A Logical Apprehension: “Hope” and “Resignation” in the Poetry of the Young Eminescu
Following Schiller’s influence upon Mihai Eminescu’s youth verse, our research aims to investigate the understanding of concepts such as “hope” and “resignation” in the contexts of Eminescu’s translations, as well as in his original works. The inquiry of sub-manuscripts “Elena” and “Marta” – conventionally named after Eminescu’s “muses” – discloses the fact that, departing from a genuine misreading of the Romantic tradition, the Romanian poet acquires a problematic and presumably tensed meaning of the two abstract notions. Unlike Schiller, Herder and Bürger’s “Hoffnung”, which depends on the dialectics of living, Eminescu’s idea of “Hope” relies on a “logical anxiety” about the representation of nothingness. Briefly, the inspiring literature of Schiller is turned, in Eminescu’s “misreadings”, to a mystical and philosophical dimension, built on actual readings from Cabala and, consequently, on a twofold intensity of reality perception. Remarked by Eminescu’s apt editor, the internal coherence of the two mentioned notebooks appears to be sustained not only psychologically, as the outer expression of a juvenile transitory mood, but also conceptually, as an effort to keep even the scales of thought.
Keywords: Hope, Resignation, Cabala, misreading, logical anxiety
