Experience against Innocence. Romanian Poets of the '80s Generation and the Dismissal of the Idyll

Introducing experience, quite biographical experience, as the central value of their poetry, Romanian poets of the '80s generation promoted subversive values like authenticity, active commitment to the real life, in an attempt to de-mystify the cultural cliches that permeated the last years of Ceausescu's dictatorship. Biographism itself became a means to de-legitimate the official poetry, claiming the return to a complex reality, more often a traumatic place where the poet was imposed to live. Assuming a radical poetical status of a chronicler of everyday life, the poet is rebelling not only against the political establishment but also against the aestheticism that dominated the Romanian cultural field in the '60s and '70s. The euphemization of reality, the refuge in the aesthetic realm perpetuated the strategy of a possible survival through culture, ignoring the degradation of the individual under communist regime. The present paper will analyse this means of confrontation with the totalitarian regime through two major poetic projects, one of Mariana Marin, another of Alexandru Musina, both focused on the possibility of survival in a brutal reality.