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LUCIAN BOIA: DEMYTHOLOGIZATION OF THE ROMANIAN HISTORICAL DISCOURSE AFTER 1989 French historical direction. Ihis was simply a misconception. As he put it clearly, "I have another approach in relation to these French historians. They are very much concerned with structures, masses or mentalities. 1am interested more in ideas. I have a relativistic perspective in terms of history while the historians from Annales were sure they made a scientific history.”'? At the same time, Lucian Boia continued his research and projects on the history of the imaginary and published in France his first books”, participated in conferences, and was integrated in the French network of the Centres for the study of the imaginary. I made this contextualization referring to the intellectual evolution of Boia and his development as a historian in order to point out the intellectual origins of the demythologizing enterprise undertaken in the 1990s after the fall of communism. Within this context, in 1993 Boia set up in Bucharest The Centre for the History of the Imaginary. Its objective was to stimulate and organize research in the fields of the collective imagination and of the history of ideas and representations. It laid special emphasis on political and historical “mythologies”, on the problems of group and national identities, and on public images of the other.” It should be mentioned that in this period Boia also elaborated his theoretical book on the Imaginary in which he attempted to reconcile the rather diverging visions on this problematic concept put forward by Gilbert Durand and Jacques Le Goff respectively. The book was published only in 1998.5 Nevertheless, an important question that should be asked is how it was that in the 1990s Boia started to study and especially deconstruct the Romanian historical mythologies. Apparently, it was not related with Boia’s earlier preoccupations, but neither was it at all an opportunistic, fashionable research focus but rather a natural intellectual evolution stemming from his preoccupations and curiosity. As he puts it “at some point I became immersed in the imaginary. In the 1980s, on the one hand, I was preoccupied with historiography and on the other hand, I was researching Martians and the ends of the world. The fusion had not yet happened, but it was inevitable that at some point it would occur”.’® The first volumes that were published as products of the Centre for the History of the Imaginary and under the coordination of Boia were based on communications presented in conferences and were mostly done by students. The general theme was the understanding, analysis and deconstruction of Istoriile mele, 69. Lucian Boia: L’exploration imaginaire de l’espace, Paris, La Découverte, 1987; Lucian Boia : La fin du monde. Une histoire sans fin, Paris, La Découverte, 1989. Lucian Boia — Anca Oroveanu — Simona Corlan-loan: Insula Despre izolare si limite in spatiul imaginar, Bucuresti, Colegiul Noua Europa, 1999. Lucian Boia : Pour une histoire de lV’imaginaire, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1998. 16 Istoriile mele, 118-119. e 113"
