During the pandemic, Ana Blandiana was going through her papers and came across the notebooks of a diary that she thought had been lost. In 1988, he records the period of the publication ban day by day. Because of the arpagic motan—a funny and bold camouflaged incarnation of Carmachio Nicolae Ceausescu—from her cycle of poems for children, she was no longer allowed to practice the profession of writer that had sanctified her. So begins this wonderful book about the darkest years of the communist regime, years of despair, fear and duplicity. I don’t know that anything similar has been written in our country in terms of the power of reconstruction and the unadorned stylistic reproduction of that era.

The recently published magazine has the freshness and authenticity of a historical document. It was written, as they say, in the heat, in the heat of events, in the heat of hidden life, in the ominous gray of an age in agony and in the atomization of an intellectual world riddled with compromises and corruption of spirit. Besides, it was written, like any honest diary, without the thought or hope that it would ever see the light of day. This makes it all the more impressive in every way: as a testimony, as an example, as literature of the highest quality.

The “action” takes place either in the city (Bucharest) or in the village (Comana), which gives this book a deep sociological dimension. We see how life is in the capital in concentric circles of writers: cultural figures, politically regulated authors, fishermen in murky water, foundries, lonely, former, current, forbidden, silent, disturbers of the peace. Readers who lived in those times will find famous names in the book and get a clearer idea of ​​what these names became later… Mircea Dinescu is just one of them. And we see how they lived in the country, in the human fabric created by the culture of the agricultural production cooperative: peasants-recusants, peasants-old-timers, plundered and depopulated peasants, a village ideologically stained and numbed by the duplicity of poverty. , fear and rudeness.

The diary is eagerly read not only because of the desire to reveal some behind-the-scenes detail from the lives of forgotten or, on the contrary, famous writers, but also because the five hundred pages are irresistible as a panorama of life. I tried to read More than the past through the eyes of a young man born after 1990, who will quickly pass by names that no longer mean anything to him, and arguments about ideas and pangs of conscience that he would understand only as dystopian waves of a good memoir novel. Instead, no era will remain indifferent to the great love story that this diary tells with many hermeneutical layers.

The gloomy political color, shades of the dramatic lack of intellectual solidarity in the face of communist reflections on life and writing, the bloody colors of everyday deprivation, coldness and absurdity stand out all the better because the canvas on which they are depicted remains steadfast. in the kingdom of love. The more the warmth, beauty, humanity and heroism of love are hidden from the view of the world, the more disgusting and shaky the grotesque of the era seems. There are three great loves in this book: love for the Blandiana-Rusan couple, love for the country of Romania, an impressive natural tenderness devoid of any patriotic demagoguery, and love for literature as a way of life.

So, young people of yesterday and today, readers of tomorrow will discover in this diary a wonderful novel about survival through love – as a message of encouragement, thrown into the ocean of all the storms of life from an island abandoned by prohibition. free thought

Endowed with a natural metaphysical fiber, Ana Blandiana is, in my opinion and taste, the most insightful and dignified voice of modern memoirs, and wins me over every time with a combination of painful clarity in relation to reality and a view of the world and people that always remains warm, full of hope.