Călinescu și Cantemir sau gâlcevile înțelepților cu lumea

We explore here the reasons for the affinity that G. Călinescu repeatedly mani¬fested with the model of ethical-philosophical dialogue practiced by Dimitrie Cantemir, one of his favorite authors in old Romanian literature, in The Divan or the Dispute of the Wise Men with the World or the Judgment of the Soul with the Body (Iași 1698). Among his press articles that explicitly claim to follow this model, we focus on a few texts from the period 1943–1945, included in the anthology Gâlceava înțeleptului cu lumea, made by Geo Şerban (Minerva Publishing House, 1974) and on a text, unknown at the time, which we published in 1979 in the magazine „Manuscriptum” (included now in Opere. Publicistică, vol. XII, 2012). The idea that emerges from our analysis is that G. Călinescu is best found, as a personality, in the portrait of a Renaissance humanist with a stenic soul but an intelligence tempted by melancholy and skepticism; he practices a language always doubled by the vivid irony with which Schlegel characterized the romantic spirit, adopting in the same time the naivety of wonder from which Schiller made the classical ideal of the romanticism in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, a text quoted by Călinescu as „one of the most penetrating essays of European literature, the first typological attempt in the modern sense and at the same time an expression of the romantic point of view and of the Gothic soul”.