Page 112 [112]
OCR
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. * 111 +
