„Jurnalul” lui Octav Șuluțiu, între neant și autenticitate
”The Diary” of Octav Șuluțiu, between nothingness and authenticity
This article is a research on the diary of the Romanian writer Octav Șuluțiu, based on the existing edition, but also taking into account the unpublished, slightly different version kept at National Museum of Romanian Literature. The focus is on the relationship between the author and the text, assuming the idea that both reflect one another. Since Șulutiu claimed that his diary should be destroyed by all means after his death, and his will was strictly followed by his wife, we confront with a case of a symbolic and real „suicide” of the text by its own author. The diary would function as a depository of the biological, real author, since his death has to be reflected by the diary’s death. From this perspective, the diary is refused any transcendence, the function of an eternal Work of art to survive his author. But, at the same time, this perfect mirror of the author’s self, even if this self is perceived in the diary as a vaccum, as a void space, reflects perfectly the unpredictable, unstable inner movements of his author. The negative, but hopefully true image of the author’s self is rendered in this existentialist text whose aim is not to make literature from the miseries of one’s mediocre life, but to try to be honest to himself, not adorned for the others, but authentic to himself. At all costs, including self-destruction. That is why Șuluțiu’s diary, even not so famous for the history of Romanian literature, is a singular instance of deliberate non-literature, anyway, an exceptional document for the existentialist credo.
Keywords: diary, existentialism, self, authenticity, despair, vacuum
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