Conferences
Ilina Gregori: When was the 19th Century? Eminescu and Modernity
On Sunday, June 14th, at 11 o'clock, the Black Box Hall will host the conference When was the 19th Century? Eminescu and Modernity, held by Mrs. Ilina Gregori.
"What does the good God expect from the one who did not live his life due to the circumstances that humiliated and sacrificed it?"
With this question - rhetoric, in fact - Alexandru Dragomir, the exceptional philosopher, but without writings, was recently justifying the tragic balance of his life. Forced by circumstances, he had decided to sabotage through solitude and silence the Romanian culture that was „created” around him – so false and so ill-founded, that any participation in the activities that kept it operative, was in the eyes of the philosopher an unforgivable guilt.
But "what does the good God expect" from a brilliant man, who has lived only thirty-nine years, of which the last six cannot even be weighed with the units of measurement suitable for normal human life? In Eminescu's case, then, God should be content with little - if He is "good." And if such kindness and mercy have hitherto manifested themselves neither constantly nor clearly in the judgment of posterity, we must not lose confidence in the mercy of heaven, but only investigate more closely where those expectations we all know stem - maximum or downright immeasurable, if not even absurd - that have always and always imposed themselves in Eminescu's reception. How can we so easily forget the circumstances that distorted his life, the disease that "humiliated" and brutally abbreviated it?
If that "God of culture" that C. Noica was talking about is not a simple figure of speech, such an exorbitant expectation could be attributed to him: Eminescu – the genius individual, the "complete man", moral and intellectual role model, "Soul" of the nation, "[its] better conscience". But Cioran also judges from above, from heaven, when it comes to Eminescu. Even in the years of maturity, with all the lucidity acquired in exile, even looking for challenge, offense, blasphemy, Cioran continues to believe that Eminescu saved the Romanian nation, deprived of any political or cultural merits, an "invertebrate" nation, lacking destiny, etc. In his youth, as we know, Cioran had claimed that Providence had expected more from its chosen one: as the Messiah, Eminescu had to project the virtues and triumph of his nation into the near future. However, Eminescu remained a prophet of the past, Cioran claimed, a true failure of the project of Romania’s modern "transfiguration".
The disappointment of young Cioran, as well as the imputations of an Eugen Lovinescu, for example – in order not to recall but two moments of a rich critical tradition - they essentially look at Eminescu's deficit in relation to modernity, but can we still accept such an apology for modernity nowadays? How much more legitimacy did this secular religion have in the interwar period? But what did it mean to be modern in the second half of the twentieth century? How was modernity conceived in Iasi? What about in Vienna or Berlin? Which of these contemporary, interconnected and yet asynchronous environments decisively influenced Eminescu's relationship - theoretical, aesthetic, existential-emotional - with modernity? We propose some topics of reflection in this direction, aroused by the Berlin phase of the poet's biography.
About Ilina Gregori:
Graduate of the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Romanian Language and Literature.
She made her debut with literary criticism articles during her student years.
Present between 1966-1969 in the literary press, especially in the Luceafărul magazine, with numerous literary reviews, signed as Ilina Grigorovici.
She pursued her studies (philosophy, Romanics, comparative literature) in the Federal Republic of Germany, where she settled in the early 1970s.
Under the guidance of Professor Walter Biemel, she received her PhD degree in Aachen (completed in 1977), with a thesis on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology of language (work published under the title Merleau-Pontys Phänomenologie der Sprache, in 1977, in Heidelberg, Carl Winter Publishing House).
From 1976 to 2005, she was a lecturer at the Institute of Romance Philology of the Free University of West Berlin.
Since 1977, she has published in synthesis volumes and specialized journals (from Germany, Holland, France) a series of studies, often from communications at congresses, colloquia, international symposia, about Eminescu, Caragiale (Ion Luca and Mateiu), Romanians writers in exile, etc.
She translated into German (in collaboration with Heinz Hermann) Mircea Eliade's Memoirs (1987, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp).
She collaborated with articles on Romanian literature at the Brockhaus Encyclopedia and the Kindlers Lexicon.
The volume Rumänistische Literaturwissenschaft. Fallstudien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2007, Heidelberg, Winter Publishing House) contains a selection of 20 studies in German and French, dedicated to modern Romanian literature.
She returned to Romanian cultural life after 1980 with the volume The Only Essential Literature: The Fantastic Story. Balzac. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Pieyre de Mandiargues (1996, DU Style Publishing House).
The volumes Literary Studies. Eminescu in Berlin. Mircea Eliade: Three Analyses (2002, Romanian Cultural Foundation Publishing House, "Titu Maiorescu" award of the Romanian Academy) and Do We Know Who Eminescu Was? Facts, Riddles, Hypotheses (2008, Art Publishing House) followed.
Translated by Simona Nichiteanu
