The series of volumes “Humanitas”, dedicated to the centenary of Monica Lovinescu, is not only an opportunity to remember the role model of fate, but also an opportunity to pay tribute, by rereading and returning, to the entire work. Because in the case of Monica Lovinescu, the biography created through ethical courage fed the unique energy with which the texts were written: the microphone of exile became the space in which this Romania appeared abroad, freed from fear, compromise and contempt. They defended the honor of the nation, with that persistence that did not yield in the face of slander, blackmail, and violence.

The paradox of history made it so that, while in exile, the daughter fulfills the role that her father once fulfilled, in the country and in freedom. Like E. Lovinescu, Monica Lovinescu was dominated by a sense of duty: duty to truth and dignity, in response to mystification and barbarism. Monica Lovinescu’s Eastern ethics, attentive to the delicate relationship between the author and his time, is contained in the continuity of Lovinescu’s ideas. A rarely mentioned father figure watches over his daughter to give her the strength to say what the shackled nation could not.

As part of this post-Maioresian movement, which E. Lovinescu reconstructed at the end of his life, Monica Lovinescu decided during her years of exile to take on that stamp of polemical precision that recalls the great pages of the Romanian nineteenth century. Monica Lovinescu’s critique of ideas creates an unforgettable portrait of the pathologies that inhabit intellectual and political Romania under communism. Drunkenness with words, patriotic delirium, brazen lies, complicity are signs of error that Monica Lovinescu’s texts contain in polemics. Monica Lovinescu’s radio essays, collected on written pages, become masterpieces that set the standard of cultural polemics: behind the voice that echoes in our memory lies the fragile clarity of her sentences.

The Humanitas series of volumes illuminates the polyphonic complexity of a work built with hard work and dedication. And perhaps only Pompiliu Constantinescu demonstrated, in the same Majoresian line, a comparable energy in recording facts and movements of ideas. The short waves of “Free Europe” were the environment in which a whole canon was created, in direct connection. Reading Monica Lovinescu as a chronicler observed Romanian culture with the eye of a comparatist. Western and Eastern European themes entered into a dialogue, creating a conceptual tapestry attentive to nuances and fate. Over the years of her intellectual master’s degree, Monica Lovinescu perfected the prose of ideas: her essays possess the unforgettable essence of Tacitus’s portraits, occupying the unique position of the critical pages of St. Bev in the space of our language. The history of literature and culture during the years of communism cannot be written without turning to this vast sensitive material: Romania found its voice as a loyal witness of a terrible time. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro