Volume XII (2007)

This article contains the last pages written by Adrian Marino before he died. The study presents the evolution of the idea of freedom in Transylvania in the first half of the 19-th century. Investigating the philosophical and political writings of scholars and thinkers like I. Budai-Deleanu, Moise Nicoara, D. Tichindeal, Petru Maior, Gh. Barit etc. and the several petitions addressed to the Habsburg emperors, Adrian Marino outlines the way in which the basic ideas of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution were assimilated by the Romanian political-philosophical discourse.

Because of the absolutistic regime, civil and human rights (such as the right to resistance, revolt and revolution) could not be discussed and demanded in a way that would have threatened the socio-political status quo. Therefore the entire discussion about political and social freedom was projected into the abstract sphere of concepts, ideas and purely theoretical systems. However, the notions and ideas debated penetrated the Romanian political language and prepared the ground for concrete political actions.

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The paper is an attempt to demonstrate the fact that the return of the theoretician to Enlightenment and “pasoptism” represents in fact a return to polyvalence and to the multifunctionality of the concept of Europe. The main theories formulated by Adrian Marino’s ideological works can also be read as an evolution of "Europe" from the state of possibility towards a specific political concept. Generally Europe becomes a grid, an ordering scheme of Romanian space, in the measure in which the author confesses that his preoccupation regarding the "way in which the Romanian spirit and culture grasp and assimilate this reality in expansion".

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The study deals with Adrian Marino's scientific activity developed in the domain of hermeneutics in the 1970s and considered to be trailblazing in the Romanian culture under the intellectual circumstances of that age. The paper is based on Marino's works written about Mircea Eliade's hermeneutics and about literary hermeneutics. It focuses on two main aspects of this hermeneutical achievement. On one hand it tries to investigate critically whether Marino's basic hypothesis can be verified. This hypothesis stated that, in Mircea Eliade's works written in the domains of history of religions, anthropology of religion, phenomenology of religion - works which explore the historical forms, cultural configurations and semantic contents of the universal religious mythology and symbol system - one can in fact discern the outlines of a universal hermeneutical conception that may be compared with Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. On the other hand our study makes an attempt to show all the deficiencies and limits of Marino's hermeneutical view which arose from his structuralist view and his epistemological-methodological approach. Having compared the essential points of the problems investigated by Marino with Eliade's statements as well as with Gadamer's and Ricoeur's relevant ideas, the present study concludes that Marino's characteristic misunderstandings related to the hermeneutical conception arose exactly from the hermeneutical situation which served as a medium for his investigations and, in fact, these misunderstandings have proved to be hermeneutically fertile.

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Contrary to the world-as-play, the Agon is above all an existential phenomenon that is characterized by the human presence. The agon differentiates itself from conflict in that it takes place according to rules and develops as horizon in the dynamics of victory. Its origin brings with it an existential modification of existence in general, inasmuch as play is the general way of life for Greek society. The tight-knit coalescence between agon and poetry shows, for instance, its deep affiliation to Greek cultural form. The agon is regarded by Nietzsche as a self-evident path of philosophy for the Greeks, and it is from himself also in the modern form further practiced. The agon moves in the same direction as the world-as-play, and lies in an analogy with it - although both are very different from one another. In this constellation of regarding the world as play and the life principle of the agon, the phenomenon of art develops by the Greeks, and the tragedy itself will be a part of this constellation.

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The paper presents the evolution of Adrian Marino's work from the monographic volume about Alexandru Macedonski to the impressive six volume literary encyclopaedia, The Biography of the Idea of Literature. An uncompromising personality, Adrian Marino was irreversibly attracted to the concepts of plurality, tolerance, democracy and he never abandoned the critical spirit. As a critic of ideas he analyzed the Romanian literary critical, political and cultural tradition and tired to shape its present and future course according to his liberal and neo-pasoptist ideals.

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The work of Adrian Marino, written mostly during the communist period, sets an example of cultural independence from the political power. It is an individual solution that undermined the anti-intellectualism promoted by the perfidious institutional circles of those times. His ideological works published after 1989 are confessions about the relationship between culture and power in the communist era: they present an alternative approach to the situation of Romanian literature under the totalitarian regime.

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A "history of Freedom" in Romanian culture is not possible without a history of understanding the roots of intolerance, dogmatism and aggressive isolationism in our recent past. Adrian Marino managed to give freedom and liberty a consistency far deeper than the mere ideological compatibility. A practitioner of a "liberal profession", Marino assumed this role of not being employed by the State as an ontological statement, not just as an attitude towards the Communist regime, or as a social ideal. Throughout his entire life Adrian Marino practiced three great Freedoms and dedicated all his intellectual efforts to them: the freedom of conscience, the freedom of expression and the freedom of thinking, all of them more than utopian ideologies, but difficult to realize in a peripheral culture like the Romanian one. For Marino freedom is based on a liberal (read it critical) model for the conscience, opposing any kind of fundamentalism.

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The violent event of the 1989 Romanian revolution was experienced both as transforming and traumatic. Using vivid, synaesthesic testimonies on those days, the paper highlights the liminality of the revolution-as-lived, its symbolic dimension, the existential dilemmas and the harsh reflexivity triggered then, while critically examining narrative patterns of the revolution-as-told.

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The present material would like to presentation briefly the newly established "Adrian Marino" documentation and scientific research centre opened in the "Lucian Blaga" Central University Library from Cluj-Napoca. In this article we tried first of all to outline some biographical reference points from the life and scientific activity of Adrian Marino, who donated the collection bearing his name. Then we tried to delineate the main elements which form the bibliographic collection, starting with the books and arriving at the personal dossiers which contain either the internal or the international correspondence Mr Marino had with different personalities of the age, then his reading notes and manuscript works, most of them already published. What we wished to underline in this paper was the importance of this area; as area intended rather to the scientific research rigorously based on the unique materials existing in this collection, than to individual reading. We hope that this material will serve as a starting point for some valuable future research.

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This study presents the development of the library building from the moment the idea of establishing this institution occurred through the different stages of its completion and the execution to its inauguration.

When the Ferenc Jozsef University was founded in 1872 in Cluj, it was decided that a University Library was required. The Transylvanian Museum donated its rich collections to the new institution. The new library functioned in several rather unsuitable buildings during the following years. Finally the Museum Society, the University Council and the library management asked for a new library building to be raised. The field where the building was to be erected was bought by the Hungarian Ministry of Education and Religion; it was situated at the corner of Miko Street and Arany Janos Street, an important location from the point of view of urban planning.

In the project competition organized for the construction of the building famous architects of the age participated. The winners, Floris Nandor Korb and Kalman Giergl were familiar with the location having already built the University Clinical Complex in the vicinity of the future University Library. Therefore they managed to integrate the library into the new urban area developed west of the city centre; they turned the building towards Arany Janos Square. Though at the competition the two architects presented a plan characterised by the dominance of Neo-Baroque elements, in the course of its execution the building gained a Secessionist character. The building, whose foundations were laid in the summer of 1906 and which was officially inaugurated on 18 May 1909, represented an economic variant of the architectural program due to financial difficulties. Consequently, some important aspects of the execution project were abandoned and others were realized only in 1931-34.

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This study presents the changes which occurred as a consequence of the new organisational chart of the Central University Library adopted at the beginning of the year 2005 whereby branch libraries were incorporated.

The paper presents the activity of this new department for the year 2005, focusing on the collections, rooms, personnel and electronic equipment of the branch libraries as well as the different activities performed by them.

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The paper discusses some issues related to the online scientific databases subscribed to by the "Lucian Blaga" Central University Library in the year 2005. The study presents the four main online collections (ProQuest, Chadwyck Healey, JSTOR, SpringerLink) as well as the major problems related to their use. The different statistics, tables and graphics show an increasing interest in such online databases, which encourages the library management to make available such information sources to its users in the future too. It can also be observed that the databases were accessed by a great number of teachers, PhD students and undergraduate students both from the University and the Central University Library. Though the users' searching methods sometimes lacked the necessary professionalism, these electronic products seem to be a great help in the scientific activity of the readers.

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