Childhood in Romanian literature – A beneficial delay? History playing the two faces God

Abstract

Many Western academics have expressed their views on the childhood crisis arisen in the last decades of the 20th century, as a consequence of both globalization and the ideology of capitalism, as well as of the impact of media. However, for Eastern societies, these changes emerge years later. Using the representations of childhood in Romanian novels (mostly autobiographical) which have as background the socialist ages (from the ʼ60s to the end of the ʼ80s), I suggest that it might have been exactly this delay that made possible the conservation of a happier childhood, despite the totalitarian regime. Many Romanian writers living their childhood during communism recount this period in post-totalitarian democracy, outlining no crisis, but the opposite.