Limbă, Literatură, Folclor

Abstract: This paper analyzes the impact that exile had on the life and work of the writer Nina Cassian after she settled in the United States in 1985. The first part of the article contextualizes exile in Romanian literature by discussing the experiences of other Romanian writers who were forced to leave their country, such as Paul Goma, Ion Vianu and Matei Călinescu. The second part highlights the changes that Nina Cassian’s work has undergone since 1985, which have reconfigured her writing and literary identity, since exile, as a limiting experience, reflects an identity crisis, an ontological fracture, determined by the uprooting of the individual. In Nina Cassian’s case, exile became a catalyst for creation and deep reflection, a continuous search for the self in the absence of stable landmarks. The poems written in exile illustrate a painful awareness of mortality rendered through a poetics of disintegration, which were in no way inferior to those written in Romania, illustrating the same belief in poetry, that axis mundi of Nina Cassian’s existence.

Keywords: exile, Nina Cassian, alienation, literary identity, poetry, ontological fracture