The esoteric reception of G. Călinescu’s novels

Three out of the four major novels written by G. Călinescu, „Cartea nunții” („The Book of the Wedding», 1933), „Bietul Ioanide” („Poor Ioanide”, 1953) and „Scrinul negru” („The Black Chestbox”, 1960) were generally interpreted from a socio-political and historical perspective, a different key of understanding being reserved to those few literary critics (I. Oprișan, R. Cernătescu, Gh. Glodeanu) who have extended their research towards the secret, cryptographic symbols slipped by the author into his writings, the esoteric reading of G. Călinescu’s novels becoming really accessible only after 1989, in postCommunism, when the censorship was abolished and the Romanians got free circulation access to the major scholarship of the domain. My presentation aims to contextualize the existing esoteric hermeneutics of G. Călinescu’s novels, to verify their validity and to suggest further interpretation clues. My intervention starts from the assumption, also sustained in several of my previous works, that, in due time, esotericism has crystallized into an autonomous, objective academic and scientific discourse, whose role in interpreting literature is mainly catalytical.