Creangă and Literary Criticism in Bessarabia

Abstract

The retrospective of criticism, i.e. a criticism of criticism, is necessary in order to record, identify, become aware of both its intellectual and methodological level and the state of our prose at different stages of evolution. The "misery and splendour" of literary criticism is tested, first of all, in and through the hermeneutical approach/examination/interpretation of Eminescu's or Creanga's work. In keeping with the custom of these types of work, we propose an attempt to synthesize the history of an investigative problem with a defective past sometimes, other times extraordinarily difficult and complex. For the purpose of minimum specification of our metacritical dissociations, we could distinguish, in the reception of Creanga's work in Bessarabia, three stages, difficult to mark, in temporary terms, exactly (years, decades). Critics have tried to show that it is precisely orality, paramiological erudition, the instinctive brilliant sense of language and popular ethos, the pleasure of storytelling, that constitute the sure landmarks of an incontestable narrative model - Creanga. Creanga's model (the storyteller's way of thinking about the world and people) in our literature, whether modernist or postmodernist, has fully contributed to the reshaping of the thinking and feeling of the Romanian prose writer, to the reshaping of models and fashions over more than a century, also the Ion Creanga model has a decisive impact in the Bessarabian prose in affirming a dialogue of texts.