Un centenar între adevăruri și mistificări: Eugen Barbu la judecata de apoi a posterității

This study concerns the controversy surrounding the life and work of Eugen Barbu (1924–1993), a writer at the forefront of the Romanian literature after World War II, whose birth centennial is this year. On this occasion, the “Eugen Barbu case” has once again been in the centre of attention, causing different reactions, in which the mistruth has overlapped the truth. In the first part, the study analyzes the accusations of plagiarism against one of Barbu’s benchmark novels. In 2016, the “România literară” journal published a file to let it be understood that the novel Groapa (1957) would have encapsulated the micro-novel Hotel Maidan (1935) signed by Stoian Gh. Tudor (1911–1941). Dissected point by point, the evidence on which the demonstration from “România literară” relies, which has been embraced – without a minimal verification – by respectable intellectual public figures on Eugen Barbu’s centennial, borders on the ridicule. At the same time, the paper discusses, through documentation recourse, the plagiarism suspicions surrounding other works by the author of Groapa. The same perspective is employed for reviewing the scandal triggered by the third volume (1978) of the Incognito tetralogy (1976–1980), for which the authour used, as he had specified in the first volume of the series, sequences from books of other foreign and Romanian writers. In its second part, the paper examines some of Eugen Barbu’s radical attitudes by recourse to important moments in his biography, using entries from both the writer’s original diaries and his wife’s diaries, actress Marga Barbu (1929–2009), documents in the collection of the author of this investigation. The research reveals significant nuances, so far overlooked in the discussion about the “Eugen Barbu case”.