DOI: 10.47743/jss-2025-71-4-18

Faculty of Law, West University of Timișoara.

Abstract: Were people truly free then and there? Are they still free here and now? What does it mean to be free? The readers might ask themselves such questions after reading Ioana Pârvulescu's book, Întoarcere în Bucureștiul interbelic (Return to Interwar Bucharest). Ostensibly, this is a story of a journey back in time to Bucharest between the two world wars. However, reading between the lines reveals that the "foreign land" the author travels to is not just the real interwar Bucharest, but an imaginary and subjective one, masterfully reconstructed from details she joyfully discovered in magazines, journals, memoirs, interview books, photo albums, almanacs, yearbooks, and audio recordings from that period.

From the abundance of information and data she collected, the author selected details that offer the reader an image of a modern, civilized, and artistic capital (and by synecdoche, of a country) where people „had everything” and were free. In her opinion, the two decades between the wars represent the period when Romania was the „land of all possibilities”, precisely because its inhabitants were free. This idealization of the interwar period transforms Întoarcere în Bucureștiul interbelic into a kind of nostos—a journey to a lost and found world where the author seems to feel truly „at home,” a place where „life in pink” triumphs over „life in gray,” and is, above all, natural.

The characters that come to life in the pages of this book—which is both a novel and an essay—are, for the most part, interwar writers (Tudor Arghezi, Camil Petrescu, Eugen Lovinescu, Mihail Sebastian, Liviu Rebreanu, Felix Aderca, Jeni Acterian), artists (Leni Caler), and famous politicians or engineers (the capital's mayor, Dem. I. Dobrescu, and the inventor-engineer, George Constantinescu). As prominent representatives of Bucharest from a bygone era, they reconstruct the image of a world where they were free to accept or defy the conventions of the time, to follow or change the rules, to stay in the country or to leave for other horizons, to write without being accountable to anyone but the reader, and to be faithful or unfaithful to an idea, a person, or a way of understanding existence. It was a world where „no one was forced to ignore evil and say that evil is good, is goodness itself. No one was forced to remain silent if they saw that the emperor or the minister or the poet or the scientist was naked. And no one knew what it meant to swallow fear for a lifetime, even if the portions differed depending on how wide the noose was”.

If the world the author champions is easily identifiable with interwar Bucharest, a world lost in the turmoil of „what followed” after the Second World War, and if its values – „daring, self-confidence, trust in others, and the capacity for admiration, sympathy, empathy, innate and educated politeness, patience, the joy of living” - have degraded since then, the contemporary reader is invited to find models (and solutions?) for a potentially better future than the present. After all, those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past risk repeating them.

Keywords: interwar period, freedom, contrasts, politics, press, literature.

References:

Bărbulescu, M., Deletant, D., Hitchins, K., Papacostea, Ș., Teodor, P., Istoria României, Corint Educaţional, București, 2014.

Murgescu, B., România și Europa. Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500-2010), Polirom, Iași, 2010.

Pârvulescu, I., Întoarcere în Bucureștiul interbelic, Editura Humanitas, București, 2018.

Petcu, M., Cenzura în spațiul cultural românesc, Editura Comunicare.ro, București, 2005.

Radu, S., Schmitt, O. J. (coord.), România interbelică. Modernizare politico-instituțională și discurs național, Polirom, Iași, 2023.