Importing and Writing Tragedy in Nineteenth-Century Romanian Principalities

This article examines the overlooked import and production of tragedy as a literary genre during the long nineteenth-century Romanian literature. It is not that Romanian tragedies had not been written until 1918, but they were not reprinted, and the critics’ interest in these early tragedies diminished considerably over time. Starting from the observation that this poor acknowledgment is a result of a narrow and de-contextualized perspective, one that leaves aside the earlier as well as non-canonical literature, I investigate what and how tragedies were imported as well as written at the time. Whereas the imports were oriented predominantly towards the Romance-speaking countries and cultures – more than towards the Greek Antiquity –, local production explored, as expected, the historical (inter-imperial) past of the Romanian Principalities. More important, however, is the configuration of imports, which can be divided, as I aim to argue, into three categories: the latecomers, the cognates, and the diversifiers. Hence, this taxonomy, along with the local production, cast light on the fact that not only do we have tragedy – translated and local – but also that it was, as most of the cultural production, instrumentalized to promote the national ideals.