Narrating the Self After Communism: Memory and Identity in Contemporary Romanian Fiction

The present study seeks to provide a coherent and critically valid perspective on contemporary Romanian prose, which, through its thematic focus—namely the exploration of human destinies drawn into the maelstrom of history—as well as its meaningful narrative structures, guides the reader toward multiple interpretations. Contemporary Romanian writing repeatedly returns to the individual and collective consequences of the communist experience, yet the narrative relationship with this past differs according to the writers’ temporal and experiential position towards it. In numerous Romanian post-revolutionary texts, we can discern an art of reminiscence that could be described as a mimesis of remembrance, in which memory, retrospection, and introspection become narrative means of negotiating the relationship between personal experience and historical memory. Through a comparative reading of texts belonging to different generations and genres, the study examines two interconnected modes of narrating the communist past.In the works of Dan Lungu, Lavinia Braniște, and Alina Nelega, the communist past is approached retrospectively, through narratives that recover and reconstruct its social realities, mentalities, and individual consequences from a post-totalitarian perspective. By contrast, in the works of exiled writers such as Norman Manea, Virgil Tănase, Dumitru Țepeneag, and Matei Călinescu, the relationship with the communist past is grounded more directly in lived experience, autobiographical memory, exile, and the attempt to reclaim or reconfigure personal identity. By bringing these two modes of writing the past into dialogue, the study argues that contemporary Romanian prose moves between the recoveryand narrative reconfigurationof lived memory and the retrospective reconstruction of a past that must increasingly be accessed through testimony, research, mediated images, and retrospective interpretation.