The Revolutionary Typology – A Perspective: Marin Preda and Petru Dumitriu
Through his novel, What is to be done? (1863), Nikolai Cernâşevski circulated a illustrative character for a new typology that of professional revolutionaries. The model has become popular because Lenin attached great importance to it and writers have left influenced by this model. The revolutionary typology enters the Romanian literature, but it acquires a special importance only after the communist regime came into power. A number of important writers use this typology, both in the context of peasant society and that of the bourgeois. Marin Preda and Petru Dumitriu are representative in this respect, and their novels, The Moromets (1955) and Family Chronicle (1957) offer two case studies. I watched through these case studies how a farmer’s son and the son of an important lawyer from Bucharest became activists and what makes the difference between them and the Rahmetov-type.
Keywords : revolutionary, class struggle, communism, ideology, resentment
