Alexandru Andritoiu and the Communist Regime’s Need of Legitimating Narratives

Abstract

The present paper is an interdisciplinary approach to one side of a poet’s career who has been of late de object of critical revaluation. The book published by Ruxandra Gavra last year, “Alexandru Andritoiu și revista Familia,” is trying to improve the public image of a poet who made his debut in the „obsessive decade” of the post-war period in Romania and whose literary career came into prominence especially during Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime – 1965-1989 – when he became Managing Editor of the Familia Journal, the oldest periodical in the country. In his favour are pleading his connections with the Sibiu Circle and the space granted to the Echinox group who contributed substantially to the emancipation of the literary scene through studies in literary theory and in comparative literature. Nevertheless, we consider that a sociological perspective will reveal Andritoiu’s role in the consolidation of Ceausescu’s cult of personality, as well as his contribution to the shaping of a mode of discourse which was not personal (a phenotext) but a genotext – an institutionalized and patterned language of ideological cliches, if we are to use Julia Kristeva’s binary in Semeiotike.