I learned this news a few minutes ago. It’s 8am here in Washington. I met Razvan in 1972. We became friends especially after his marriage to Roxana. We met for the first time in Stelian Motiu’s office at the headquarters of the journals “Viata studenteasca” and “Amfiteatru” on Shito Maguryan.

He was good-natured and warm-hearted, not at all arrogant. As a professor of ITA (history and theory of art), he demonstrated erudition, professionalism, and intellectual depth. He wasn’t a fugitive like Ion Frunzetti, he wasn’t floating in a dizzying array of nebulous metaphors like Dan Haulica. He was a historian, not an art critic.

In the second half of the 70s, we were brought closer by our friendship with Tudor and Florica Djebeleanu’s aunt, the wonderful graphic artist Marcela Cordescu and her husband, the writer Volodymyr Kolin. When we met, we spoke openly, freely, without restraint. I visited Roxana and Razvan several times in their apartment in the block between Soseaua Stefan cel Mare and Piata Dorobanti. Conversations about art, literature, ideas. Razvan hates hooligan “Saptamanism”, Balchi nationalism, anti-Semitism. He considers protochronism an aberration.

I spoke about Razvan with Vlad Georgescu in Munich. They were friends, they came from the same world of sophisticated, cosmopolitan, pro-Western bourgeoisie. In a word, liberal.

The collapse of the dictatorship came, Razvan signed up with weapons and luggage to the Fesenist camp, became, like Augustin Buzura and Eugene Simion, a partisan and beneficiary of what G.-R. Patapievichi called the Iliescu system. He used his authority as a historian to denigrate the civil resistance in University Square and to strongly and vocally support the infamous miners’ raid of June 13-15, 1990. Then our relationship was finally broken.

I’m stopping here. Razvan was expelled while at school for his solidarity with Professor Dionysius Pippidi. It was a brave and noble gesture. He passed the Ceausescu era as an honorary teacher. He, like Dean C. Jurescu, opposed the crazy program of destruction of historical monuments. Unfortunately, in the post-communist years, it became one of the pillars of the old and provincial symbolic production apparatus of the Academy, which became increasingly problematized and ossified. This text is neither an obituary nor an indictment. This is just a sad confession about a former friend. Comment on Contributors.ro