THE POLITICAL DIMENSION IN ROMANIAN NOVELS OF THE COMMUNIST PERIOD (1965–1989): A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH

It is almost taken for granted that literature and politics are linked when discussing the artistic production of the Romanian communist period, so much so that politics is often referred to as the driving force behind literature.In fact, even when opposes politics, literature profoundly conditioned by it 1 .However, the representation of the political in literature is also closely related to the emergence of a political consciousness in everyday life, which began in the twentieth century and became particularly pronounced in Romania with the establishment of the communist regime.This change led to a shift in the relationship between the individual and society or state institutions, as well as the individual's relationship with history, and thus in the way these relationships were filtered through literary representations.The label "political novel" was widely used in conjunction with the bestknown works of post-war Romanian prose, as evidenced by the numerous debates in the leading literary journals of the time 2 , even though these novels often display 1 See Eugen Negrici, Literatura romna sub comunism [Romanian Literature under Communism], Bucuresti, Editura Fundatiei Pro, 2006, p. 11: "Nothing that happens in the course of a literature developed under totalitarian rule has a natural explanation.Directly or indirectly, everything is an imitation, a reaction, a recoil, a defensive, a desperate or inventive form of adaptation, a strategy of survival".Unless otherwise stated, the quotations are translated into English by the author of this paper.