culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

EDUCATIONAL REFERENCES IN VIRGIL TĂNASE’S
LITERARY WORK
IULIANA BARNA
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
Virgil Tănase – novelist and playwright
A remarkable Romanian writer and expatriate, Virgil Tănase was born in Galaţi
(16 th of July 1945). Being awarded the degree of a Bachelor of Arts (from the
University of Bucharest) and of Dramatic Art (as a stage manager), he settled in
Paris in 1977, where he embarked on a PhD programme in Sociology and
Semiology. The political censorship in Romania under the communist regime
led to exile. Romanian writers, who did not submit to the political regime,
preferring an aesthetic, clearly outspoken literature, refusing to hide the truth in
their writings, were constrained to choose alienation. Settled in Paris, he
followed the example of his fellow countrymen, paving the way towards a
different kind of literature, a literature of exile, through which he boldly
rendered “the mistakes of the past” in various fields, education included. He
wrote many novels, essays, plays, well received by the public and by the literary
criticism in France and in our country after 1990.
The educational policy of the communist regime in Romania, mirrored in
Virgil Tănase’s work
The novelist and playwright Virgil Tănase portrays, in his novels and
plays, numerous and various aspects of education throughout the period when
the communist regime was set up and then consolidated in Romania.
There are, in his work, references to the “democratization” of the
educational system also materialized in removing from the educational system
the teaching staff considered refractory to the process of setting up the new
social order. In this process, thousands of teachers, as well as a great number of
students and pupils, were eliminated.
Reading Virgil Tănase’s work gives us the privilege of witnessing the
transformation of the educational system into an instrument of carrying out the
orders of the communist regime, the founding of the entire curriculum on
materialistic dialectics and historical philosophy (considered the only philosophy
holding the attributes of a science), the exaggeration of the role of the
communist ideology in the country’s life, the indoctrination of the young
generation through the entire educational system, the substitution of the criterion
of competence, of the professional grounding in the evaluation of teachers and
students, with that of social origin, the uncritical taking over, without any
selection, of many aspects from the USSR educational system, methods used in
the educational process, in family education etc.
273