The Păltinis Diary
Gabriel Liiceanu, is a brilliant philosopher
and Professor of the Faculty of Philosophy, University
of Bucharest.
The intellectual resistance to totalitarian regimes
can take many forms. This remarkable volume portrays
one such story of resistance in Romania during the reign
of Ceausescu: that of Constantin Noica, one of the country's
foremost intellectuals.
Noica was an original thinker belonging to the remarkable
intellectual generation of important figures such as
Mircea Eliade, E.M. Ciorin and Eugene Ionescu, but he
chose to stay in Romania after the communist takeover
when many others fled. Harassed and jailed for six years,
Noica retreated to the mountains and gathered around
him some brilliant young minds and future talent to
challenge and nurture them in a time when communism
denied them the materials of true intellectual importance.
This group of students withdrew to Noica's retreat
for intensive philosophical sessions to debate the works
of Kant, Plato, Heidegger and discuss humanistic values.
The author of this volume Liiceanu, himself a brilliant
philosopher, was Noica's closest disciple and during
every meeting he noted every conversation in a diary
which came to be known as The Păltinis Diary. These
conversations were secretly published and quickly devoured
by intellectuals in Romania who were prepared to sacrifice
part of their food provisions to acquire the book. The
Păltinis Diary sold out within a matter of days
and because of Secret Police censorship and was not
published again in Romania until 1991 by which time
Noica had died and the group had disbanded to help with
the reconstruction of post-Ceausescu Romania.
The Păltinis Diary is a wonderful homage to
an intellectual master and to the power of intellect
and freedom. The book will be of interest to philosophers,
non-philosophers alike, and to anyone who seeks to grasp
the true meaning of survival under totalitarian conditions.
"The Păltinis Diary... would be difficult
to summarize, because it 'encapsulates the substance
of a whole culture.' Further, it encapsulates a spirituality
and a view of culture that have enormous weight, despite
their problematic history and antecedents. The Diary
is dominated by the figure of the philosopher Constantin
Noica, and his project of maintaining, even in the darkest
years of Ceausescu's communist dictatorship, an informal
school... devoted to high culture--especially philosophy--in
a remote mountain village... It is easy to see why The
Păltinis Diary invoked such a passionate response
when it was published, and why for a time even photocopies
of the book could fetch high prices. Anyone who reads
the Diary carefully will find that Noica attained
his goal of intellectually mastering the western canon,
and of spiritually residing somewhere near the heart
of European culture... What is one to make of such a
record of peculiar place and time?... No terror is left
to the slain dragon of communist dictatorship. But it
is completely probable that the end of history has not
arrived, and that resistance might again be called for.
Might we not, one day, stare into the 'cosmic night'
of total technocracy?... But there is another side of
Păltinis. The Diary offers a very appealing vision
of mutuality and companionship, and devotion to scholarship
and ideas, in a moral setting created and reinforced
by the conditions of political tyranny... This edition
begins with an important, critical introductory essay
by Sorin Antohi, professor of history at the Central
European University in Budapest, and editor of the series
in which this volume appears. Antohi offers an erudite
introduction to the milieu of Păltinis, its historical
antecedents, and the cultural context of Noica's thought.
The translation by James Christian Brown seems clear
and convincing, and the book features a wonderful glossary
of Romanian scholars and thinkers." - East European
Politics and Society
"Als das Jurnalul de la Paltinis (Das Tagebuch
von der Hohen Rinne) 1983 in Bukarest erstmals erschien,
wurde es bald zu einem vielbeachteten Werk. Die Auflage
von 8000 Exemplaren war schnell verkauft, und Kopien
auf dem Schwarzmarkt wurden für bis zu 200 Lei
behandelt (der Ladenpreis war 9 Lei). In einer Zeit,
als das Ceausescu-Regime immer unerträglicher wurde
und in der die Kultur bzw. die Geistwissenschaften stark
auf eine nationalistisch-protochronistische Linie ausgerichtet
waren, die letzlich das Regime zu legitimieren hatte,
musste ein werk wie das vorliegende einer nach geistiger
Nahrung dürstellenden Elite wie eine Offenbarung
vorkommen." - Zeitschrift für Siebenbürgische
Landeskunde
2000
250 pages
ISBN 978-963-9116-88-7 cloth $27.95 / €24.95 / £22.99
ISBN 978-963-9116-89-4 paperback $22.95 / €19.95 /
£17.99
Published in the series:
Central European Library of Ideas
ISSN 1586-6335
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