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THE RHETORIC OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN NICOLAE DABIJA’S POETRY
Authors: Liviu CHISCOP
Number of views: 1032
The warning once formulated by Mircea Eliade – a prominent personality in the literary, political and scientific life of the past century, a world-renowned scientist – is as relevant today as it was when it was uttered.
Because it is obvious that for several decades now, a treacherous and tenacious campaign against the national history, the traditional family, the ancestral faith and especially the nationally imprinted literature has been implemented in the two Romanian states on both banks of the Prut River. So, the choice of the theme of the present essay was not at all fortuitous, being circumscribed to a constant preoccupation with radiography of the prosaic, publicist and lyrical creation of Nicolae Dabija.
A complex, protean and versatile personality, the author of over 80 volumes of poetry, prose, essays, journalism, text¬books and teaching aids, etc., Nicolae Dabija is today a leading exponent of our culture and literature, but also a militant like no other on the barricades of Romanianism. It could even be said that Nicolae Dabija's poetic work is a true book of national identity, a sui-generis treaty on identity, since – as we will see – many of the poems capture essential aspects of the identity of Bessarabian Romanians, such as territory, history, ancestors, heroes, mother tongue, folklore, the Orthodox faith, village, cultural personalities, etc.
An important feature of Nicolae Dabija's poetic creation is his concern for what is called artistic achievement, for form (not only for content), for the technical elements of versification, for euphony and even musicality of lyrics, in a word – for style. The illustration, through examples of verses and the argumentation of this, harmonious consonances between signified and significant in the case of Nicolae Dabija's lyric will be a constant concern during the present essay.