Damian Stănoiu and the literary ethnography of the monastic space

The present study revalues two older texts about Damian Stănoiu’s work. The idea of returning to these texts from a different perspective appeared in the context in which the Polirom publishing house from Iași recently published the volume "Între două lumi. Monahismul ortodox și modernitatea" ("Between Two Worlds. Orthodox monasticism and modernity"), written by Mirel Bănică, a work that offers the opportunity to resume the discussion about Romanian monasticism already on a solid and modern basis. But fiction also has a lot to say about this literary and social topos, and the work of Damian Stănoiu offers enormously to the big project of mapping the autochthonous monastic universe. Fiction writers complement the anthropological approach not only in the sense that they would produce a sensitive description of human communities, always an alternative to «professional" ethnographic writing (especially in the case of writers of a realistic orientation and especially from the perspective of postmodern ethnographies), but also for that, in a certain sense, the literature of monasteries shapes the historical reality of the monastery and the perception of this reality. In this perspective, therefore, Damian Stănoiu produces a literary ethnography of the monastery.