Paradise Visions in Paul Georgescu’s Fiction

The present article discusses Paul Georgescu’s short story O viziune a Paradisului [A Vision of Paradise] focusing on the main character’s revelatory experiences and placing them in relationship with various views on happiness exposed by the writer in other circumstances. At the same time, the intertextual strategies used by the author in order to dismantle certain stereotypes and clichés are analysed not only through the lens of modernism/ postmodernism dichotomy, but also in connection with the concept of literary balcanism. From the perspective of today’s reader, Paul Georgescu’s novels and short stories prove their durability especially to the extent that they propose polyphonic constructions and the mannerist voluptuousness of arranging things according to colors and shapes, volumes and textures. The mixture of evocations and fictions that Paul Georgescu’s prose offers us proves in the last instance not only a method of exorcising one’s own demons, but also a means of testing the possibilities and limits of a strong (onto)poetics.