Remembering the “National Poet”: From Memoirs to Postmemory

Drawing on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory and Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, this article examines how personal recollections of Mihai Eminescu’s life (1850-1889) entered the Romanian cultural and literary circuit. At the time of his death, Eminescu’s prestige as a „national poet” was already established, thence at this moment precisely, I argue, starts a complex and collective process of national remembrance, reinforcing the cultural myth of the Romantic poet. In the following decades these recollections are continuously reworked and rewritten, especially through biographical, literary, and filmic representations which shape and canonize Eminescu’s postmemory. Thus my analysis is concerned with the memory-dimension of the Romanian myth of the “national poet”, and at the same time it suggests a new way of reading the memoirs about Eminescu, in the frame of cultural memory studies.

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