SOURCE: Ciopraga, Constantin. “History and Myth.” Romanian Review 33, no. 12 (1979): 121-31.

In the following essay, Ciopraga presents Eminescu as the voice of the Romanian conscience.

In a broad sense it is History that spoke through Eminescu. Not a history in abstracto, but a pathetically human one, animated by questions about destiny, a history—to be more precise—seen as a succession of existential realities, within the frame of which the whole governs the parts. Moment and eternity become terms with polar functions marking the state of existence, underlining transition in particular, “the eternal flight” under the sign of repetition. The idea of circular movement—from non-being to life and hence to death—asserted in a poem of 1874 (“Emperor and Proletarian”) had previously emerged in his Viennese academic period: Forever the same longings draped in another dress, / The same men, everlasting, in the unchanged mankind.” Or this even more pregnant...