Literature of Commitment in Matei Vișniec's Works

 AComing into prominence with an amazingly original work, Matei Vişniec is for sure one of the subtlest contemporary creators of satire, who, starting his literary activity in the ’80s, as many others, wants to attract the reader not only with his poetry and prose, but especially with his theatre. The latter becomes for the author an ongoing, unprecedented experiment, which skips any absolute classification.

He was considered by literary criticism, poor up to now, a representative of post-modernism, of the absurd, of the pseudo-absurd, of the post-absurd, post-Beckett, post-Ionescu dramatist, post-Pirandello. This paper’s purpose is to demonstrate the original profile of a work that gives birth to ideas, doubts, questions, meditations about contemporary man and his existential problems. On the other hand, his work exposes, through original satirical formulas, what man became or is becoming.
Centered on Man, Matei Vişniec reinterprets history, language, philosophy, literature, almost making a synthesis of space and time, his satire showing itself underneath multiple layers of meanings. The author himself reveals the starting point: “Of course. Although… You see, here there are more levels… of understanding… every level has a different rhythm, a different color, each… Step by step…”
In his work, we can see influences from Franz Kafka, F. Dostoyevsky, Arghezi, Blaga, Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, Caragiale, Jorge Luis Borges, Dante Alighieri, Ionescu, Lautréamont, Shakespeare etc., modern, post-modern, surrealistic, absurd, tragic elements. We can see the comic, the grotesque; we are amazed at the altered formulae of the language, at silence as way of communicating ideas… all this, wrapped in theatrical poetry marked by lucidity. This lucidity becomes the engine of his vast work and this aspect is the subject of my paper, because the satiric ego comes out this dimension and it marks every word, meaning, symbol, nothing at random, everything develops logically in a painful meditation on history, time, reality, culture, and language.
Situated between cultures (he defines the dramaturgic space of the last decades in Romania, but in the same time he commands respect in the francophone area), modest, poet converted to theater and journalism, Matei Vişniec assimilates the exigencies of the western culture in very short time and converts his loyalty for poetry to loyalty for theater. (Mihaela Paula Olimpia Ghiţ)

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