated by the sense of sight and recurring references to optical instrument
s, argues: "[His] sight digs into the sordidness of everyday banality in order to present us with samples of reality based on minute facts. All that which resides within the author's field of vision is transmitted to us, the readers, giving us that impression of 'real reality', of real life." In addition to this, she identifies a "kaleidoscope
" effect, which subverts the order of realistic details between the levels of each narrative, concluding: "The manner in which Mircea Nedelciu has captured everyday banality leaves the impression of a film based on real fact, where the characters and incidents have been introduced for aesthetic reasons." A similar argument was made by Gheorghe Crăciun, who compared the effect with the "hallucinatory something" of a "film clip", translated as "a world continuously in the making".
For Sanda Cordoş, his short fiction represents "a propitious moment" and a "resurrection" synonymous with "the creative type of the '80s." One of Nedelciu's cogenerationists and friends, critic Ion Bogdan Lefter, also recalled how Nedelciu's personality reflected in his style and choice of subjects, noting the great pauses his colleague would leave between his works, and how "the details of reality which [Nedelciu] would bring into conversation" were casually integrated in later texts. Lefter argued: "[he] was a writer without writing" who "observed and described, lived and retold." Among the narrative techniques setting Nedelciu apart among his generation colleagues was that of so-called "live transmissions", or stories in which the mixture of coherent record and textualist transcript led to an identification with the subject. Another colleague and friend of Nedelciu, Cristian Teodorescu, recalled: "one of these stories was the transcript of a front line diary by a peasant who fought in World War II
. I repeatedly asked Nedelciu what the deal was with the peasant's diary. Eventually, he admitted that he only owned a few pages of the diary, that the rest had been lost. Had he filled out the rest? He would not tell me. He knew how to defend the mysteries of his prose, taking shelter behind textualist explanations on 'text generation'." Items of regular life transposed into his prose notably include the phone number of his fellow writer Radu Cosaşu, recorded in one of Nedelciu's prose fragments.
Some commentators attribute Mircea Nedelciu's work with other distinct qualities, stemming from a confrontation of identities: his rural and provincial roots over his adoption by the cosmopolitan Bucharest
scene. This issue is reflected in a 2006 statement Crăciun: "He is, after all, a cosmopolitan figure, I could even say a frivolous figure. He runs away from the world to which he belongs, in search of the urban world, but he nevertheless can never part with the former." The claim was supported by Diniţoiu, who argued that Nedelciu's frivolity refers to his "southern" roots in the historical region
of Wallachia
, which contrasted with and "captivated" the Transylvania
n-born Crăciun. In the assessment of Sanda Cordoş, "Nedelciu's freedom of spirit was rooted in peasant culture and the literary life of the city, and he preserved it after graduation in 1973." Such aspects of Mircea Nedelciu's work and biography are reflected in his choice of subjects and underlying themes, listed by Cordoş as "travel, vagrancy and wandering through everyday reality, immediately experienced." The "need for freedom", Diniţoiu argues, is associated in Nedelciu's fiction with "surprisingly romance" love affairs, whose female protagonists "are often on the verge of ideal projection
." The narrative is generally laid out as a ceaseless travel, and the often guide-like protagonists seem to suffer their crises only in rare moments of respite. An allusive background to these fictional biographies is provided by the social context: like the author himself, the characters are often uprooted people who relate to historical events as a seminal but mysterious collective trauma
. In addition to this element, Crăciun lists the recurring themes of Nedelciu's fiction as "archeology", "meteorology
" and "the mechanisms through which nature and the surrounding life exercise pressure on the individual", adding: "Each of these three elements [...] is liable to provoke the distortion of reality, the emergence of strange phenomenons, abrupt changes of life and destiny, the passage from the immediate space into other spaces, at the very least atypical if not fantastical ones." A similar listing of Mircea Nedelciu's main preoccupation was also provided by Lefter.
authors. He also argued that the group's identification with Postmodernist theses prevented others from doing the same, and that the approximation implied by this process rendered the Postmodern label meaningless.
Another literary historian to issue negative comments on Nedelciu's overall contribution is Alex. Ştefănescu. In his view, although being "intelligent and inventive", Nedelciu lacked "artistic sense", displayed "intellectual immaturity", and wrote novels that, unlike his short stories, were "needlessly complicated, clumsy, irrelevant from a literary point of view". Ştefănescu objected in particular to Nedelciu's theory about the need to eliminate "mystification" in prose, commenting that the awareness of conventions was accessible to "every reader", and the contrary effort brought to mind "someone who, storming into a cinema hall, [starts] shouting 'My brothers, don't let yourselves be fooled! That which you see is not reality. These are but images projected on a piece of cloth'." He also challenged Nedelciu's view of self-referential prose was a path to interactivity
, arguing that, although the writing process was exposed, the readers' passive role could not be modified: "they can only watch upon the authors' demagogic
gesticulation and later conclude that the latter have still pursued their narrative as intended." In Cristea-Enache's view, Nedelciu circulated "sophism
s" and "sleight of hand
", his target reader being someone who, in order not to seem "tasteless, unintelligent and conservative
", claims to have enjoyed writings "without substance, structure or form". In 1995, answering to unfavorable comparisons made between the palpable interactivity of electronic literature
on one hand and the theoretical interactivity of pre-1989 prose on the other, Nedelciu accused his rival Ion Manolescu of having created, "out a cocktail of confusions, a thesis supported only by [his] inexplicable enthusiasm".
For Ştefănescu, the nature of language experiments in Mircea Nedelciu's short fiction is not innovative in its recourse to orality
, and its techniques of constrained writing affect the personal message—citing his record of the 1977 prison term, which follows a strict pattern of grammatical conjugation
. Like Negrici, the critic also reproaches some of his peers having welcomed Nedelciu as an innovator "out of lassitude or snob
bery". Similar points were made by essayist Laszlo Alexandru, who claimed that the lionized mainstream of the 1980s and 90s had artificially promoted a "pyramid structure" dominated by Nedelciu as "The Great Prose Writer", Cărtărescu as "The Great Poet" and Lefter as "The Great Critic". This endorsement clashed with the opinion Laszlo shares, according to which Nedelciu "is far from being even an important prose writer". Although highly critical of Alex. Ştefănescu's overall views on literature, Laszlo agreed with his verdicts on Nedelciu. Taking his distance from the negative critical revisions, in particular that contributed by Ştefănescu, Crăciun claimed: "The narratological
issues posed by Mircea Nedelciu's writing style [...] have been improperly treated—as aspects on their own, isolated from their subjects, situations, characters and contents—[...] because prose experiment in our country is still seen as an extravagant phenomenon, exterior to creation as such, of doubtful value, arousing suspicion when not in fact pejorative labels."
Among the most debated aspects of Mircea Nedelciu's contribution to literature under communism was his theory that writers could evade the pressures of censorship by appealing to subtext
, allusions, irony, and other Postmodern mechanisms, while formally adapting themselves to the exterior ideological aspects. According to literary historian Marcel Cornis-Pope, his approach to testing the "prohibitive boundaries" and "foundations of communist reality" relied on exposing the "dogmatic stagnation" through "bolder experimental fiction", of a kind illustrated by other Eastern Europe
an authors: Gabriela Adameşteanu
, Péter Esterházy
, Danilo Kiš
, Sławomir Mrożek, Péter Nádas
, Toomas Raudam
, Piotr Szewc, Dubravka Ugrešić
and Mati Unt
. Nedelciu's stance was retrospectively criticized by as illusory, particularly since, even if it allowed the Optzecişti to penetrate the market, it did not prevent the censorship apparatus from viewing Nedelciu personally with suspicion. The theory also scandalized older authors, in particular the dissident
s and the openly anti-communist
observers from within the Romanian diaspora
: Radio Free Europe
contributor Monica Lovinescu
referred to Nedelciu as a "socialist
textualist".
Much debate surrounded the writer's own preface to his Tratament fabulatoriu, which several have read as an endorsement of Nicolae Ceauşescu
's regime. Alex. Ştefănescu cited its main subject of contention as being the statement that capitalism
was inherently hostile toward art, whereas communist state
s nurtured creativity in order to create a "New Man". According to Laszlo Alexandru, the text enforces the reader's "indignant stupefaction" concerning Nedelciu's promotion by his peers. Such conclusions are contrasted by Nedelciu's own account, provided after the Revolution: he recorded having been engaged in a conflict with censors, and argued that the book itself was about escape from the increased pressures of the 1980s. Mircea Mihăieş recalled that, during the writing process for Femeia în roşu, he had confronted his colleague on the issue of his preface being "annoying and false through its leftism, its opportunistic Marxism
", and mentioned having received an enraged justification in response. In parallel to such debates, Nedelciu's 1982 article, defined by Ştefănescu as "vehement and insulting", brought further suspicion of his motives.
"). A critically acclaimed section of the volume is Provocare în stil Moreno ("Moreno-style Provocation"), called by Diniţoiu a "wonderful prose [which nevertheless] entangles itself in its own meta-textual armor, pressing on its vibration-loaded core." It depicts a physically disabled man, who closely follows the outside world using a pair of binoculars
.
The apparent historical novel
Zmeura de cîmpie, carrying the subtitle Roman împotriva memoriei ("A Novel against Memory"), tells the story of Zare Popescu, who is engaged on a mysterious quasi-archeological investigation into history. He and all other protagonists are presumably orphaned drifters who run into each other chaotically while traveling the country—a narrative setting to which Nedelciu adds long fragments of inquires into abstract topics of etymology
or cinemaphilia
, reflecting the main characters' obsessions. A secondary element is the erotic tension between Zare and Ana, an ambiguous female character who occasionally and mysteriously expresses herself in an ungrammatical version of Romanian
with strong influences from Hungarian
. Cornis-Pope sees it as representative for the subtle manner in which Nedelciu, like Stan and Adameşteanu, chose to question "ideological representations" and "official myths" present "at the height of Ceauşescu's 'totalitarian
absurd' ". He argues: "Zmeura de cîmpie [...] dramatized the difficulties of extricating the culture's 'soul of facts' from official fictions and the totalistic language of the 'tribe'." For Cornis-Pope, this concern is similar to dissenting reportage authors in Communist Poland
and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
, such as Ryszard Kapuściński
and Miško Kranjec
. Taking the book's dedication to veterans of Romania's 1944-1945 campaign
as her clue, critic Simona Vasilache discusses the text as a generational epic, stressing that the hidden theme is the fate of anti-fascists
entrapped by communism. Daniel Cristea-Enache is highly critical of Zmeura de cîmpie, deeming it "weak and indigestible", and opining that the experimental aspects "no longer enable fiction to breathe, but substitute it."
novel, having for its protagonist the meteorologist Luca, whose work assignment in Temelia ("Foundation") village leads him into a world apparently governed by the rules of Utopian socialism
. Like in Zmeura de cîmpie, the small community benefiting from these guidelines finds its preoccupation in historical research: its leader Marius asks his comrades to piece together the career of his supposed ancestor, Neculai Fiston-Gulianu. The plot subsequently focuses on Luca's internal struggles, brought upon by clues that this universe is the design of his own imagination, and culminating in resignation to reality. Within the text are references and stylistic homages to Mateiu Caragiale
and his celebrated Craii de Curtea-Veche
novel, centered on details in Fiston-Gulianu's biography. The work is punctuated by first-person interrogations, where Mircea Nedelciu transforms his narrative mode into a third-level story, where he analyzes his own ability to interpret Luca's feelings.
Mihai Oprea notes the text's ambiguous fluctuation between an actual "Möbius strip
" space with "unknown laws" and the imagination of a character "on the verge of autism
". In his updated preface of 1996, where he presented his intentions of subverting the communist guideline, Mircea Nedelciu explained that his intent was to create "a counter-utopia
", sourced by his clandestine readings from George Orwell
's Nineteen Eighty-Four
, from Elias Canetti
's Crowds and Power
, and from Michel Foucault
's Discipline and Punish
. According to Oprea, the work nevertheless fails in its stated ambition of evading the "obsessive-pressuring" world of the late Ceauşescu years: "We are promised the solution of a bitter fight and we are offered a cardboard scenery and wooden swords. We are informed by the sound of trumpets of the retreat into the last redoubt we still can defend (although it can't defend us), and, once we arrive there, we realize that the enemy is a controlled marionette, albeit one masterfully handled by that absolute and pitiless master, the Author." Adina Diniţoiu believes that, contrary to its author's reflections, Tratament fabulatoriu is "Mircea Nedelciu's only fantasy and baroque
book"; she also highlights its "mannerist
", formalist
" and "Bovaryist
" characteristics.
Noted within Şi ieri va fi o zi, the story Probleme cu identitatea ("Identity Problems") is believed by Cordoş as the "peak" of Nedelciu's short fiction. Subtitled Variaţiuni în căutarea temei ("Variations in Search of a Theme"), it merges biographical details with imagined elements, recounting in three different ways the journey of Mureşan Vasile (or Murivale), who travels to Bucharest in order to stand wake
for poet Nichita Stănescu
. Murivale is, in turn, a worker who quits his job, a deserting
soldier and a bankrupt visual artist from Timişoara
—avatars which allow Nedelciu to expand on the issue of art in general and, in particular, on that of Timişoara's literary environment. By highlighting the awkwardness in his protagonist's dealing with grief, Probleme cu identitatea also reflects the contrast between the fragile everyday and the magnificence presumed of art. Cordoş concludes: "Life is made of cunning, betrayals, affection and exasperation, marital strife and unexpected complicity, which Nedelciu constructs not in antithesis
but in a complementary way so that art will acquire, even in the eyes of petty people, a radiance inexplicable to them." In addition to this piece, the volume includes Primul exil la cronoscop ("The First Chronoscope
Exile"), a science fiction
-inspired story introducing the deep-sea diving metaphor which would come to fascinate Nedelciu during his final years.
Femeia în roşu, defined by its subtitle as a retro roman ("retro-novel"), is the fictionalized biography of Ana Cumpănaş
, a Romanian prostitute who helped capture American gangster John Dillinger
. Columbia University
academic and literary historian Harold Segel
calls it "a curious mixture of docudrama
, historical novel
, and self-reflective fiction", seeing it as "of particular interest to Americans" among existing pieces of Romanian collaborative fiction
. The three authors, who were reportedly following the suggestion of Banat Swabian
writer William Totok, based their retrospective account on various sources, including first-hand interviews with people from Comloşu Mare
, the village where Cumpănaş originated, resulting in what writer Ana Maria Sandu called "a story that is at the very least as fascinating as that of [...] Dillinger." The subject matter reputedly irritated communist censors, accounting for the fact that Femeia în roşu was published only after the 1989 Revolution
.
Beyond the conventional aspects of the narrative, the novel introduces various pieces of experimental prose, whose actual protagonist, critic Simona Sora proposes, is the human body. While respecting formal conventions to the point of including a bibliographical section for the sources consulted, the authors stretch the plot to mention real or imagined details of their own process of researching and writing, or divert it to include episodes about real but not directly relevant personages (such as Canetti and psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud
). The focal point and recurring element is autopsy
, a procedure in which Sora sees a hidden comment on the very nature of novels: "The rules of a professional autopsy thus become the rules of a novel that is self-aware and aware of literature's (often void) demands." Although she argues that the stated goal of overturning "ancient complexes of the Romanian writer" is left open, Simona Sora sees Femeia în roşu and its "virtuosity" as imposing the autofictional model in front of conventional "artifice".
as marked by "generosity, the cult of friendship, a sense of honor and, above all, indifference in the face of death"). Days before dying, the author himself recorded how the expectation had impacted on his writing style: "I know, time now seems to have become very short. It's no longer feasible to put down on paper everything that passes through your mind. You have to make selections, samples. You have to know how to do the opposite of what a tailor does: to measure just once and to cut dozens of times, to discard, to suggest rather than to develop in great detail. But these are things that can be learned." He also commented on the "tricks" his literature had developed in its confrontation with both the threat of death and the debilitating character of his disease: "For example, [describing] in detail a healthy foot, the toes that waggle freely up and down, the mobility of a fine ankle, the play of the shins and thighs in dance—all these things place my hideous adversary in a real crisis of uncertainty. It knows already that my legs belong to it, but I am talking about different legs. There are and will be so many!" Nedelciu also recounted masking his fear of the disease by only referring to it with the euphemism
gâlci ("quinsy
"). According to both Gheorghe Crăciun and Ion Bogdan Lefter, their friend had a superstition
according to which completing his book would accelerate death.
Despite the timely constraints, Nedelciu's original project may have called for Zodia Scafandrului to be the first section of a larger cycle, structured around the yearly cycle of months. Adina Diniţoiu calls attention to the book's "unsettling biographical genre [...] intensely vibrating the chord of a writing style completely lacking in formalism." She ties it to a final development in Nedelciu's literary attitudes, that in which "profundity" was added to his branch of "microrealism", producing "an ethical and even soteriological
connotation". In Lefter's view, the book "may be and must be read—I insist: must be read—in various ways." Its nature, he specifies, is that of a "literary and sociocultural project [...] attempting to reach the profound truths in Romania's 20th century universe", but also that of a memoir offering "the sense to a life." The text, having for its protagonist Nedelciu's alter ego
Diogene "Dio" Sava, again speaks of its own genesis, notably by referencing a real-life encounter with Scarlat, a diver for the state commercial fleet Navrom and amateur novelist, who reveals to Nedelciu that writing itself may carry the symptoms of disease. Through the themes of diving and disease, the book filtrates satire
of communist politics, as Nedelciu explained within the actual text: "this free body of mine, Mediterranean
as it is even through the idea of a healthy and harmonious body, perceives this adventure into the deep [...] as an adventure into a much colder land. In short, the mind imagines the deep-sea diver's world and the body refuses it instinctively, viscerally. And for good reason too, given that, in fact, behind the Cousteauesque
design, my mind encrypts the adversities (the chill, the frost) of this entire world I'm living in, this symbolic coldness of Romania's communist society in the year 1989, and the body naturally refuses this exile 'up North'." According to Lefter, Nedelciu was actually reworking his notion of layered meanings into the diving metaphor, adapting an earlier interest in the techniques of art restoration
(in turned provoked by his discussions with muralist Viorel Grimalschi).
Sava's literary biography reflects his familiarity with interwar society and its upper class
, and again portrays Mateiu Caragiale (this time by fictionalizing Caragiale's activities at his property in Fundulea
). The impact of communism and collectivization
is reflected as a collective tragedy, and the start of an apparent Bildungsroman
, depicting the Sava family's encounters with the Securitate
secret police, the life of debauchery he leads in order to liberate himself from pressures, and his employment at the Securitate-led Great Institute of History. The latter is a satirical reworking of historiographic
practice under communism, the extreme nationalism
of the late Ceauşescu years, and the intrusion of pseudoscientific
theories such as Protochronism
into scientific practice. These episodes also mark the return of Zare Popescu, the protagonist of Zmeura de cîmpie, who works with Dio at the Institute and whom again experiences life through digressions into historical symbolism, which this time are explicitly about dictatorship. These include an oblique mention of Ceauşescu being convinced that he was about to be replaced by "a Pisces", and Crăciun declared himself "absolutely convinced" that Zodia Scafandrului was supposed to end with an overview of the 1989 Revolution as "December". The narrative takes Diogene to Communist Poland
, on a scientific mission which connects him to the Securitate's international schemes, and fictionalizes events related to the Gdańsk Shipyard
strikes.
, which reworked a similar 19th century piece by the folk writer Ion Creangă
(Povestea poveştilor, "Tale of All Tales"), thus seeking to liberate profane language
. Nedelciu, who deemed Creangă "the ballsiest Romanian-language storyteller", placed his version of the story during the late years of communism, describing sexual encounters between female teachers and party activists. Literary critic Paul Cernat commended the work for its "overflowing relish", and concluded on the posthumous relationship between the two authors and their treatment of Romanian folklore
: "the genuine storyteller, bearer of the oral
, peasant culture in the written from [versus] the Postmodern prose writer, who has seen everything written culture has to offer, returning to the rudimentary, popular roots of his writing". The text was among those rejected by Alex. Ştefănescu, who claimed: "Ion Creangă's text is not simply picturesque
, it is refined and full of charm, while Mircea Nedelciu's, fashioned in a cold manner, lacking the joy of storytelling, is merely vulgar."
Several other scattered prose fragments were discovered only after Nedelciu died. Among them is Uriaşa şi ciudata pasăre a viselor noastre ("The Giant and Weird Bird in Our Dreams"), which seems to refer to his countryside escapades with Ion Dumitriu and others. Literary critic Carmen Muşat advances a hypothesis according to which the undated work dates ca. 1990, basing it on various clues in the text. She also describes the "key" of the piece as being provided by its motto
, "Now that we are done creating the world, what's left for us other than recreating it?" This, the critic argues, results in a "representative text for Mircea Nedelciu's prose", or "a story told with naturalness and well-tempered irony, about the ambiguity of relations between the narrator, the characters and the reader, about their double rooting in reality and textuality, as well as about their adventures in this 'through the looking-glass
country' that is literature." The main intertextual reference in this case is Ernest Hemingway
: Uriaşa şi ciudata pasăre a viselor noastre transmits images or sections of text borrowed from The Snows of Kilimanjaro
, Hills Like White Elephants
and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
.
review: out of 150 novels, Femeia în roşu was voted 23rd-best, with Tratament fabulatoriu at 28 and Zmeura de cîmpie at 139. An edition of Zodia Scafandrului was published in 2000, sparking debates about the appropriateness of circulating unfinished versions of one's work. Nedelciu's posthumous bibliography also includes a 1999 selection of his entire work (under the collective title Aventuri într-o curte interioară) and a 2003 version of Femeia în roşu, as well as the collection Proză scurtă ("Short Prose" or "The Mircea Nedelciu Reader"). They were followed by a reprint of Zmeura... and third editions of Tratament fabulatoriu (2006) and Femeia în roşu (2008). Several other of his stories saw print in stages after his death (including Uriaşa şi ciudata pasăre a viselor noastre, published by Observator Cultural in July 2008).
In addition to Mircea Mihăieş, who recounts having learned the techniques of novelistic writing from his friend, a new generation of authors, most of whom debuted in the 1990s, assimilated influences from the writings of Mircea Nedelciu. Among them are Dan Lungu
, Sorin Stoica, Lucian Dan Teodorovici
, Andrei Bodiu
and Călin Torsan. Nedelciu's reworking of Povestea poveştilor, alongside Creangă's original and similar texts, was transformed into an eponymous fringe theater show, directed by actor Gheorghe Hibovski and premiered in spring 2009. According to critic Cornel Ungureanu, Femeia în roşu has endured as "the manifesto of Optzecişti prose writers, an exemplary work of autochthonous Postmodernism", while its main character, Ana Cumpănaş
, has grown into "the actual aunt of autochthonous Postmodernism."
However, Daniel Cristea-Enache claimed, Nedelciu has become a victim of lack of interest, or "our lack of critical memory", after 1999, a phenomenon which he contrasts with the "almost always positive old critical references". Cristea-Enache believes the "not to flattering" explanation resides in the critical establishment's acknowledgment that Nedelciu "is not one of the sizable novelists." A different account was offered by Gheorghe Crăciun, who wrote: "Presently, [Nedelciu's] prose is, in the eyes of many (including school textbook authors), a rather precisely charted territory, which may no longer offer surprises, be they thematic or technical." According to Diniţoiu (who bases her conclusions on 2005 inquires among University of Bucharest
students), Nedelciu's popularity declined not just because of his difficult stylistic approach, but also because "the referent" of "microrealism" has vanished—whereas Cărtărescu's "imaginative constructs" had maintained "a good quotation on the market of values."
In November 2002, during events marking Nedelciu's 52nd birthday, the Fundulea
school which the writer had attended as a child was renamed in his honor. Ion Bogdan Lefter, who attended the event, commented: "Fundulea has become a spot on Romania's cultural map, owing to him, to Nedelciu, just like other small communities—albeit not many!—are renowned for being the places which so and so have left in order to become great names in national creativity..." Since 2002, the annual Gaudeamus Book Fair hosts an essay contest on literary subjects, targeting students in their final years of high school and awarding the Mircea Nedelciu National Prize for Reading.
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
n short-story writer, novelist, essayist and literary critic, one of the leading exponents of the Optzecişti generation in Romanian letters
Literature of Romania
Romanian literature is literature written by Romanian authors, although the term may also be used to refer to all literature written in the Romanian language.Eugène Ionesco is one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd....
. The author of experimental prose
Experimental literature
Experimental literature refers to written works - often novels or magazines - that place great emphasis on innovations regarding technique and style.-Early history:...
, mixing elements of conventional narratives with autofiction
Autofiction
Autofiction is a term used in literary criticism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography.Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in 1977 with reference to his novel Fils. Autofiction combines two paradoxically contradictory styles: that of autobiography, and fiction...
, textuality
Textuality
Textuality is a concept in linguistics and literary theory that refers to the attributes that distinguish the text as an object of study in those fields...
, intertextuality
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
and, in some cases, fantasy
Fantasy literature
Fantasy literature is fantasy in written form. Historically speaking, literature has composed the majority of fantasy works. Since the 1950s however, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of films, television programs, graphic novels, video games, music, painting, and other...
, he placed his work at the meeting point between Postmodernism
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
and a minimalist
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
form of Neorealism
Neorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
. This approach is illustrated by his volumes of stories and his novels Zmeura de cîmpie ("Raspberry of the Field"), Tratament fabulatoriu ("Confambulatory Treatment"), and by Femeia în roşu ("The Woman in Red"), a collaborative fiction
Collaborative fiction
Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by a group of authors who share creative control of a story.Collaborative fiction can occur for commercial gain, as part of education, or recreationally - many collaboratively written works have been the subject of a large degree of academic research.-...
piece written together with Adriana Babeţi and Mircea Mihăieş.
A follower of trends in avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
literature of the 1960s and '70s, Nedelciu co-founded the literary circle Noii ("The New Ones") with Gheorghe Crăciun, Gheorghe Ene, Ioan Flora, Gheorghe Iova, Ioan Lăcustă, Emil Paraschivoiu, Sorin Preda and Constantin Stan. His integration as an authoritative voice on the Postmodern scene, inaugurated by his presence in the Desant '83 anthology, was complimented by his free-minded attitude and drifter lifestyle. Although Nedelciu's political nonconformism pitted him against the repressive communist system
Communist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
on several occasions, he stood out on the literary scene for adapting to some communist requirements in order to get his message across. This tendency made Nedelciu the target of controversy.
The final years of Mircea Nedelciu's life witnessed his publicized struggle with Hodgkin's lymphoma
Hodgkin's lymphoma
Hodgkin's lymphoma, previously known as Hodgkin's disease, is a type of lymphoma, which is a cancer originating from white blood cells called lymphocytes...
, which shaped the themes in his unfinished novel, Zodia Scafandrului ("Sign of the Deep-sea Diver"). Although the rhythm of his activity slowed under the pressures of infirmity and major surgery in French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
clinics, Nedelciu continued his involvement with the literary scene, as both cultural promoter and polemicist, until shortly before his death. His critical posterity is sharply divided on issues surrounding the importance of his work, between those who primarily view him as an eccentric figure and those who describe him as one Romania's major experimental writers.
Early life
Nedelciu was born in the semi-urban locality of FunduleaFundulea
Fundulea is an agricultural town located in the Călăraşi County, Romania. It is located on the Bărăgan Plain, approximately 30 km east of the capital Bucharest, in the historical region of Wallachia. It has a population of 6,217. The A2 freeway and Mostiştea River pass through its vicinity...
, Călăraşi County
Calarasi County
Călărași is a county of Romania, in Muntenia, with the county seat at Călărași.-Demographics:In 2002, it had a population of 324,617 and a population density of 64/km².*Romanians – 95%*Roma and others.-List of cities by population:...
, where his parents Ştefan and Maria worked in agriculture (Nedelciu's father was also employed by the House of Savings, a state-run bank). The couple's resistance to forced collectivization
Collectivization in Romania
The collectivization of agriculture in Romania took place in the early years of the Communist regime. The initiative sought to bring about a thorough transformation in the property regime and organisation of labour in agriculture...
had engendered political repercussions, and impacted on the family's standing: Nedelciu's older sister was expelled from university for one year. The family was also periodically harassed by the communist authorities after their son-in-law decided to cross the Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain
The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989...
, settling in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.
Mircea Nedelciu attended primary school in his native town and high school in Brăneşti
Branesti, Ilfov
Brăneşti is a commune in the far east of Ilfov County, Romania. Its name is derived from Bran, a Romanian name, and the suffix -eşti. It is composed of four villages: Brăneşti, Islaz, Pasărea and Vadu Anei....
, and afterward left for the national capital of Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
, in order to complete his studies. A student at the University of Bucharest
University of Bucharest
The University of Bucharest , in Romania, is a university founded in 1864 by decree of Prince Alexander John Cuza to convert the former Saint Sava Academy into the current University of Bucharest.-Presentation:...
Faculty of Letters, specializing in English and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Nedelciu was attracted into bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
, cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. This is contrasted with communitarian and particularistic theories, especially the ideas of patriotism and nationalism...
and countercultural
Counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a cultural movement that mainly developed in the United States and spread throughout much of the western world between 1960 and 1973. The movement gained momentum during the U.S. government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam...
circles, growing his hair long and informing himself on new developments in Western culture
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
. His time as a student overlapped with an episode of liberalization
Liberalization
In general, liberalization refers to a relaxation of previous government restrictions, usually in areas of social or economic policy. In some contexts this process or concept is often, but not always, referred to as deregulation...
which coincided with the early rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
, and which, as Nedelciu himself recalled, provided young intellectuals with access to cultural items that were less known or were recovering from official censorship
Censorship in Communist Romania
Censorship in Communist Romania was widespread and virtually every published document, be it a newspaper article or a book, had to pass the censor's approval...
. These included texts Nedelciu read in the University Library: the French journal Tel Quel
Tel Quel
Tel Quel was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.-Overview:...
and the works of Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhaíl Afanásyevich Bulgákov was a Soviet Russian writer and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, which The Times of London has called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.-Biography:Mikhail Bulgakov was born on...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
and J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980....
. Nonconformism also impacted on his student life: reportedly, he only attended courses which he found interesting, neglecting all others.
Nedelciu was especially close to his colleague and campus roommate Gheorghe Crăciun and to painter Ion Dumitriu, and vacationed in Crăciun's native Braşov County
Brasov County
Brașov ; ) is a county of Romania, in Transylvania, with the capital city at Brașov. The county incorporates within its boundaries most of the Medieval "lands" Burzenland and Făgăraș Land.-Demographics:...
. It was also during his time in college that he helped found Noii, which in its original form also comprised Flora and "the three Gheorghes" (Crăciun, Ene, Iova). The club was later joined by Lăcustă, Paraschivoiu, Sorin Preda and Stan. Noii, which for a while published an eponymous student magazine, survived both its members' graduation and the national communist
National communism
The term National Communism describes the ethnic minority communist currents that arose in the former Russian Empire after Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party seized power in October 1917....
backlash inaugurated by the July Theses
July Theses
The July Theses is a name commonly given to a speech delivered by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu on July 6, 1971, before the Executive Committee of the Romanian Communist Party...
of 1971, but remained marginal on the literary scene, and discreetly reacted against the new restrictive guidelines by cultivating difference. According to Nedelciu's own recollection: "In all these years down to 1980, the club was a literary life completely separated from the official literary life."
After completing his studies in 1973 and turning down a post-graduate assignment at a school in the remote Danube Delta
Danube Delta
The Danube Delta is the second largest river delta in Europe, after the Volga Delta, and is the best preserved on the continent. The greater part of the Danube Delta lies in Romania , while its northern part, on the left bank of the Chilia arm, is situated in Ukraine . The approximate surface is...
, Nedelciu went through several jobs, including that of tour guide
Tour guide
A tour guide provides assistance, information and cultural, historical and contemporary heritage interpretation to people on organized tours, individual clients, educational establishments, at religious and historical sites, museums, and at venues of other significant interest...
for foreigners. According to literary historian Sanda Cordoş, his refusal of initial employment exposed him to the political regime's suspicion for "parasitism
Parasitism (social offense)
Social parasitism is a charge that is leveled against a group or class in society which is considered to be detrimental to the whole by analogy with biologic parasitism .-General concept:...
". Nedelciu was however able to publish his first literary piece, the short story Un purtător de cuvânt ("A Spokesman"), hosted by a Luceafărul magazine issue of 1977.
Rise to prominence
The young author's standing declined further later that year, when he was briefly held under arrest for handling foreign currency (a criminal offense at the time). This time inspired him to write another story, Curtea de aer ("The Air Court"), also printed by Luceafărul in the following period. He ultimately found stable employment soon after his release, when he began working as a librarian on the staff of Cartea Românească publishing house (where his first works in literature were to be printed over the following years). As Cordoş argued, the institution "would become legendary as a meeting place for young writers from Bucharest and out of town—political rather than literary marginals." A similar statement is made by literary historian and reviewer Alex. Ştefănescu, who sees the writer's activities as responsible for making the library "a sui generisSui generis
Sui generis is a Latin expression, literally meaning of its own kind/genus or unique in its characteristics. The expression is often used in analytic philosophy to indicate an idea, an entity, or a reality which cannot be included in a wider concept....
literary club". Also according to Cordoş, Nedelciu was still being subject to political pressures for his family connections and his refusal to join the Romanian Communist Party
Romanian Communist Party
The Romanian Communist Party was a communist political party in Romania. Successor to the Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave ideological endorsement to communist revolution and the disestablishment of Greater Romania. The PCR was a minor and illegal grouping for much of the...
.
With his 1979 volume of short stories, Aventuri într-o curte interioară ("Adventures in an Interior Courtyard"), Nedelciu became a notorious figure among young authors, and earned the Writers' Union
Writers' Union of Romania
The Writers' Union of Romania , founded in March 1949, is a professional association of writers in Romania. It also has a subsidiary in Chişinău, Republic of Moldova...
annual prize for debut. He was by then also affiliated with Junimea, a workshop and literary society named after its 19th-century predecessor
Junimea
Junimea was a Romanian literary society founded in Iaşi in 1863, through the initiative of several foreign-educated personalities led by Titu Maiorescu, Petre P. Carp, Vasile Pogor, Theodor Rosetti and Iacob Negruzzi...
and hosted by the influential critic Ovid Crohmălniceanu. Nedelciu followed up on his writing with the short story volumes Effectul de ecou controlat ("The Controlled Echo Effect") of 1981 and Amendament la instinctul proprietăţii ("Amendment to the Proprietary Instinct") of 1983. Owing to Crohmălniceanu's patronage, his prose works were published as part of the critically acclaimed Desant '83 anthology, which set the tone for Optzecişti writings. From this moment on until his death, Nedelciu was at the forefront of debates opposing the Optzecişti to their older colleagues, and stood among those members of his generation who willingly accepted to be called "Postmodernists". A separate and enduring controversy, involving Nedelciu's apparent endorsement of the repressive regime, was sparked in 1982. That year, he signed a lampoon piece targeting anti-communist
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
exiles who broadcast clandestinely into Romania by means of Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a broadcaster funded by the U.S. Congress that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East "where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed"...
, and had it published in Scînteia Tineretului (or SLARS), the mouthpiece of Communist Youth
Union of Communist Youth
The Union of Communist Youth was the Romanian Communist Party's youth organisation, modelled after the Soviet Komsomol. It aimed to cultivate young cadres into the party, as well as to help create the "new man" envisioned by communist ideologues.-History:Founded in 1922, the UTC went underground...
and branch of the main official party newspaper Scînteia
Scînteia
Scînteia was the name of two newspapers edited by Communist groups at different intervals in Romanian history...
.
Zmeura de cîmpie, Tratament fabulatoriu and the new short prose grouping Şi ieri va fi o zi ("And Yesterday Will Be Another Day"), published in 1984, 1986 and 1989 respectively, were Nedelciu's last volumes to emerge in print before the 1989 Revolution
Romanian Revolution of 1989
The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was a series of riots and clashes in December 1989. These were part of the Revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several Warsaw Pact countries...
. The former was published by the Romanian Army's specialized venue Editura Militară
Editura Militară
Editura Militară is a publishing house based in Bucharest, Romania. It was founded as a state-run company during the communist period on 27 December 1950.-External links:...
, which commentators have considered slightly unusual, ultimately tying the decision to the text's oblique mentions of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. First issued in 1990, Femeia în roşu was co-written with Anglicist
English studies
English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...
Mircea Mihăieş and comparatist
Comparative literature
Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
Adriana Babeţi. A best seller, it went through a second edition in 1997.
A second revised edition of Tratament fabulatoriu came in 1996. The following year, Femeia în roşu was tuned into an eponymous film, directed by Mircea Veroiu
Mircea Veroiu
Mircea Veroiu was a Romanian film director and screenwriter. He directed 22 films between 1968 and 1997. He was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival.-External links:...
. It was also at that stage that Nedelciu began collecting his essays of criticism, grouped in the 1994 anthology Competiţia Continuă. Generaţia '80 în texte teoretice ("The Race Goes On: the Eighties Generation in Theoretical Texts"). In 1996, Nedelciu was involved in the open debate organized by the Writers' Union magazine România Literară
România Literară
România literară is a cultural and literary magazine from România founded in 1855 by Vasile Alecsandri and published in Iași between January 1, 1855 until December 3, 1855, when it was suppressed. The new series appeared in October 10, 1855 as a continuation of Gazeta literară...
and critic Nicolae Manolescu
Nicolae Manolescu
Nicolae Manolescu is a Romanian literary critic. As an editor of România Literară literary magazine, he has reached a record in reviewing books for almost 30 years...
, whose purposes were defining the nature and expectations of Romanian Postmodernism and allowing its representatives a reply to criticism. A section of the debate opposed Nedelciu to the younger writer Ion Manolescu, the latter of whom had objected to the supposed Optzecişti monopoly on Postmodernist terminology while arguing that a more genuine manifestation of the current was to be found in the emerging forms of electronic literature
Electronic literature
Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments.-Definitions:N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article...
. Nedelciu also contributed to Dan Petrescu and Luca Piţu's 1998 anthology of erotic literature
Erotic literature
Erotic literature comprises fictional and factual stories and accounts of human sexual relationships which have the power to or are intended to arouse the reader sexually. Such erotica takes the form of novels, short stories, poetry, true-life memoirs, and sex manuals...
, Povestea poveştilor generaţiei '80 ("The Tale of the Tales of the 80s Generation").
Final years
The final decade of Nedelciu's life witnessed his struggle with Hodgkin's diseaseHodgkin's lymphoma
Hodgkin's lymphoma, previously known as Hodgkin's disease, is a type of lymphoma, which is a cancer originating from white blood cells called lymphocytes...
, a rare type of lymphoma
Lymphoma
Lymphoma is a cancer in the lymphatic cells of the immune system. Typically, lymphomas present as a solid tumor of lymphoid cells. Treatment might involve chemotherapy and in some cases radiotherapy and/or bone marrow transplantation, and can be curable depending on the histology, type, and stage...
with which he was diagnosed in 1988, and which severely impaired his motor skills. His treatment involved difficult surgery, performed with French assistance; in 1995, he was subject to a bone marrow autograft, carried out in Romania with additional help from Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...
's Paoli-Calmettes Institute. Although he was eventually forced to use a wheelchair, Nedelciu continued to be active on the literary scene, both through his involvement with the Writers' Union and his founding of Euromedia, a Franco-Romanian company specialized in distributing literature. He also briefly served as editor of Contrapunct, a magazine launched by the Optzecişti, and, after accusing the Writers' Union of "Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
", joined other disgruntled authors in creating the Association of Professional Writers. Late in his life, he also presided over the initiative to monitor book circulations, setting up the external auditor program Topul naţional de carte ("National Book Rankings"). His output was much reduced and his ability to write altogether threatened, but he was still working on Zodia Scafandrului, his final contribution to literature.
After a 1996 treatment session in France, Nedelciu was informed that his life expectation depended on procedures which cost 70,000 American dollars
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
—a sum described by Nedelciu himself as "huge". Commenting on these developments, he indicated having resolving not to accept either "capitulation" or "the solution of humiliation", and declared himself optimistic about the possibility of collecting funds in dignity. His efforts were supported by the literary community, who organized a series of fundraiser
Fundraiser
A fundraiser is an event or campaign whose primary purpose is to raise money for a cause. See also: fundraising. A fundraiser can also be an individual or company whose primary job is to raise money for a specific charity or non-profit organization...
s, the collection being supplemented by government authorities. In late 1997, Nedelciu applied for a visa
Visa (document)
A visa is a document showing that a person is authorized to enter the territory for which it was issued, subject to permission of an immigration official at the time of actual entry. The authorization may be a document, but more commonly it is a stamp endorsed in the applicant's passport...
in order to get treatment in France, but it was not granted. This prompted indignation on the Romanian literary scene, and press campaigns criticizing the French Embassy in Bucharest. In November of that year, while participating in the Gaudeamus Book Fair, Nedelciu was able to collect the endorsement of various local cultural personalities for his own manifesto, which demanded "freedom of movement
Freedom of movement
Freedom of movement, mobility rights or the right to travel is a human right concept that the constitutions of numerous states respect...
throughout Europe for those who are in need of it". The French authorities eventually rescinded their decision, and the writer left for Marseille, where he underwent an intervention to improve his mobility.
Mircea Nedelciu died on July 12, 1999, and was buried at Bellu two days later. His tombstone bears the title of one of his books, "And Yesterday Will Be Another Day". In a short memoir of the event, his Noii colleague Stan commented on the "subtle irony" of his burial having taken place on Bastille Day
Bastille Day
Bastille Day is the name given in English-speaking countries to the French National Day, which is celebrated on 14 July of each year. In France, it is formally called La Fête Nationale and commonly le quatorze juillet...
, France's national celebration.
Cultural positioning
Throughout his career, Nedelciu was a prominent exponent of experimental literatureExperimental literature
Experimental literature refers to written works - often novels or magazines - that place great emphasis on innovations regarding technique and style.-Early history:...
, metafiction
Metafiction
Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
and autofiction
Autofiction
Autofiction is a term used in literary criticism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography.Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in 1977 with reference to his novel Fils. Autofiction combines two paradoxically contradictory styles: that of autobiography, and fiction...
. Inside Noii, he reportedly cut the figure of an innovator, a promoter, and the club member most interested in literary theory. This verdict was partly backed by Alex. Ştefănescu, who remarks: "Like other authors from his generation, Mircea Nedelciu took care to define himself his own manner of writing, before literary critics did". According to critic Adina Diniţoiu, the period of "theoretical effervescence", in which Nedelciu assimilated inspiration from diverse sources, was followed by a "growing preoccupation for language." Writing during the second part of his career, Nedelciu reflected back with self-irony: "the writer's childhood diseases are [...] the wish the theorize and the baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
. Which shall the disease of old age be? I do not know. Probably monumentality, classicization!"
Owing to their secondary nature, that of literary tests, Nedelciu's works abound in references and compliments to, as well as borrowings from, various authors. Names critics cite in this context include Romanian classics such as Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale
Ion Luca Caragiale was a Wallachian-born Romanian playwright, short story writer, poet, theater manager, political commentator and journalist...
, Mateiu Caragiale
Mateiu Caragiale
Mateiu Ion Caragiale was a Romanian poet and prose writer, best known for his novel Craii de Curtea-Veche, which portrays the milieu of boyar descendants before and after World War I. Caragiale's style, associated with Symbolism, the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle, and early modernism, was...
, Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...
and Marin Preda
Marin Preda
Marin Preda was a Romanian novelist, one of the best-known post-WWII Romanian writers.Preda was born in Teleorman county, in a village called Siliştea-Gumeşti, into a family of peasants. He first studied at school in his home village, then schools in Abrud and Cristur-Odorhei...
. Nedelciu's narratives were overall significantly indebted to American fiction
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
, and in particular to J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980....
, in whose Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, it has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage confusion, angst, alienation, language, and rebellion. It has been translated into almost all of the world's major...
he reportedly found the first model for his own autofictional style. He is also known to have reworked and blended into his own texts various themes borrowed from Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
. The Anglosphere
Anglosphere
Anglosphere is a neologism which refers to those nations with English as the most common language. The term can be used more specifically to refer to those nations which share certain characteristics within their cultures based on a linguistic heritage, through being former British colonies...
became the Romanian author's primary cultural reference, and, according to researcher Caius Dobrescu, Nedelciu was one of those "fascinated" with the ideas of Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
essayist Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....
on "the constant degeneration of the character" in Western literature
Western literature
Western literature refers to the literature written in the languages of Europe, including the ones belonging to the Indo-European language family as well as several geographically or historically related languages such as Basque, Hungarian, and so forth...
. His inspiration sources also covered French authors associated with the May 1968 movement. Primarily related to his interest in the textuality
Textuality
Textuality is a concept in linguistics and literary theory that refers to the attributes that distinguish the text as an object of study in those fields...
and intertextuality
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
techniques of Tel Quel
Tel Quel
Tel Quel was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.-Overview:...
theorists, French echoes are ranked by Diniţoiu as secondary in Nedelciu's work. The author did however make extensive use of constrained writing
Constrained writing
Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.Constraints are very common in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form....
techniques popularized by France's avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
, stating his admiration for the lipogram
Lipogram
A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided — usually a common vowel, and frequently "E", the most common letter in the English language.Writing a lipogram is a trivial task...
s of Georges Perec
Georges Perec
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He is a member of the Oulipo group...
. According to a testimonial by his friend Gheorghe Crăciun, Mircea Nedelciu also adopted "action writing
Automatic writing
Automatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...
"-like techniques, "without prior minute elaboration", displaying "that science of controlling one's own text bear-handed." Diniţoiu also mentions the "passion [...] for exact science
Exact science
An exact science is any field of science capable of accurate quantitative expression or precise predictions and rigorous methods of testing hypotheses, especially reproducible experiments involving quantifiable predictions and measurements...
" as a distinct trait of Nedelciu's experimentation, accounting for his "stylistic rigor".
Nedelciu equaled his integration into the Desant '83 group with an affiliation to Postmodernism
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
, an interpretation of positioning which came to divide the Optzecişti camp. Mircea Cărtărescu
Mircea Cartarescu
Mircea Cărtărescu is a Romanian poet, novelist and essayist.Born in Bucharest, he graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, Department of Romanian Language And Literature, in 1980. Between 1980 and 1989 he worked as a Romanian language teacher, then he worked at the Writers'...
, another member of this faction, referred to his colleague as "the uncontested prose leader of the 1980s", while Mihăieş acknowledged in him "the true leader of our generation, whose rule was naturally acknowledged, indisputable and therefore not at all constrictive." In tandem, author Daniel Cristea-Enache retrospectively referred to Nedelciu as a "Pope
Pope
The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, a position that makes him the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church . In the Catholic Church, the Pope is regarded as the successor of Saint Peter, the Apostle...
of Romanian textualism" whose "strongest asset" was literary theory. The main meeting point between Nedelciu's style and Postmodernist tenets is provided by his attachment to reinterpreting literary conventions, often with the introduction of self-referential
Self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding...
material or provoking artistic license
Artistic license
Artistic licence is a colloquial term, sometimes euphemism, used to denote the distortion of fact, alteration of the conventions of grammar or language, or rewording of pre-existing text made by an artist to improve a piece of...
.
Neorealism and personalized techniques
Within the Postmodernist framework, Nedelciu also stood for a minimalistMinimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
approach to Neorealism
Neorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
, which linked him directly to fellow Optzecişti Ioan Groşan, Cristian Teodorescu and Sorin Preda. For the author himself, Postmodernist-textualist practices and the tradition of literary realism
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
were complementary, in that the former meant "the realism of attitudes toward the real", a conclusion to which he added: "The document, the act, the direct transmission of an event that has actually happened may enter a literary text's economy, where they are no longer 'artistically transfigured' but authenticated [Nedelciu's italics]." According to literary critic Mihai Oprea, who builds his comments on terms introduced by essayist Monica Spiridon, Nedelciu's textualist approach to literature as its own reality actually followed a middle course between "referential verisimilitude
Verisimilitude
Verisimilitude is the quality of realism in something .-Competing ideas:The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory...
, preoccupied with retracing reality" and a "cultural verisimilitude", whose characteristic is "a world of objects already interpreted and ideologically formed by a certain culture." Cristea-Enache also discusses the impact that the interwar
Interwar period
Interwar period can refer to any period between two wars. The Interbellum is understood to be the period between the end of the Great War or First World War and the beginning of the Second World War in Europe....
Romanian Social Realist
Social realism
Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic...
Camil Petrescu
Camil Petrescu
Camil Petrescu was a Romanian playwright, novelist, philosopher and poet. He marked the end of the traditional novel era and laid the foundation of the modern novel era.- Life :...
had on Nedelciu's style, where it resurfaced in an adapted form. Essayist Genţiana Moşneanu, who defines Nedelciu's prose as being dominated by the sense of sight and recurring references to optical instrument
Optical instrument
An optical instrument either processes light waves to enhance an image for viewing, or analyzes light waves to determine one of a number of characteristic properties.-Image enhancement:...
s, argues: "[His] sight digs into the sordidness of everyday banality in order to present us with samples of reality based on minute facts. All that which resides within the author's field of vision is transmitted to us, the readers, giving us that impression of 'real reality', of real life." In addition to this, she identifies a "kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope
A kaleidoscope is a circle of mirrors containing loose, colored objects such as beads or pebbles and bits of glass. As the viewer looks into one end, light entering the other end creates a colorful pattern, due to the reflection off the mirrors...
" effect, which subverts the order of realistic details between the levels of each narrative, concluding: "The manner in which Mircea Nedelciu has captured everyday banality leaves the impression of a film based on real fact, where the characters and incidents have been introduced for aesthetic reasons." A similar argument was made by Gheorghe Crăciun, who compared the effect with the "hallucinatory something" of a "film clip", translated as "a world continuously in the making".
For Sanda Cordoş, his short fiction represents "a propitious moment" and a "resurrection" synonymous with "the creative type of the '80s." One of Nedelciu's cogenerationists and friends, critic Ion Bogdan Lefter, also recalled how Nedelciu's personality reflected in his style and choice of subjects, noting the great pauses his colleague would leave between his works, and how "the details of reality which [Nedelciu] would bring into conversation" were casually integrated in later texts. Lefter argued: "[he] was a writer without writing" who "observed and described, lived and retold." Among the narrative techniques setting Nedelciu apart among his generation colleagues was that of so-called "live transmissions", or stories in which the mixture of coherent record and textualist transcript led to an identification with the subject. Another colleague and friend of Nedelciu, Cristian Teodorescu, recalled: "one of these stories was the transcript of a front line diary by a peasant who fought in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. I repeatedly asked Nedelciu what the deal was with the peasant's diary. Eventually, he admitted that he only owned a few pages of the diary, that the rest had been lost. Had he filled out the rest? He would not tell me. He knew how to defend the mysteries of his prose, taking shelter behind textualist explanations on 'text generation'." Items of regular life transposed into his prose notably include the phone number of his fellow writer Radu Cosaşu, recorded in one of Nedelciu's prose fragments.
Some commentators attribute Mircea Nedelciu's work with other distinct qualities, stemming from a confrontation of identities: his rural and provincial roots over his adoption by the cosmopolitan Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
scene. This issue is reflected in a 2006 statement Crăciun: "He is, after all, a cosmopolitan figure, I could even say a frivolous figure. He runs away from the world to which he belongs, in search of the urban world, but he nevertheless can never part with the former." The claim was supported by Diniţoiu, who argued that Nedelciu's frivolity refers to his "southern" roots in the historical region
Historical regions of Romania
At various times during the late 19th and 20th centuries, Romania extended over the following historical regions:Wallachia:*Muntenia or Greater Wallachia: as part of Wallachia, joined Moldavia in 1859 to create modern Romania;...
of Wallachia
Wallachia
Wallachia or Walachia is a historical and geographical region of Romania. It is situated north of the Danube and south of the Southern Carpathians...
, which contrasted with and "captivated" the Transylvania
Transylvania
Transylvania is a historical region in the central part of Romania. Bounded on the east and south by the Carpathian mountain range, historical Transylvania extended in the west to the Apuseni Mountains; however, the term sometimes encompasses not only Transylvania proper, but also the historical...
n-born Crăciun. In the assessment of Sanda Cordoş, "Nedelciu's freedom of spirit was rooted in peasant culture and the literary life of the city, and he preserved it after graduation in 1973." Such aspects of Mircea Nedelciu's work and biography are reflected in his choice of subjects and underlying themes, listed by Cordoş as "travel, vagrancy and wandering through everyday reality, immediately experienced." The "need for freedom", Diniţoiu argues, is associated in Nedelciu's fiction with "surprisingly romance" love affairs, whose female protagonists "are often on the verge of ideal projection
Idealization and devaluation
In psychoanalytic theory, when an individual is unable to integrate difficult feelings, specific defenses are mobilized to overcome what the individual perceives as an unbearable situation. The defense that helps in this process is called splitting. Splitting is the tendency to view events or...
." The narrative is generally laid out as a ceaseless travel, and the often guide-like protagonists seem to suffer their crises only in rare moments of respite. An allusive background to these fictional biographies is provided by the social context: like the author himself, the characters are often uprooted people who relate to historical events as a seminal but mysterious collective trauma
Collective trauma
A collective trauma is a traumatic psychological effect shared by a group of people of any size, up to and including an entire society. Traumatic events witnessed by an entire society can stir up collective sentiment, often resulting in a shift in that society's culture and mass actions.Well known...
. In addition to this element, Crăciun lists the recurring themes of Nedelciu's fiction as "archeology", "meteorology
Meteorology
Meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere. Studies in the field stretch back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did not occur until the 18th century. The 19th century saw breakthroughs occur after observing networks developed across several countries...
" and "the mechanisms through which nature and the surrounding life exercise pressure on the individual", adding: "Each of these three elements [...] is liable to provoke the distortion of reality, the emergence of strange phenomenons, abrupt changes of life and destiny, the passage from the immediate space into other spaces, at the very least atypical if not fantastical ones." A similar listing of Mircea Nedelciu's main preoccupation was also provided by Lefter.
Controversial aspects
Together with Cărtărescu and other figures in the Postmodernist group, Nedelciu was a target for criticism, both individual and collective. A synthesis of these objections was provided by literary historian Eugen Negrici. In Negrici's view, the self-referential and ironic works produced by such writers hindered the development of local literature on a more solid basis, and their embrace by the established critics diverted attention from older, classically ModernistModernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
authors. He also argued that the group's identification with Postmodernist theses prevented others from doing the same, and that the approximation implied by this process rendered the Postmodern label meaningless.
Another literary historian to issue negative comments on Nedelciu's overall contribution is Alex. Ştefănescu. In his view, although being "intelligent and inventive", Nedelciu lacked "artistic sense", displayed "intellectual immaturity", and wrote novels that, unlike his short stories, were "needlessly complicated, clumsy, irrelevant from a literary point of view". Ştefănescu objected in particular to Nedelciu's theory about the need to eliminate "mystification" in prose, commenting that the awareness of conventions was accessible to "every reader", and the contrary effort brought to mind "someone who, storming into a cinema hall, [starts] shouting 'My brothers, don't let yourselves be fooled! That which you see is not reality. These are but images projected on a piece of cloth'." He also challenged Nedelciu's view of self-referential prose was a path to interactivity
Interactivity
In the fields of information science, communication, and industrial design, there is debate over the meaning of interactivity. In the "contingency view" of interactivity, there are three levels:...
, arguing that, although the writing process was exposed, the readers' passive role could not be modified: "they can only watch upon the authors' demagogic
Demagogy
Demagogy or demagoguery is a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, vanities and expectations of the public—typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist, populist or religious themes...
gesticulation and later conclude that the latter have still pursued their narrative as intended." In Cristea-Enache's view, Nedelciu circulated "sophism
Sophism
Sophism in the modern definition is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. In ancient Greece, sophists were a category of teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric for the purpose of teaching aretê — excellence, or virtue — predominantly to young statesmen and...
s" and "sleight of hand
Sleight of hand
Sleight of hand, also known as prestidigitation or legerdemain, is the set of techniques used by a magician to manipulate objects such as cards and coins secretly....
", his target reader being someone who, in order not to seem "tasteless, unintelligent and conservative
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
", claims to have enjoyed writings "without substance, structure or form". In 1995, answering to unfavorable comparisons made between the palpable interactivity of electronic literature
Electronic literature
Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments.-Definitions:N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article...
on one hand and the theoretical interactivity of pre-1989 prose on the other, Nedelciu accused his rival Ion Manolescu of having created, "out a cocktail of confusions, a thesis supported only by [his] inexplicable enthusiasm".
For Ştefănescu, the nature of language experiments in Mircea Nedelciu's short fiction is not innovative in its recourse to orality
Orality
Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition...
, and its techniques of constrained writing affect the personal message—citing his record of the 1977 prison term, which follows a strict pattern of grammatical conjugation
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
. Like Negrici, the critic also reproaches some of his peers having welcomed Nedelciu as an innovator "out of lassitude or snob
Snob
A snob is someone who believes that some people are inherently inferior to him or her for any one of a variety of reasons, including real or supposed intellect, wealth, education, ancestry, taste, beauty, nationality, et cetera. Often, the form of snobbery reflects the snob's personal attributes...
bery". Similar points were made by essayist Laszlo Alexandru, who claimed that the lionized mainstream of the 1980s and 90s had artificially promoted a "pyramid structure" dominated by Nedelciu as "The Great Prose Writer", Cărtărescu as "The Great Poet" and Lefter as "The Great Critic". This endorsement clashed with the opinion Laszlo shares, according to which Nedelciu "is far from being even an important prose writer". Although highly critical of Alex. Ştefănescu's overall views on literature, Laszlo agreed with his verdicts on Nedelciu. Taking his distance from the negative critical revisions, in particular that contributed by Ştefănescu, Crăciun claimed: "The narratological
Narratology
Narratology denotes both the theory and the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect our perception. While in principle the word may refer to any systematic study of narrative, in practice its usage is rather more restricted. It is an anglicisation of French...
issues posed by Mircea Nedelciu's writing style [...] have been improperly treated—as aspects on their own, isolated from their subjects, situations, characters and contents—[...] because prose experiment in our country is still seen as an extravagant phenomenon, exterior to creation as such, of doubtful value, arousing suspicion when not in fact pejorative labels."
Among the most debated aspects of Mircea Nedelciu's contribution to literature under communism was his theory that writers could evade the pressures of censorship by appealing to subtext
Subtext
Subtext or undertone is content of a book, play, musical work, film, video game, or television series which is not announced explicitly by the characters but is implicit or becomes something understood by the observer of the work as the production unfolds. Subtext can also refer to the thoughts...
, allusions, irony, and other Postmodern mechanisms, while formally adapting themselves to the exterior ideological aspects. According to literary historian Marcel Cornis-Pope, his approach to testing the "prohibitive boundaries" and "foundations of communist reality" relied on exposing the "dogmatic stagnation" through "bolder experimental fiction", of a kind illustrated by other Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
an authors: Gabriela Adameşteanu
Gabriela Adamesteanu
Gabriela Adameșteanu is a Romanian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, and translator. The author of the celebrated novels The Equal Way of Every Day and Wasted Morning , she is also known as an activist in support of civil society and member of the Group for Social Dialogue , as...
, Péter Esterházy
Péter Esterházy
Péter Esterházy is one of the most widely known contemporary Hungarian writers. His books are considered to be significant contributions to postwar literature....
, Danilo Kiš
Danilo Kiš
Danilo Kiš was a Yugoslavian novelist, short story writer and poet who wrote in Serbo-Croatian. Kiš was influenced by Bruno Schulz, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Ivo Andrić, among other authors...
, Sławomir Mrożek, Péter Nádas
Péter Nádas
Péter Nádas is a Hungarian writer, playwright, and essayist.- Biography :He was born in Budapest as the son of László Nádas and Klára Tauber. After the takeover of the Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross Party on 15 October 1944, Klára Tauber escaped with her son to Bačka and Novi Sad, but returned...
, Toomas Raudam
Toomas Raudam
Toomas Raudam is an Estonian writer.He won the Fridebert Tuglas Award award in 1989 for Lodus tiivad.He has won or been nominated for several other awards for his books, screenplays, and radio plays....
, Piotr Szewc, Dubravka Ugrešić
Dubravka Ugrešic
Dubravka Ugrešić is a Croatian writer who lives in the Netherlands.- Background and education:Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Kutina, SR Croatia, SFR Yugoslavia., She studied Comparative Literature and Russian Language and Literature at the University of Zagreb, pursuing parallel careers as a...
and Mati Unt
Mati Unt
Mati Unt was an Estonian writer, essayist and theatre director....
. Nedelciu's stance was retrospectively criticized by as illusory, particularly since, even if it allowed the Optzecişti to penetrate the market, it did not prevent the censorship apparatus from viewing Nedelciu personally with suspicion. The theory also scandalized older authors, in particular the dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
s and the openly anti-communist
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
observers from within the Romanian diaspora
Romanian diaspora
The Romanian diaspora is the ethnically Romanian population outside Romania and Moldova. The concept does not usually include the ethnic Romanians who live as natives in the states surrounding Romania, chiefly those Romanians who live in Ukraine and Serbia. The diaspora does include the people of...
: Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a broadcaster funded by the U.S. Congress that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East "where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed"...
contributor Monica Lovinescu
Monica Lovinescu
Monica Lovinescu was a Romanian essayist, short story writer, literary critic, translator, and journalist, noted for her activities as an opponent of the Romanian Communist regime. She published several works under the pseudonyms Monique Saint-Come and Claude Pascal. She is the daughter of...
referred to Nedelciu as a "socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
textualist".
Much debate surrounded the writer's own preface to his Tratament fabulatoriu, which several have read as an endorsement of Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
's regime. Alex. Ştefănescu cited its main subject of contention as being the statement that capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
was inherently hostile toward art, whereas communist state
Communist state
A communist state is a state with a form of government characterized by single-party rule or dominant-party rule of a communist party and a professed allegiance to a Leninist or Marxist-Leninist communist ideology as the guiding principle of the state...
s nurtured creativity in order to create a "New Man". According to Laszlo Alexandru, the text enforces the reader's "indignant stupefaction" concerning Nedelciu's promotion by his peers. Such conclusions are contrasted by Nedelciu's own account, provided after the Revolution: he recorded having been engaged in a conflict with censors, and argued that the book itself was about escape from the increased pressures of the 1980s. Mircea Mihăieş recalled that, during the writing process for Femeia în roşu, he had confronted his colleague on the issue of his preface being "annoying and false through its leftism, its opportunistic Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
", and mentioned having received an enraged justification in response. In parallel to such debates, Nedelciu's 1982 article, defined by Ştefănescu as "vehement and insulting", brought further suspicion of his motives.
Debut works
With his debut writings, Mircea Nedelciu elaborated the generic characteristics of his style, and in particular his choice of subjects. The first of his volumes, Aventuri într-o curte interioară, is also his first account of vagrancy as a lifestyle, showing young abandoned orphans escaping into reverie. The characters of Amendament la instinctul proprietăţii expand on Nedelciu's reflexions about marginality and aggression: a wanderer, Alexandru Daldea, is gripped by despair, while his female counterpart Dilaré is shown to be suicidal. Another character, Bebe Pîrvulescu, stands for political allusion, being the morally ambiguous son of an officer involved in repression and his cheating wife (whose lover was among those branded "enemiesEnemy of the people
The term enemy of the people is a fluid designation of political or class opponents of the group using the term. The term implies that the "enemies" in question are acting against society as a whole. It is similar to the notion of "enemy of the state". The term originated in Roman times as ,...
"). A critically acclaimed section of the volume is Provocare în stil Moreno ("Moreno-style Provocation"), called by Diniţoiu a "wonderful prose [which nevertheless] entangles itself in its own meta-textual armor, pressing on its vibration-loaded core." It depicts a physically disabled man, who closely follows the outside world using a pair of binoculars
Binoculars
Binoculars, field glasses or binocular telescopes are a pair of identical or mirror-symmetrical telescopes mounted side-by-side and aligned to point accurately in the same direction, allowing the viewer to use both eyes when viewing distant objects...
.
The apparent historical novel
Historical novel
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is-Development:An early example of historical prose fiction is Luó Guànzhōng's 14th century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history and left a lasting impact on Chinese culture.The...
Zmeura de cîmpie, carrying the subtitle Roman împotriva memoriei ("A Novel against Memory"), tells the story of Zare Popescu, who is engaged on a mysterious quasi-archeological investigation into history. He and all other protagonists are presumably orphaned drifters who run into each other chaotically while traveling the country—a narrative setting to which Nedelciu adds long fragments of inquires into abstract topics of etymology
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
or cinemaphilia
Cinemaphile
Cinephilia is the term used to refer to a passionate interest in cinema, film theory and film criticism. The term is a portmanteau of the words cinema and philia, one of the four ancient Greek words for love...
, reflecting the main characters' obsessions. A secondary element is the erotic tension between Zare and Ana, an ambiguous female character who occasionally and mysteriously expresses herself in an ungrammatical version of Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
with strong influences from Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
. Cornis-Pope sees it as representative for the subtle manner in which Nedelciu, like Stan and Adameşteanu, chose to question "ideological representations" and "official myths" present "at the height of Ceauşescu's 'totalitarian
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
absurd' ". He argues: "Zmeura de cîmpie [...] dramatized the difficulties of extricating the culture's 'soul of facts' from official fictions and the totalistic language of the 'tribe'." For Cornis-Pope, this concern is similar to dissenting reportage authors in Communist Poland
People's Republic of Poland
The People's Republic of Poland was the official name of Poland from 1952 to 1990. Although the Soviet Union took control of the country immediately after the liberation from Nazi Germany in 1944, the name of the state was not changed until eight years later...
and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the abolition of the Yugoslav monarchy until it was dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav Wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of six socialist republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,...
, such as Ryszard Kapuściński
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist and writer whose dispatches in book form brought him a global reputation. Also a photographer and poet, he was born in Pińsknow in Belarusin the Kresy Wschodnie or eastern borderlands of the second Polish Republic, into poverty: he would say later that...
and Miško Kranjec
Miško Kranjec
Miško Kranjec was a Slovene writer.Kranjec was born in the village of Velika Polana in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as the son of the village tailor Mihalj Kranjec...
. Taking the book's dedication to veterans of Romania's 1944-1945 campaign
Romania during World War II
Following the outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939, the Kingdom of Romania officially adopted a position of neutrality. However, the rapidly changing situation in Europe during 1940, as well as domestic political upheaval, undermined this stance. Fascist political forces such as the Iron...
as her clue, critic Simona Vasilache discusses the text as a generational epic, stressing that the hidden theme is the fate of anti-fascists
Anti-fascism
Anti-fascism is the opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals, such as that of the resistance movements during World War II. The related term antifa derives from Antifaschismus, which is German for anti-fascism; it refers to individuals and groups on the left of the political...
entrapped by communism. Daniel Cristea-Enache is highly critical of Zmeura de cîmpie, deeming it "weak and indigestible", and opining that the experimental aspects "no longer enable fiction to breathe, but substitute it."
Tratament fabulatoriu, Şi ieri va fi o zi and Femeia în roşu
Tratament fabulatoriu, the preface of which made Mircea Nedelciu the subject of controversy, is Nedelciu's contribution to the fantasyFantasy literature
Fantasy literature is fantasy in written form. Historically speaking, literature has composed the majority of fantasy works. Since the 1950s however, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of films, television programs, graphic novels, video games, music, painting, and other...
novel, having for its protagonist the meteorologist Luca, whose work assignment in Temelia ("Foundation") village leads him into a world apparently governed by the rules of Utopian socialism
Utopian socialism
Utopian socialism is a term used to define the first currents of modern socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen which inspired Karl Marx and other early socialists and were looked on favorably...
. Like in Zmeura de cîmpie, the small community benefiting from these guidelines finds its preoccupation in historical research: its leader Marius asks his comrades to piece together the career of his supposed ancestor, Neculai Fiston-Gulianu. The plot subsequently focuses on Luca's internal struggles, brought upon by clues that this universe is the design of his own imagination, and culminating in resignation to reality. Within the text are references and stylistic homages to Mateiu Caragiale
Mateiu Caragiale
Mateiu Ion Caragiale was a Romanian poet and prose writer, best known for his novel Craii de Curtea-Veche, which portrays the milieu of boyar descendants before and after World War I. Caragiale's style, associated with Symbolism, the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle, and early modernism, was...
and his celebrated Craii de Curtea-Veche
Craii de Curtea-Veche
Craii de Curtea-Veche is a novel by the inter-war Romanian author Mateiu Caragiale...
novel, centered on details in Fiston-Gulianu's biography. The work is punctuated by first-person interrogations, where Mircea Nedelciu transforms his narrative mode into a third-level story, where he analyzes his own ability to interpret Luca's feelings.
Mihai Oprea notes the text's ambiguous fluctuation between an actual "Möbius strip
Möbius strip
The Möbius strip or Möbius band is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. The Möbius strip has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. It can be realized as a ruled surface...
" space with "unknown laws" and the imagination of a character "on the verge of autism
Autism
Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their...
". In his updated preface of 1996, where he presented his intentions of subverting the communist guideline, Mircea Nedelciu explained that his intent was to create "a counter-utopia
Utopian and dystopian fiction
The utopia and its offshoot, the dystopia, are genres of literature that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world, or utopia, as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: creation of a nightmare world, or dystopia...
", sourced by his clandestine readings from George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchical dictatorship of the Party...
, from Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...
's Crowds and Power
Crowds and Power
Crowds and Power is a 1960 book by Elias Canetti, dealing with the dynamics of crowds and "packs" and the question of how and why crowds obey rulers. Canetti draws a parallel between ruling and paranoia...
, and from Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
's Discipline and Punish
Discipline and Punish
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a book by philosopher Michel Foucault. Originally published in 1975 in France under the title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, it was translated into English in 1977. It is an interrogation of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind...
. According to Oprea, the work nevertheless fails in its stated ambition of evading the "obsessive-pressuring" world of the late Ceauşescu years: "We are promised the solution of a bitter fight and we are offered a cardboard scenery and wooden swords. We are informed by the sound of trumpets of the retreat into the last redoubt we still can defend (although it can't defend us), and, once we arrive there, we realize that the enemy is a controlled marionette, albeit one masterfully handled by that absolute and pitiless master, the Author." Adina Diniţoiu believes that, contrary to its author's reflections, Tratament fabulatoriu is "Mircea Nedelciu's only fantasy and baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
book"; she also highlights its "mannerist
Mannerism
Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...
", formalist
Formalism (literature)
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...
" and "Bovaryist
Bovarysme
Bovarysme is a term derived from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary . It denotes a tendency toward escapist daydreaming in which the dreamer imagines himself or herself to be a hero or heroine in a romance, whilst ignoring the everyday realities of the situation. The eponymous Madame Bovary is an...
" characteristics.
Noted within Şi ieri va fi o zi, the story Probleme cu identitatea ("Identity Problems") is believed by Cordoş as the "peak" of Nedelciu's short fiction. Subtitled Variaţiuni în căutarea temei ("Variations in Search of a Theme"), it merges biographical details with imagined elements, recounting in three different ways the journey of Mureşan Vasile (or Murivale), who travels to Bucharest in order to stand wake
Wake (ceremony)
A wake is a ceremony associated with death. Traditionally, a wake takes place in the house of the deceased, with the body present; however, modern wakes are often performed at a funeral home. In the United States and Canada it is synonymous with a viewing...
for poet Nichita Stănescu
Nichita Stanescu
Nichita Stănescu was a Romanian poet and essayist. He is the most acclaimed contemporary Romanian language poet, loved by the public and generally held in esteem by literary critics.-Biography:...
. Murivale is, in turn, a worker who quits his job, a deserting
Desertion
In military terminology, desertion is the abandonment of a "duty" or post without permission and is done with the intention of not returning...
soldier and a bankrupt visual artist from Timişoara
Timisoara
Timișoara is the capital city of Timiș County, in western Romania. One of the largest Romanian cities, with an estimated population of 311,586 inhabitants , and considered the informal capital city of the historical region of Banat, Timișoara is the main social, economic and cultural center in the...
—avatars which allow Nedelciu to expand on the issue of art in general and, in particular, on that of Timişoara's literary environment. By highlighting the awkwardness in his protagonist's dealing with grief, Probleme cu identitatea also reflects the contrast between the fragile everyday and the magnificence presumed of art. Cordoş concludes: "Life is made of cunning, betrayals, affection and exasperation, marital strife and unexpected complicity, which Nedelciu constructs not in antithesis
Antithesis
Antithesis is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition...
but in a complementary way so that art will acquire, even in the eyes of petty people, a radiance inexplicable to them." In addition to this piece, the volume includes Primul exil la cronoscop ("The First Chronoscope
Marine chronometer
A marine chronometer is a clock that is precise and accurate enough to be used as a portable time standard; it can therefore be used to determine longitude by means of celestial navigation...
Exile"), a science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
-inspired story introducing the deep-sea diving metaphor which would come to fascinate Nedelciu during his final years.
Femeia în roşu, defined by its subtitle as a retro roman ("retro-novel"), is the fictionalized biography of Ana Cumpănaş
Ana Cumpanas
Ana Cumpănaş or Anna Sage, nicknamed Woman in Red , was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian prostitute and brothel owner in the American cities of Chicago and Gary...
, a Romanian prostitute who helped capture American gangster John Dillinger
John Dillinger
John Herbert Dillinger, Jr. was an American bank robber in Depression-era United States. He was charged with, but never convicted of, the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana police officer during a shoot-out. This was his only alleged homicide. His gang robbed two dozen banks and four police stations...
. Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
academic and literary historian Harold Segel
Harold Segel
Harold B. Segel is professor emeritus of Slavic literatures and of comparative literature at Columbia University.-Works:*Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia: A History and Anthology *The Major Comedies of Alexander Fredro...
calls it "a curious mixture of docudrama
Docudrama
In film, television programming and staged theatre, docudrama is a documentary-style genre that features dramatized re-enactments of actual historical events. As a neologism, the term is often confused with docufiction....
, historical novel
Historical novel
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is-Development:An early example of historical prose fiction is Luó Guànzhōng's 14th century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history and left a lasting impact on Chinese culture.The...
, and self-reflective fiction", seeing it as "of particular interest to Americans" among existing pieces of Romanian collaborative fiction
Collaborative fiction
Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by a group of authors who share creative control of a story.Collaborative fiction can occur for commercial gain, as part of education, or recreationally - many collaboratively written works have been the subject of a large degree of academic research.-...
. The three authors, who were reportedly following the suggestion of Banat Swabian
Banat Swabians
The Banat Swabians are an ethnic German population in Southeast Europe, part of the Danube Swabians. They emigrated in the 18th century to what was then the Austrian Banat province, which had been left sparsely populated by the wars with Turkey. This once strong and important ethnic Banat Swabian...
writer William Totok, based their retrospective account on various sources, including first-hand interviews with people from Comloşu Mare
Comlosu Mare
Comloşu Mare is a commune in Timiş County, Romania. It is composed of three villages: Comloşu Mare, Comloşu Mic and Lunga. Its sister-settlement is Magyarcsanád, Hungary.- Relevant Dates :1446 - First historical documents mention the commune;...
, the village where Cumpănaş originated, resulting in what writer Ana Maria Sandu called "a story that is at the very least as fascinating as that of [...] Dillinger." The subject matter reputedly irritated communist censors, accounting for the fact that Femeia în roşu was published only after the 1989 Revolution
Romanian Revolution of 1989
The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was a series of riots and clashes in December 1989. These were part of the Revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several Warsaw Pact countries...
.
Beyond the conventional aspects of the narrative, the novel introduces various pieces of experimental prose, whose actual protagonist, critic Simona Sora proposes, is the human body. While respecting formal conventions to the point of including a bibliographical section for the sources consulted, the authors stretch the plot to mention real or imagined details of their own process of researching and writing, or divert it to include episodes about real but not directly relevant personages (such as Canetti and psychoanalyst
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
). The focal point and recurring element is autopsy
Autopsy
An autopsy—also known as a post-mortem examination, necropsy , autopsia cadaverum, or obduction—is a highly specialized surgical procedure that consists of a thorough examination of a corpse to determine the cause and manner of death and to evaluate any disease or injury that may be present...
, a procedure in which Sora sees a hidden comment on the very nature of novels: "The rules of a professional autopsy thus become the rules of a novel that is self-aware and aware of literature's (often void) demands." Although she argues that the stated goal of overturning "ancient complexes of the Romanian writer" is left open, Simona Sora sees Femeia în roşu and its "virtuosity" as imposing the autofictional model in front of conventional "artifice".
Zodia Scafandrului
Nedelciu's unfinished novel, Zodia Scafandrului, is marked by the expectation of death, echoing the final part of its author's life (a period described by Nedelciu's colleague Alexandru MuşinaAlexandru Musina
Alexandru Muşina is a Romanian poet, essayist, and editor born in Sibiu.He studied literature at the University of Bucharest in the late 1970s and published poetry in the 1980s beginning with Cinci in 1982....
as marked by "generosity, the cult of friendship, a sense of honor and, above all, indifference in the face of death"). Days before dying, the author himself recorded how the expectation had impacted on his writing style: "I know, time now seems to have become very short. It's no longer feasible to put down on paper everything that passes through your mind. You have to make selections, samples. You have to know how to do the opposite of what a tailor does: to measure just once and to cut dozens of times, to discard, to suggest rather than to develop in great detail. But these are things that can be learned." He also commented on the "tricks" his literature had developed in its confrontation with both the threat of death and the debilitating character of his disease: "For example, [describing] in detail a healthy foot, the toes that waggle freely up and down, the mobility of a fine ankle, the play of the shins and thighs in dance—all these things place my hideous adversary in a real crisis of uncertainty. It knows already that my legs belong to it, but I am talking about different legs. There are and will be so many!" Nedelciu also recounted masking his fear of the disease by only referring to it with the euphemism
Euphemism
A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, inoffensive, relatively uncontroversial phrase for another more frank expression that might offend or otherwise suggest something unpleasant to the audience...
gâlci ("quinsy
Peritonsillar abscess
Peritonsillar abscess , also called a quinsy or abbreviated as PTA is a recognised complication of tonsillitis and consists of a collection of pus beside the tonsil .-Symptoms and signs:...
"). According to both Gheorghe Crăciun and Ion Bogdan Lefter, their friend had a superstition
Superstition
Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any process in the physical world linking the two events....
according to which completing his book would accelerate death.
Despite the timely constraints, Nedelciu's original project may have called for Zodia Scafandrului to be the first section of a larger cycle, structured around the yearly cycle of months. Adina Diniţoiu calls attention to the book's "unsettling biographical genre [...] intensely vibrating the chord of a writing style completely lacking in formalism." She ties it to a final development in Nedelciu's literary attitudes, that in which "profundity" was added to his branch of "microrealism", producing "an ethical and even soteriological
Soteriology
The branch of Christian theology that deals with salvation and redemption is called Soteriology. It is derived from the Greek sōtērion + English -logy....
connotation". In Lefter's view, the book "may be and must be read—I insist: must be read—in various ways." Its nature, he specifies, is that of a "literary and sociocultural project [...] attempting to reach the profound truths in Romania's 20th century universe", but also that of a memoir offering "the sense to a life." The text, having for its protagonist Nedelciu's alter ego
Alter ego
An alter ego is a second self, which is believe to be distinct from a person's normal or original personality. The term was coined in the early nineteenth century when dissociative identity disorder was first described by psychologists...
Diogene "Dio" Sava, again speaks of its own genesis, notably by referencing a real-life encounter with Scarlat, a diver for the state commercial fleet Navrom and amateur novelist, who reveals to Nedelciu that writing itself may carry the symptoms of disease. Through the themes of diving and disease, the book filtrates satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
of communist politics, as Nedelciu explained within the actual text: "this free body of mine, Mediterranean
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...
as it is even through the idea of a healthy and harmonious body, perceives this adventure into the deep [...] as an adventure into a much colder land. In short, the mind imagines the deep-sea diver's world and the body refuses it instinctively, viscerally. And for good reason too, given that, in fact, behind the Cousteauesque
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water...
design, my mind encrypts the adversities (the chill, the frost) of this entire world I'm living in, this symbolic coldness of Romania's communist society in the year 1989, and the body naturally refuses this exile 'up North'." According to Lefter, Nedelciu was actually reworking his notion of layered meanings into the diving metaphor, adapting an earlier interest in the techniques of art restoration
Art restoration
Art restoration is related to art conservation. Restoration is a process that attempts to return the work of art to some previous state that the restorer imagines was the "original". This was commonly done in the past...
(in turned provoked by his discussions with muralist Viorel Grimalschi).
Sava's literary biography reflects his familiarity with interwar society and its upper class
Upper class
In social science, the "upper class" is the group of people at the top of a social hierarchy. Members of an upper class may have great power over the allocation of resources and governmental policy in their area.- Historical meaning :...
, and again portrays Mateiu Caragiale (this time by fictionalizing Caragiale's activities at his property in Fundulea
Fundulea
Fundulea is an agricultural town located in the Călăraşi County, Romania. It is located on the Bărăgan Plain, approximately 30 km east of the capital Bucharest, in the historical region of Wallachia. It has a population of 6,217. The A2 freeway and Mostiştea River pass through its vicinity...
). The impact of communism and collectivization
Collectivization in Romania
The collectivization of agriculture in Romania took place in the early years of the Communist regime. The initiative sought to bring about a thorough transformation in the property regime and organisation of labour in agriculture...
is reflected as a collective tragedy, and the start of an apparent Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
, depicting the Sava family's encounters with the Securitate
Securitate
The Securitate was the secret police agency of Communist Romania. Previously, the Romanian secret police was called Siguranţa Statului. Founded on August 30, 1948, with help from the Soviet NKVD, the Securitate was abolished in December 1989, shortly after President Nicolae Ceaușescu was...
secret police, the life of debauchery he leads in order to liberate himself from pressures, and his employment at the Securitate-led Great Institute of History. The latter is a satirical reworking of historiographic
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
practice under communism, the extreme nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
of the late Ceauşescu years, and the intrusion of pseudoscientific
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
theories such as Protochronism
Protochronism
Protochronism is a Romanian term describing the tendency to ascribe, largely relying on questionable data and subjective interpretations, an idealised past to the country as a whole...
into scientific practice. These episodes also mark the return of Zare Popescu, the protagonist of Zmeura de cîmpie, who works with Dio at the Institute and whom again experiences life through digressions into historical symbolism, which this time are explicitly about dictatorship. These include an oblique mention of Ceauşescu being convinced that he was about to be replaced by "a Pisces", and Crăciun declared himself "absolutely convinced" that Zodia Scafandrului was supposed to end with an overview of the 1989 Revolution as "December". The narrative takes Diogene to Communist Poland
People's Republic of Poland
The People's Republic of Poland was the official name of Poland from 1952 to 1990. Although the Soviet Union took control of the country immediately after the liberation from Nazi Germany in 1944, the name of the state was not changed until eight years later...
, on a scientific mission which connects him to the Securitate's international schemes, and fictionalizes events related to the Gdańsk Shipyard
Gdansk Shipyard
Gdańsk Shipyard is a large Polish shipyard, located in the city of Gdańsk. The yard gained international fame when Solidarity was founded there in September 1980...
strikes.
Other late works
Mircea Nedelciu's other short prose work include his 1998 contribution to erotic literatureErotic literature
Erotic literature comprises fictional and factual stories and accounts of human sexual relationships which have the power to or are intended to arouse the reader sexually. Such erotica takes the form of novels, short stories, poetry, true-life memoirs, and sex manuals...
, which reworked a similar 19th century piece by the folk writer Ion Creangă
Ion Creanga
Ion Creangă was a Moldavian-born Romanian writer, raconteur and schoolteacher. A main figure in 19th century Romanian literature, he is best known for his Childhood Memories volume, his novellas and short stories, and his many anecdotes...
(Povestea poveştilor, "Tale of All Tales"), thus seeking to liberate profane language
Romanian profanity
Romanian profanity refers to a set of words considered blasphemous or inflammatory in the Romanian language.Romanian is considered to have a huge set of inflammatory terms and phrases...
. Nedelciu, who deemed Creangă "the ballsiest Romanian-language storyteller", placed his version of the story during the late years of communism, describing sexual encounters between female teachers and party activists. Literary critic Paul Cernat commended the work for its "overflowing relish", and concluded on the posthumous relationship between the two authors and their treatment of Romanian folklore
Folklore of Romania
A feature of Romanian culture is the special relationship between folklore and the learned culture, determined by two factors. First, the rural character of the Romanian communities resulted in an exceptionally vital and creative traditional culture. Folk creations were the main literary genre...
: "the genuine storyteller, bearer of the oral
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
, peasant culture in the written from [versus] the Postmodern prose writer, who has seen everything written culture has to offer, returning to the rudimentary, popular roots of his writing". The text was among those rejected by Alex. Ştefănescu, who claimed: "Ion Creangă's text is not simply picturesque
Picturesque
Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England's...
, it is refined and full of charm, while Mircea Nedelciu's, fashioned in a cold manner, lacking the joy of storytelling, is merely vulgar."
Several other scattered prose fragments were discovered only after Nedelciu died. Among them is Uriaşa şi ciudata pasăre a viselor noastre ("The Giant and Weird Bird in Our Dreams"), which seems to refer to his countryside escapades with Ion Dumitriu and others. Literary critic Carmen Muşat advances a hypothesis according to which the undated work dates ca. 1990, basing it on various clues in the text. She also describes the "key" of the piece as being provided by its motto
Motto
A motto is a phrase meant to formally summarize the general motivation or intention of a social group or organization. A motto may be in any language, but Latin is the most used. The local language is usual in the mottoes of governments...
, "Now that we are done creating the world, what's left for us other than recreating it?" This, the critic argues, results in a "representative text for Mircea Nedelciu's prose", or "a story told with naturalness and well-tempered irony, about the ambiguity of relations between the narrator, the characters and the reader, about their double rooting in reality and textuality, as well as about their adventures in this 'through the looking-glass
Through the Looking-Glass
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a work of literature by Lewis Carroll . It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
country' that is literature." The main intertextual reference in this case is Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
: Uriaşa şi ciudata pasăre a viselor noastre transmits images or sections of text borrowed from The Snows of Kilimanjaro
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in Esquire magazine in 1936. It was republished in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories in 1938, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories in 1961, and is included in The Complete Short Stories of...
, Hills Like White Elephants
Hills Like White Elephants
"Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in the 1927 collection Men Without Women.-Plot summary:...
and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Set in Africa, it was published in the September 1936 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine concurrently with "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"...
.
Legacy
Nedelciu has been voted among Romania's most important novelists in 2001, following a poll by Observator CulturalObservator Cultural
Observator Cultural is a literary magazine based in Bucharest, Romania. It covers Romania's cultural and arts scene.-External links:*...
review: out of 150 novels, Femeia în roşu was voted 23rd-best, with Tratament fabulatoriu at 28 and Zmeura de cîmpie at 139. An edition of Zodia Scafandrului was published in 2000, sparking debates about the appropriateness of circulating unfinished versions of one's work. Nedelciu's posthumous bibliography also includes a 1999 selection of his entire work (under the collective title Aventuri într-o curte interioară) and a 2003 version of Femeia în roşu, as well as the collection Proză scurtă ("Short Prose" or "The Mircea Nedelciu Reader"). They were followed by a reprint of Zmeura... and third editions of Tratament fabulatoriu (2006) and Femeia în roşu (2008). Several other of his stories saw print in stages after his death (including Uriaşa şi ciudata pasăre a viselor noastre, published by Observator Cultural in July 2008).
In addition to Mircea Mihăieş, who recounts having learned the techniques of novelistic writing from his friend, a new generation of authors, most of whom debuted in the 1990s, assimilated influences from the writings of Mircea Nedelciu. Among them are Dan Lungu
Dan Lungu
Dan Lungu is a Romanian novelist, short story writer, poet and dramatist, also known as a literary theorist and sociologist. The recipient of critical acclaim for his short story volume Cheta la flegmă and his...
, Sorin Stoica, Lucian Dan Teodorovici
Lucian Dan Teodorovici
Lucian Dan Teodorovici is a Romanian writer, journalist and editor. He works as co-ordinator of Polirom’s “Ego. Prose” series, and as senior editor of the...
, Andrei Bodiu
Andrei Bodiu
Andrei Bodiu is a Romanian poet, literary commentator, Professor of Literature and publicist.He graduated in Philology at the Universităţii din Timişoara in 1988....
and Călin Torsan. Nedelciu's reworking of Povestea poveştilor, alongside Creangă's original and similar texts, was transformed into an eponymous fringe theater show, directed by actor Gheorghe Hibovski and premiered in spring 2009. According to critic Cornel Ungureanu, Femeia în roşu has endured as "the manifesto of Optzecişti prose writers, an exemplary work of autochthonous Postmodernism", while its main character, Ana Cumpănaş
Ana Cumpanas
Ana Cumpănaş or Anna Sage, nicknamed Woman in Red , was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian prostitute and brothel owner in the American cities of Chicago and Gary...
, has grown into "the actual aunt of autochthonous Postmodernism."
However, Daniel Cristea-Enache claimed, Nedelciu has become a victim of lack of interest, or "our lack of critical memory", after 1999, a phenomenon which he contrasts with the "almost always positive old critical references". Cristea-Enache believes the "not to flattering" explanation resides in the critical establishment's acknowledgment that Nedelciu "is not one of the sizable novelists." A different account was offered by Gheorghe Crăciun, who wrote: "Presently, [Nedelciu's] prose is, in the eyes of many (including school textbook authors), a rather precisely charted territory, which may no longer offer surprises, be they thematic or technical." According to Diniţoiu (who bases her conclusions on 2005 inquires among University of Bucharest
University of Bucharest
The University of Bucharest , in Romania, is a university founded in 1864 by decree of Prince Alexander John Cuza to convert the former Saint Sava Academy into the current University of Bucharest.-Presentation:...
students), Nedelciu's popularity declined not just because of his difficult stylistic approach, but also because "the referent" of "microrealism" has vanished—whereas Cărtărescu's "imaginative constructs" had maintained "a good quotation on the market of values."
In November 2002, during events marking Nedelciu's 52nd birthday, the Fundulea
Fundulea
Fundulea is an agricultural town located in the Călăraşi County, Romania. It is located on the Bărăgan Plain, approximately 30 km east of the capital Bucharest, in the historical region of Wallachia. It has a population of 6,217. The A2 freeway and Mostiştea River pass through its vicinity...
school which the writer had attended as a child was renamed in his honor. Ion Bogdan Lefter, who attended the event, commented: "Fundulea has become a spot on Romania's cultural map, owing to him, to Nedelciu, just like other small communities—albeit not many!—are renowned for being the places which so and so have left in order to become great names in national creativity..." Since 2002, the annual Gaudeamus Book Fair hosts an essay contest on literary subjects, targeting students in their final years of high school and awarding the Mircea Nedelciu National Prize for Reading.
External links
- Yesterday Will Be Another Day (excerpt), The Sign Of The Diver (excerpt), Swampward Ho! (selection from Sign of the Deep Sea-Diver), in the Romanian Cultural InstituteRomanian Cultural InstituteThe Romanian Cultural Institute is a state-funded institution that promotes Romanian culture and civilization in Romania and abroad. The ICR was formerly set up through reorganization of the Romanian Cultural Foundation and Romanian Cultural Publishing Foundation...
's Plural Magazine (various issues) - The Controlled Echo Effect, at Observator CulturalObservator CulturalObservator Cultural is a literary magazine based in Bucharest, Romania. It covers Romania's cultural and arts scene.-External links:*...
, The Observer Translation Project