OCR
LUCIAN BOIA: DEMYTHOLOGIZATION OF THE ROMANIAN HISTORICAL DISCOURSE AFTER 1989 was labelled a somehow inappropriate demythologizing-turn.™ His attempt at critically assessing the way Romanian history was written in the 19‘* and 20 centuries is essential but did not generate a turn in the way history was written in post-communist Romania.” Rather it was the other way around. Historians did not enjoy Boia’s demythologizing historical work. As Cristina and Dragos Petrescu put it in the book Istorie si mit in constiinta romdneascd, Boia criticized “both the national communist historical master narrative and the ‘national’ tradition of historical writing to which many Romanian historians wanted to return after 1989.26 This observation explains why historians were not among those to positively assess Boia’s book. There were literary scholars, cultural journalists and other intellectuals who thought Boia’s demythologizing attempt was an excellent piece of scholarship while still many others attacked the author as being an anti-patriot producing a message that in fact served the enemies of the Romanian national state. For instance, a rumour that circulated at that time and which was reproduced in the excellent analysis of post-communist Romanian historiography made by Cristina and Dragos Petrescu was that the book Istorie si mit in constiinta romdneasca was sponsored by George Soros, the Hungarian born American billionaire. It was a detail that fuelled those maintaining that the book concealed a Hungarian revisionist agenda. However, this information was just a constitutive element of a conspiracy scenario. George Soros did not sponsor the publication of Boia’s book simply because it did not need any sponsoring. [storie si mit in constiinta romdneasca was a great publishing success; it was one of the Romanian post1989 bestsellers. In the foreword to the second impression, Boia mentions that in two years only, the book had four successive editions with 9000 copies each.” However, the negative assessments have been almost proportional with the success of the book. Interestingly enough the most comprehensive critique came from lIoan-Aurel Pop, a historian from Cluj-Napoca University who in 2002 published an almost 400-page book in which he critically analysed Cristina Petrescu — Dragos Petrescu: Mastering vs. Coming to Terms with the Past. A Critical Analysis of Post-Communist Romanian Historiography, in S. Antohi - B. Trencsényi — P. Apor (eds.): Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe, Budapest, Central European University Press, 2007. I made this note about the use of the term “turn” in reference to the proportions and influence of the so-called “linguistic turn”. See Elizabeth A. Clark: History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2004. Petrescu — Petrescu: Mastering vs. Coming, 324. Boia, Istorie si mit, 15. * 117 +