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LUCIAN BOIA: DEMYTHOLOGIZATION OF THE ROMANIAN HISTORICAL DISCOURSE AFTER 1989
However, these books were only the beginning of Boias demythologizing
intellectual effort towards Romanian history. He remembers that these
personal attacks did not determine him to renounce his work and he started
to write Istorie si mit ín constiinta románeascá.
In this book published in 1997, Boia sought to investigate the main myths
that were characteristic of Romanian historiography and the Romanian
historical conscience in the last two centuries. For him exploring the
relationship between history and the imaginary was particularly relevant in
the period of the 90s when, as he put it, Romanian historiography was in the
“phase of necessary critical revision.”*' Boia’s purpose was not to demolish
Romanian historical mythology but rather to understand how it appeared
and the functions it performed in the past and still performs in the present.
As he explains, the amplification and promotion of these mythological
constructions in the historical discourse of the present carry an authoritarian
and xenophobic message and prevent the achievements of the very goals of
the present that were at that time “the modernization and democratization
of Romanian society and the integration of the country into the European
Structure.”
Ihe main mythological constructions identified by Boia, that shaped the
194 and 20" century Romanian historical discourse correspond with the
themes imposed on historians in the new Party Program approved after the
11* Congress of the Romanian Communist Party in 1974.% In the 1970s
the ideological rationale of the emerging national-communism, which
characterised the last part of Ceausescu’s regime, was different from the
period in which these mythological constructions appeared in Romanian
historiography, namely in the 19° century when Romanian historical
consciousness had been under the strong influence of the national ideology.
The identification and deconstruction of several mythological themes is
the core of Boia’s message in [storie si mit in constiinta romäneascä. However,
as I shall show later on, the book also implied important thoughts about
the epistemological nature of historical studies. All through the stages of
Romanian historiography (in his analysis of the 19'* century to present), as
Boia put it, historians sought to reveal and reconstruct the glorious past in
opposition to the present decay. In order to do this, as I mentioned before,
several mythological constructions were shaped.
20 In this study I make reference to the third edition of the book, published in 2011. It is
identical with the first edition except that it contains the extended foreword to the second
edition and that to the third edition.
Lucian Boia: Istorie si mit in constiinta romdneascd, Bucuresti, Humanitas, 2011, 57.
22 Tbid., 58.
Programul Partidului Comunist Romän de fäurire a societatii multilateral dezvoltate si
inaintarea Romäniei spre communism, Bucuresti, Editura Politicä, 1975.