ROMANIAN LITERATURE FOR THE WORLD: A MATTER OF PROPERTY

For many Romanian intellectuals of the 19th–20th centuries, the relation of their national literature to world literature(s) was not only a pressing question to consider, but also a real obsession which has led to two extreme attitudes in modern Romanian intellectual culture. On the one hand, a number of Romanian writers and scholars (some of whom deliberately left for the West) have described the situation of their own culture from a pamphlet and/or self-victimizing position, which confirmed a foreign researcher’s observation that “self-denigration is an essential component of the Romanian self-image and is deeply rooted in the matrix of the national culture”