Lucian Blaga and the Rural Imaginary at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Contrary to the expectations aroused by the title, the point of departure in this essay is a desire to amend the perception of Lucian Blaga as the representative of a conservative school of thought and poetics, who designed a broad canvas of metaphysical speculations embedded in an architecture of unfailing systematicity and patterned symmetries reminiscent of the totalitarian ambitions of all-embraciung structures such as Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost. His philosophical system—one of the last—is not, however, a “monument to dead ideas” like Milton’s theodicy, but the prophecy of a new epistemology based on polyvalent logic and particle physics. The prevailing setting of his poems – nature tamed in the village community – was not a curtsey to the traditionalist poetics of some of his contemporaries (the “sămănătorist” group) but the poetic garb of his vitalist philosophical outlook inspired by Bergson’s concept of the ėlan vital, as well as by his readings from German pioneers of ecology and advocates of organic, biological life in its universal connectivity (especially in the spirit of Friedrich Junge’s Lebensgemeinschaft – Life’s community).