Chiril de Schitopolis - Devenirea unui autor şi destinul unei opere (original) (raw)

Nicola Nicolau: an Intellectual with an Unfair Posterity: This is the first in a series of three articles discussing the life and work of Nicola Nicolau (1762-1837), a Romanian merchant and scholar from the Transylvanian town of Brașov (Kronstadt, in the Habsburg Empire). Its chapters deal with Nicolau’s family and life, the books published by him, the question of their authorship, their sources, their circulation, and, finally, with Nicolau’s teaching activity. While settling, on the basis of primary sources, a number of earlier hypotheses and debates, it proposes some new hypotheses, which should be checked against further primary evidence.

In the history of Romanian literature in Bessarabia Creangă's modelling role is exem¬pli¬fied especially during the turning periods, when the concept of literature is radicalized (years 20-30, 60, 80). Across different searches and wanderings of prose writers, namely, the organicist perspective of the structure of the Bessarabian literary phenomenon elucidates the importance of the Creangă model in overcoming the different complexes, among which, especially, of the narrow-minded Romanian.

Geography and encyclopaedism. Revisiting Gheorghe Lazăr: Between 1810 and 1822, Gheorghe Lazăr (1779/82-1823) composed or compiled four geography textbooks for the use of the Romanian schools of Transylvania and Walachia: a mathematical geography (1810), a geography of Transylvania (1815), an astronomical geography (1820), and a world geography (1822), respectively. The first two were destined for publication in Transylvania, but his superior blocked all attempts. The last two were used in the St. Sava College of Bucharest, and – according to a 1822 manifesto – the world geography was being prepared for publication. Like most of Lazăr’s Nachlass, they have been lost after his death. The present article discusses all the available information about these books and attempts to identify their sources on the basis of contextual data. It also underlines Lazăr’s long lasting interest for the subject matter of geography, which has been neglected by both his biographers and the historiography of geographical studies in Romanian culture. My thesis is that it should be understood as part of Lazăr’s encyclopaedicism, another dimension of his intellectual formation and academic profile which has been neglected. The last section, which places Lazăr in the context of the geographical textbook production during his mature life and the decades following his death, shows that many other manuscript textbooks have met with the same fate: they failed to reach the printing press and – sooner or later – have been lost.

The article highlights the printing activity in Chisinau in the old period and the circumstances in which the synodal exarchate was abolished. The idea of creating a new religious administrative unit and framing the annexed territory in a new diocese is analyzed. Important contributions regarding the history of printing in Chisinau are reflected

Mircea Eliade’s Interwar American Project: In his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliade nurtured two projects related to America, which remained unaccomplished. On the one hand, he was planning a long return trip to his homeland, which would pass through the United States. On the other hand, he considered obtaining a teaching position in an American university, the first target being Harvard. This early American project – hitherto unexplored – becomes symbolic in the perspective of Eliade’s subsequent evolution and choices. Decades later, as a professor at the University of Chicago, he turned down an invitation to occupy a chair at Harvard, which offered him far better conditions and opportunities than those in Chicago. We present here the first results of an ongoing research that tries to clarify all the details related to the young Eliade’s American project.

Culegerea de articole reprezintă materialele celei de-a 2-a ediții a Conferinței Internaționale "Lectura ca bază pentru cultură, cunoaștere și dezvoltare", organizată de Biblioteca Națională a Republicii Moldova în septembrie 2020. Temele abordate de către autori sunt de ordin teoretic cât și practic. Volumul al II lea reprezintă diferite abordări ale fenomenului lecturii.