Lucian Blaga and the Rural Imaginary at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Abstract Contrary to the expectations aroused by the title, the point of departure in this essay is a desire to amend the perception of Lucian Blaga as the representative of a conservative school of thought and poetics, who designed a broad canvas of metaphysical speculations embedded in an architecture of unfailing systematicity and patterned symmetries reminiscent of the totalitarian ambitions of all-embraciung structures such as Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost . His philosophical system—one of the last—is not, however, a “monument to dead ideas” like Milton’s theodicy, but the prophecy of a new epistemology based on polyvalent logic and particle physics. The prevailing setting of his poems – nature tamed in the village community – was not a curtsey to the traditionalist poetics of some of his contemporaries (the “sămănătorist” group) but the poetic garb of his vitalist philosophical outlook inspired by Bergson’s concept of the ėlan vital , as well as by his readings from German pioneers of ecology and advocates of organic, biological life in its universal connectivity (especially in the spirit of Friedrich Junge’s Lebensgemeinschaft – Life’s community).