Sadoveanu și modelul Turgheniev în romanul sentimental Însemnările lui Neculai Manea

Sadoveanu and the Turgenev model in the sentimental novel The notes of Neculai Manea

Abstract

The antebellum novel signed by the young Mihail Sadoveanu three years after his literary debut, Neculai Manea’s Notes, represents an expression of the Slavic influence on native literature and, in particular, on the Moldavian one. The predisposition towards reverie, passivity, and lyricism of Moldavian writers resembles Russian psychism. Inspired by Turgenev’s literature, where the superfluous man becomes a concept, Sadoveanu transposes in his novel from 1907, the atmosphere of the literature on the border between the two eras, a literature of the end of the century. The Sower’s ideology characteristic of the 1900s reveals a closeness to the specific elements of Turgenev’s prose: empathy for oppressed peasants, passivism, uprootedness, illusory love etc. The hero Neculai Manea illustrates the native version of the maladjusted, uprooted intellectual who lives exclusively under the sign of regret, unable to integrate into social reality anymore. Additionally, the Turgenevian theme of unfulfilled love that causes suffering to characters in a state of perpetual unhappiness is also revisited by Sadoveanu. The suggestion of the diary in the title of the novel in the form of notes points towards a sentimental subjectivism, almost intimate in its confessions, and can be compared to the sentimental diary-type novel, Intim, by Traian Demetrescu written in 1892 and to Turgenev’s The Dairy of a Superfluous Man (1850). The Turgenev model plays an important role in the evolution of the Romanian sentimental novel up to the First World War, seducing our writers even during the interwar period.