One of the peak moments in the literary life of 2000 was the publication of Anna Bento’s collection of memoirs. The book was called, and not by chance, The life we ​​were given it covered the period 1944-1952, and the reflexive-passive in the title said everything about how little a person’s will mattered, his very life, in communist times.

After 19 years, the publishing house named after Humanitas republished, under special graphic conditions, the book in question. In a chronicle written at the time, we noted that the transition from fiction to memoir (Annie Bentoi originally intended to write a novel) was a useful fact. First of all, for us, the readers. Making the independent transition from fiction to non-fiction certainly took some effort. Even certain costs. Which metamorphosed into so many distinguishing signs of the book. In functions that make similar The time we were given present a significant book of reviews otherwise.

Of course, Annie Bentoi wrote her testimony in the first person. Only she is not the main character of the book. He admitted the fact Confessor himself. “This text is not and cannot be the story of my life. My life itself does not interest me. I am trying to tell here the story of what I saw: I am only an eye. And this eye is not all-seeing, it cannot overcome either its conditioning or the limits of its own field – and time – of vision. Interpretation of the obtained data is also too complex a process to be fully mastered.”

Annie Bentoit was the wife of the famous composer Pascal Bentoit. Who, at the request of their daughter Ioana Bentoiu, wrote a package of four letters between September 12, 1994 and January 2, 2004. Addressed to her (Ioana Bento is fondly called Duduets), but the value of which far exceeds the value of family correspondence. In them, the composer evokes his memories, intending to write as little as possible about himself, but rather about the great period of time, which he witnessed. It is about the period between 1937 and 1995.

Ioana Bentoi had the wonderful initiative to offer four letters for publication, supplemented by several appendices mainly thanks to Anna Bentoi, also to the publisher Humanitas. He rearranged them so that they followed, reconstructed the natural course of history. He provided them with a series of notes and thus a wonderful series Memories, diaries, correspondence publishing house was enriched with a new and, in my opinion, important name. Lived history. Letters for Ioana.

Also The time we were givenalthough written in the first person, letters Pascal Bento, I put the author’s subjectivity in parentheses as much as possible. Pascal Bentouy does not mean the main character of the book, but it is without a complex personality, the author’s qualifications as a critical intellectual being are in any way shredded. IN Lived history. Letters to Joanna, Pascal Bentoux is what is called a conscious involved witness. His memoirs, prompted to be put on paper by his daughter’s wishes, give a truthful account of Romania’s period of relative prosperity in the interwar period (with that mythical year 1938), and of the earthquake of November 1940, and of the perception of royal power. the dictatorship of Charles II as an attempt by such a controversial monarch to counter the exaggerated and dangerous growth of far-right anarchy, as well as the National Legionary State and the Antonesian dictatorship and all that the terrible year 1940 brought with it, and the war years and what happened August 23, 1944, and about everything that happened after. That is, about the gradual, brutal seizure of power by the communists with the help of the Soviet army, as well as about all kinds of things fellow travelers (Pascal Bentoy is unforgiving when he talks about Dr. Petro Groza), and the terror between 1945 and 1964, and the deceptive liberalization between 1963 and 1971. And about a strict return to the totalitarian night.

The author of the letters was not misled by the myth of Lucretsia Petrashkana, nor by the simulacrum of the monstrous child of the communist camp presented by Nicolae Ceausescu in the first years of his reign. Next, I will quote Pascal Benta’s description of Lucretius Petrashkan. “This person is now described as the victim of G. Georgiou Dei, and indeed he was; arrested in 1948, then shot in the back of the head in 1954, in prison. But between 1944 and 1948, it was an island that shredded the legal and judicial structure of the Romanian state. He destroyed the magistracy and its status by clearing heads and suppressing real estate, he turned prosecutors into communist thugs, he cleaned the bars of everything that was more valuable in them, he proclaimed himself a professor of law, while people like Micescu, Strat, Gruy and several others were exiled and imprisoned. The guy was a beast, and his only asset is that some even more terrifying beasts (Day, Dragichi, Kishinevsky, etc.) cleaned him without the right to appeal.

Pascal Bentouy comments lucidly on the events of August 1968 and what happened in December 1989, and what he calls the transformation of political power into economic power (a letter dated September 12, 1994, exemplary in terms of quality and sharpness of analysis), and the interested disappearance ideological reasonas well as the cultivation of nationalism, interested by Ion Iliescu and his followers (events of March 1990 in Tirgu Mures), extremist parties such as PRM and PUNR, which at some point were called to the government (known red rectangle), and the naivety of the opposition, and its wrong steps (the case of Radu Campeanu), and the brutal impoverishment of the population. The latter leads to the establishment of an increasingly distinct anti-capitalist attitude. Pascal Bentou is not very optimistic about the results of the elections in November 1996, which in 1995 were perceived as salvation. It turned out that this was not destined. Or that you had the strength not to be Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro