Protocronismul în lumea lui și în lumea de apoi

As its title suggests, the paper is structured in two parts. The first outlines the emergence of the protochronist movement in Romanian literature, in the second half of the 1970s, tracing the evolution of the concept coined by comparative literature scholar Edgar Papu. The collapse of the socialist regime made the movement irrelevant, and its scientific dimension has been repeatedly subjected to blatant misrepresentations both by its adherents and its critics, with protochronism expanding its ideological range in a harmful manner, especially after 1980, in a virtual fusion with the national-communist line. Initially protochronism was in a relationship of complementarity with synchronism, but they ended up in a relationship of adversity. At the same time, this paper aims to clarify certain insufficiently considered aspects of protochronism, which is often discussed in a reductionist manner, without concrete examples of its manifestations.
In the second part, the paper presents the manner in which România literară, the flagship journal of the Writers’ Union and the main anti-protochronism stronghold, has reflected – post-1989 – the demise of certain writers associated with protochronism. An alternative analysis of a controversial movement, which indulged in exaggerating Romanian pioneering, yet which did not escape mystifications either. A case study on literature within a political-ideological context.