AUTHOR: Silviu LUPAȘCU
Danubius, XLI, Galati, 2023, pp. 327-336.
Abstract
During the last decades of the communist regime in Romania, at “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania, a marvelously unexplainable event occurred, with considerable impact in the fields of academia and mass-media. In a paradoxical way, freedom of writing became possible, during the 1970s and 1980s, in the editorial office of the “Students’ Opinion”, a journal edited by the Union of the Communist Students’ Associations from Romania (UCSAR). The members of the editorial staff, all of them teachers and students enrolled in the universities of the University Center of the city of Iasi, built a mass-media, literary, philosophical, cultural discourse consisting of several semantic layers. An apparently innocent layer addressed the censors of the Communist Party of Romania. A subversive, anti-communist, layer addressed the readers of the journal residing in the Romanian Western diaspora. A layer of a perpetual intellectual feast of the ideas circulated among writers and philosophers in the West, in the free world. The editorial staff was constituted by the writers who formed the nucleus of the anti-communist group of Iasi (Luca Pitu, Liviu Antonesei, Liviu Cangeopol) and students enrolled in various BA programs. Most of the authors who contributed to the journal gained notoriety in the realms of mass-media and literature, in Romania, after 1990.