Continuity beyond Disruptions. Tudor Vianu and the Early Essays of Matei Călinescu

The article is focused on the topic of continuity. It is a rereading of the early critical work of Matei Călinescu, before his exile from communist România in 1973. The study starts from his later 2002 confessions about the continuity between his American and Romanian writing. Continuity involves a deeper sense of temporality, in his whole work (critical and theoretical, autobiographical and literary). If we research his early Romanian writing within their historical and biographical framework we retrospectively grasp the importance of this idea and the meanings continuity had from the very beginning, in close relationship to other concepts like community, communication, secrecy, poetry and time. Almost every volume published between 1963 and 1973 includes a text about Tudor Vianu; his later memories testify the key role Professor Vianu played for his intellectual biography. This article is interested in rereading the early texts about Tudor Vianu in order to draw the image of a moral and intellectual portrait, that of Professor Vianu, but also the image of an early self-portrait. When the young Matei Călinescu writes about his Professor, he writes about Vianu’s personality and ideas, but also about his own ideas on criticism or culture. Tudor Vianu is a live symbol for his own engagement with “secret” values and with the legacy of a banned past. The fundamental traits of Vianu’s portrait (his “discreet” pedagogy, “poetry of ideas”, “secrecy”, his focus on style) obliquely express Matei Călinescu’s own affirmation of individualism, difference and poetry in a collectivist, ideologised epoch. The early texts on Vianu are considered synchronically, in relationship to a few contemporary texts published by Vianu himself and also in a retrospective framework of Matei Călinescu’s work.