Nicolae Manolescu, critic and historian of literature from the great tradition illustrated by Titu Mayorescu, E. Lovinescu, G. Calinescu, Tudor Vianu, has left us. This is a huge loss for Romanian humanist culture. I got the news an hour ago from Mircea Mihais. I try to collect my thoughts and say what seems to me to be the essential truth. I was a close friend of N. Manolescu. I will write separately about what this friendship meant to me and my family. I was a fan of his even before I left Romania in September 1981. I met him personally in February 1990, when together with Octavian Paler and Dan Petrescu he came to Otopeni to wait for Dorin Tudoran, his old friend, and me. We immediately became friends. Then I made a dialogue, which was published first in the Timisoara monthly “Orizont”, then in the volume “Guillotina de scrum”. I have rarely met a spirit freer from anxieties and prejudices than N. Manolescu. Something makes me think he wasn’t having nightmares.

I wrote the foreword to his volume of political essays, The Right to Normality. I claimed then, in the early 90s, and I confirm it now, that Romanian political prose was reborn through N. Manolescu. The “Magic Eye” column he ran for years in “Romania Literară” contained moral references in an ocean of conformity and cowardice. He wrote elegantly, with sober transparency. Opera, like Alexander Paleologue, with working hypotheses. Cast aside all dogmatism. He was structurally liberal. Simply put, liberalism ran through his veins.

In March 1991, together with Mircea Mihajesh and Vasyl Popovich, I organized the international conference “Government and Opposition in Post-Communist Societies” in Timisoara. I simultaneously translated his speech into English. It was distinguished by both maximum clarity and impressive depth. N. Manolescu knew how to laugh, had an infectious sense of humor. But fundamentally he was not a playboy. Cultivate and practice serious spirit. He knew that there were things that could not be joked about. He was a member of the presidential commission for the analysis of the communist dictatorship in Romania. _Read the entire article and comment on it on Contributors.ro