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LUCIAN BOIA: DEMYTHOLOGIZATION OF THE ROMANIAN HISTORICAL DISCOURSE AFTER 1989
was considered a ‘demythologizing-turn’ in Romanian historiography. In this
paper I shall explain the intellectual origins of this effort by concentrating on
the intellectual career of Lucian Boia. I shall then analyze the nature of Boia’s
de-mythologizing endeavour towards Romanian history and finally discuss
the implications it brought concerning the problem of objectivity in history.
Judging by his academic research agenda and scholarly achievements,
Boia was a prodigious historian even during the communist period. After
graduating from the University of Bucharest, Faculty of History in 1967
as valedictorian, he was hired as faculty member being interested at that
time (the end of the 1960s) in contemporary universal history and French
history during the Second French Empire of Napoleon III. However, after the
mandatory military stage, he was transferred, without being asked, from the
department of Universal history to that of Romanian history at the Faculty
of History. Thus, he was forced to abandon his scholarly plans related to
universal history and find a Romanian subject.
The visit in Romania, as part of the socialist countries collaboration
scheme, of a gifted and well-known Czechoslovak historian, Josef Mactrek,
and the appointment of Boia as his research assistant created the context
for Boia to join the research project put forward by Macürek for the study
of the relationships between Romanians, Czechs and Slovaks within the
Habsburg empire. In 1968 Boia benefited from a research visit (in fact a three
month research scholarship offered by the Czechoslovak institute directed
by Macürek) in Prague, where he could study in the archives. However, the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Prague Spring stopped
the project and Mactrek was removed from the direction of the Socialist
Countries History Institute. But Boia rescued the lost research agenda in a
book he wrote alone, shortly after he returned to Romania." At the same time,
inspired by this research experience, Boia became interested in the national
Romanian movement from Transylvania. As he remembers, "I got closer to
Romanian history through Czechoslovakia because I was not interested in
Romanian historical issues before." Out of his PhD (he conducted research
both in Romanian and Hungarian archives), at the beginning of the 1970s, he
published a monograph about Eugen Brote, a key figure in the Transylvanian
memorandist movement.’
These elements of Boia’s intellectual career are hardly known today, being
shaded by his books on historiography, the history of the imaginary, historical
mythologies and recently Romanian intellectual history. What Boia published
Lucian Boia: Relationships between Romanians, Czechs and Slovaks, Bucuresti, Editura
Academiei, 1977.
Lucian Boia: Istoriile mele; Eugen Stancu in dialog cu Lucian Boia, Bucuresti, Humanitas,
2012, 39.
7 Lucian Boia: Eugen Brote (1850-1912), Bucuresti, Litera, 1974.
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