Dan Lungu

In its immediate Romanian context, Lungu's work has occasionally been ranked among "recovery literature" pieces—diverse works which, in the post-censorship era, provide retrospective testimonies or analytical overviews of the communist period. This classification, which places Lungu alongside Petru Cimpoeșu and Ion Manolescu, is, according to critic Cosmin Ciotloș, exaggerated and simplistic: "Personally, I am rather skeptic toward any sort of necessity that is imposed or predictable." Another particularity of Lungu's work involves his local affiliation, connected with the culture of Iași city and the historical region of Moldavia. Cernat, who noted that Lungu has a preference for publishing his work with Iași-based venues, deduced "the strategy of asserting a personal project with several levels, which assigns a certain place to a 'Moldavian' (Iașian) identity". Reportedly, Lungu refused several offers to move into Bucharest, Romania's capital, to which he prefers his adoptive Iași.

Dan Lungu himself places stress on his affiliation to a form of Neorealism deemed "microsocial"—that is, primarily concerned with everyday subjects and simple interactions between individuals. His main influences include foreign authors Peter Handke, Michel Houellebecq and Elfriede Jelinek, while his imagery has drawn comparisons with the films of Yugoslavian-born director Emir Kusturica. Lungu has also become one of the Romanian authors best known outside Romania, and, according to literary critic Marius Chivu, one in the rare position of being recommended to a local public with quotes from foreign critics. This notoriety, coupled with the candor of his accounts, has reputedly sparked criticism that Lungu is "ruining Romania's image abroad", which prompted Lungu to state: "I am not a Foreign Ministry employee."

Some of Lungu's earliest published works were poetry pieces which, according to writer Șerban Axinte, do not reach the same standard as his other contributions: "Few still recall that Dan Lungu has debuted as a poet. The Muchii volume [...] no longer communicates much to us, even if [it] does not lack certain several good, intelligent texts, albeit lacking the force and consistency to impose an author." His debut work in short prose, grouped as Cheta la flegmă, is, in Iulian Ciocan's definition, a book about "the prisoners of everyday": a bulldozer operator, an asylum custodian, a thief, a group of soldiers, a child and an unhappy couple. According to critic and journalist Costi Rogozanu: "Under a 'strong' title, Dan Lungu collects the most diverse of prose pieces, some written in the most direct argotic language, others including the most meticulous of traditional lines. [...] The Iași-based writer sets to clearly delimit his area of interest—daily life in the post-Revolution period—, varying with irony the types of writing he uses." The shock value of the title was also noted by Cernat, who concluded that its apparent connection to the "miserabilist" tone of more radical Romanian literature was "rather inadequate". An argument of similar substance was provided by Cristea-Enache. In his view, the stories are "finely written" portraits of people caught in the "post-communist transition", to the "stark setting of 'tower block life' which nevertheless almost completely lacks—bizarrely—the 'consumerist' and pop ingredients of post-communist kitsch."

With Construcția identității într-o societate totalitară, seen by Cernat as "a study up to the international standards" and a work of "entomological precision", Dan Lungu focuses on how writers and intellectuals related to ideological pressures, explores in particular the theme of "resistance through culture" (as opposed to outspoken dissidence). The thesis advanced by Lungu is that Romania's pre-communist authoritarian traditions accompanied Westernization, and therefore failed to rally the society around the notion of legality. Paraphrasing the author's conclusions, Cernat writes: "The 'voluntarist and elitist' projects of emancipation, the intellectuals' paternalistic Bovarysme, the destruction of the traditional model of the village and the partial assumption of modern values in the urban environment, the weakness of civil society have all facilitated adaptation to the Stalinist and, later, national-communist models [...]. Hence the duplicity, the lack of solidarity among the 'resisters' within a patriarchal, mostly rural, country..." Historian Cristian Vasile sees Lungu's study as akin to the contributions of anthropologist Katherine Verdery, in that it defines the writers' individual roles in "the process of transforming society and creating the new man", while serving as an investigation of social identity constructs. Vasile quotes the book for its conclusions about the impact of agitprop, socialist realism and censorship on Romanian literature and education, including a corroboration of the censors' own dissatisfaction with their activity, or the link Lungu establishes between the spread of atheism and the communist version of science education. A distinct section of the essay refers to the tradition of Jewish Romanian literature, and in particular to the Jewish impact on modernist literature. In his review of the chapter, Cernat discussed the "relevant—if at times exaggerated—conclusions" Lungu draws on minority authors having been pushed by their social marginalization into becoming the cultural avant-garde. In Cernat's view, Construcția identității... "imposes itself through span, seriousness and an irreproachable professionalism", but suffers from "a savant jargon which limits [its] reception to the circle of specialists."

Among the diverse accounts in Tovarășe de drum, Burța-Cernat singles out those of Babeți, who recalls the importance tote bags had for her family during two decades of communism, and Bittel, who speaks about the ideal female cook, as "the queen of sarmale". She is however critical of the fact that such a contribution was initiated by men, arguing that this impinges on its merits: "given the way in which they write here, the ladies invited to partake in this collective project leave the impression that they are striving to fall in line with the rules of a game, [...] to confirm [...] the already consolidated idea about them: the idea of difference—much too essentialist (and it is biological essentialism that is involved here)—, the idea that [...] they see the world, politics included, different from humanity's masculine majority." As part of this comment, she also argues that the book is excessively indebted to concrete economic aspects which women found especially challenging, whereas the "generically human" intellectual needs are "placed in brackets". Chivu, who saw the work as fluctuating between the seriousness of Ruști's account and Babeți's humorous recollection, believed Simona Popescu's contribution, which describes communist experience as "laughing out of pity", to be "the most balanced". In reference to the entire text, and in particular accounts of the ban on abortion, he argues: "all [its] female authors fundamentally speak about the same thing: the torment of being a woman, between the frustration of having one's intimacy forbidden and the efforts of illicit femininity." Babeți's account was also viewed with interest by journalist Florentina Ciuverca, who also drew attention to Ruști's story about how, despite the official campaign against abortion, a doctor preemptively subjected her to curettage over a case of vaginal bleeding.

As of 2009, Lungu's work had been translated into nine languages, including a critically acclaimed French-language version of Raiul găinilor (Le paradis des poules, Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 2005). In its Spanish translation, published in 2009, Sînt o babă comunistă! was included by El País daily in a "best of" chart for humorous literature. Also in 2009, a chart compiled by the satirical and lifestyle magazine Academia Cațavencu ranked Lungu 46th among the "50 sexiest Romanian intellectuals". During the 2016 parliamentary election, Lungu ran for and won a seat in the Romanian Senate on the lists of the Save Romania Union. He subsequently left his prior position as director of the Museum of Romanian Literature.

Commenting on 2008 reprint, Ciotloș argued "a permanently invoked Cheta la flegmă of 1999 has become, four years later, a permanently appreciated Proză cu amănuntul", describing the fragments of reviews collected by Lungu as "unbelievably high". Cernat took a more negative view of the new edition, writing that, while the original stories were still relevant, they "only seems to have been republished in order to complete the author's 'polyvalent' profile". The reportage piece detailing Lungu's trip to Transnistria notably depicts the preservation of Soviet and communist symbolism throughout the region, the officially sanctioned imposition of Moldovan Cyrillic even to the point where schoolteachers use it for transliterating French-language texts, and the religious aspects of local sports. According to Ciotloș: "The ideology of the 50s appears to have been frozen here for more than half a century."

Tovarășe de drum, the oral history collection coordinated by Lungu and his colleague Radu Pavel Gheo in 2008, groups together the testimonies of 17 intellectual women with various social backgrounds, all of whom reflect back on totalitarian pressures. The list mostly includes professional writers, among them Adriana Babeți, Carmen Bendovski, Rodica Binder, Adriana Bittel, Mariana Codruț, Sanda Cordoș, Nora Iuga, Simona Popescu, Iulia Popovici, Doina Ruști and Simona Sora. According to Bianca Burța-Cernat, the study, part of a "war on silence", falls in line with earlier contributions in this field—particularly those of Gabriel Horațiu Decuble, Doina Jela and Tia Șerbănescu. Marius Chivu also underlines their subject's proximity to Cristian Mungiu's award-winning film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The narratives often focus on the presence and use of mundane objects, from Western contraband items such as condoms and fragrance, to monopoly products of the state economy.

A resident of Iași, Dan Lungu is married and the father of two. One of the first authors from the post-Revolution period to collect a steady profit from literary contributions, he invested his money into a chalet on the outskirts of Iași. He visited France in 2005, invited by the Belles Etrangères cultural exchange program, and, in 2007, returned as a Writer-in-Residence at the Villa Mont Noir, Marguerite Yourcenar's birthplace. He was twice nominated for the European Commission's Jean Monnet Award for Literature in 2008. The target of much public interest, Sînt o babă comunistă! was considered for a film adaptation by Romanian director Stere Gulea.

Writing in 2005, French reviewer Alexandre Fillon argued that Raiul găinilor proved a "hilarious" read, whose plot "says a lot about the Romania of yesterday and of the present." However, he also wrote that the work "did not receive critical unanimity". In contrast, Terian defines the reaction of Romanian reviews as "virtually unanimous adhesion".

In 2003, Lungu published three books of essays on literary theory and microsociology, titled respectively Povestirile vieții. Teorie și documente ("Life Stories. Theories and Documents"), Construcția identității într-o societate totalitară. O cercetare sociologică asupra scriitorilor ("The Construction of Identity in a Totalitarian Society. A Sociological Study on Writers") and Cartografii în tranziție. Eseuri de sociologia artei și literaturii ("Transitional Cartographies. Essays of Art and Literary Sociology"). Also that year came a second work in drama, Nuntă la parter ("Wedding on the Ground Floor"), and a reprint of Cheta la flegmă under the title of Proză cu amănuntul ("Retail Prose"), which also featured a dossier of critical commentary from all sides of the literary scene and an account of his visit to Transnistria, a breakaway region of Romania's neighbor Moldova, governed as an unrecognized state. They were followed in 2004 by the novel Raiul găinilor. A second volume of short stories, titled Băieți de gașcă (Romanian for both "Boys in a Gang" and "Good Fellows"), saw print in 2005. After joining fellow Club 8 member Gheo in authoring a study of social history and microsociology, investigating impact of communist rule on Romanian women, published in 2008 as Tovarășe de drum. Experiența feminină în comunism ("Female Fellow Travelers. Female Experience under Communism"), Lungu returned to fiction with the 2009 novel Cum să uiți o femeie ("How to Forget a Woman").

Povestirile vieții, Lungu's scientific study of 2003, also marks his preoccupation with oral history as a path to investigating Romania's communist past, in particular the 1965-1989 regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Paul Cernat commends the work for breaking with the pattern of similar post-1989 recoveries, which mainly focus on interviews with political personalities. In contrast, Lungu's book centers on three study cases from working class environments—Florentina Ichim, Vasile Ariton and Petre Jurescu—whom the regime took pride in claiming were its support base. Their retrospective images of the era vary significantly, fluctuating between nostalgia and virulent anti-communism. However, all three witnesses recall having themselves resorted to alternative and illicit mechanisms of survival or self-promotion, in particular theft and political corruption. In his commentary on the interviews, Lungu concluded that, in some cases, the image of workers' lifestyles as offered by the propaganda apparatus was real, "contrary to our expectations". He added, to Cernat's agreement: "Overturning that which was officially stated during the epoch is not indicative of the real state of things and only drags us down into another ideology [...]. That is why we have said: back to the facts!" In his review of the book, literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu resonated with such observations, noting their revelatory aspect: "once confronted with the accounts [...], I convinced myself once and for all that the things which, under Ceaușism, I could still believe united us into a solidarity of suffering, are as false as can be. That is, even though we waited in grueling queues, in the same cold, for the same food rations, an ocean existed between the proletariat [...] and the intellectuals, between 'base and superstructure'. We were simply put two worlds, not just figuratively, but also effectively. There was nothing for us to sell and steal, whereas they had access to the circuits of theft, to the web of programmed lawlessness."

At the same time, Dan Lungu's literary contributions adopt a number of traits which have been defined as postmodern. These aspects include Lungu's parodic take on clichés and commonplace ideas, a process which, according to Ursa, results in "cultural short-circuits". His prose is also placed in connection to the debates surrounding the Postmodern nature of the Optzeciști, writers who debuted a decade before Lungu, but whose contribution is seen as influential on the young literary scene. Lungu is a successor to the Neorealist group among the Optzeciști, and seen by Moldovan literary critic Iulian Ciocan as less indebted to "the Postmodern paradigm". Writing in 2000, Ciocan argued: "Dan Lungu's debut is remarkable because the young writer does not frantically embrace the Postmodern technique and ontology, but uses them only to the measure where they lend more authenticity to his prose." A similar point is made by Cristian Teodorescu, himself one of the Optzeciști, who parallels Lungu's storytelling techniques with those developed before 1989 by Mircea Nedelciu. Commenting on Lungu's relation to a larger historical and stylistic context, Burța-Cernat wrote: "the prose writers of the newer category, the 'social anthropologists', do not aim to reinvent the world by capturing it within fabulous scenarios, but merely to describe it. They operate with a lens, a microscope [...], avid for describing its textures and the most anodyne of its details." This "minimalist" tendency, she noted, falls in line with 1980 authors—Nedelciu, Teodorescu, Sorin Preda, Ioan Groșan—, and also includes Lungu's colleagues Stoica, Teodorovici, Radu Aldulescu, Andrei Bodiu and Călin Torsan. A distinct view is held by Cristea-Enache, who views Dan Lungu as one of the authors who parted with both "the endless ironical games" of the 1980 generation and the "harshness of 1990s naturalism", while avoiding "aesthetic compromise".

The first volume bearing Lungu's signature saw print with Editura Junimea in 1996: a poetry collection, it carried the title Muchii ("Edges"). His stories, including Buldozeristul ("The Bulldozer Operator"), winner of the Editura Nemira prize for 1997, saw print in various venues during the late 1990s. Lungu also debuted as a dramatist, his work being included in two anthologies of young Romanian theater. The first among these writings is the 1995 Lecție. Sau ceva de genul acesta ("A Lesson. Or Something like That"), first performed in 2002 by Bucharest's Green Hours fringe theater under the name of Cu cuțitul la os ("A Knife Cut to the Bone"); the second such text, published in 1996, was called Vinovatul să facă un pas înainte ("Will the Guilty Man Take One Step Forward"). Having made his editorial debut in short story with the 1999 collection Cheta la flegmă, he regularly published new works of fiction and cultural analysis over the following years. Between 2001 and 2002, he took over as editor in chief of Timpul.

Lungu developed a passion for writing from a young age, but debuted in literature only in the early 1990s. In 1996, he and several other Iași-based authors founded the literary society Club 8, and he consequently came to be seen as its main theorist. Among those who frequented the circle during the following years were authors of various schools, such as Constantin Acosmei, Șerban Alexandru, Radu Andriescu, Michael Astner, Emil Brumaru, Mariana Codruț, Gabriel Horațiu Decuble, Radu Pavel Gheo, Florin Lăzărescu, Ovidiu Nimigean, Antonio Patraș, Dan Sociu and Lucian Dan Teodorovici.

Dan Lungu (Romanian pronunciation: [dan ˈluŋɡu] ; born September 15, 1969) is a Romanian novelist, short story writer, poet and dramatist, also known as a literary theorist and sociologist. The recipient of critical acclaim for his short story volume Cheta la flegmă ("Quest for Phlegm") and his novels Raiul găinilor ("Chicken Paradise") and Sînt o babă comunistă! ("I'm a Communist Biddy!"), he is also one of the most successful authors to have emerged in post-1990 Romanian literature. Lungu's literary universe, which mainly comprises "microsocial" images of life under the communist regime and during the subsequent transitional period, bridges a form of Neorealism with Postmodernism. Often included among a group of authors who signed their first major contracts with Polirom publishing house, he is also seen as a distinctive voice from his adoptive provincial city of Iași.

With the ample first-person narrative Sînt o babă comunistă!, Lungu explores the theme of nostalgia and its pitfalls. Through introspection and flashbacks, the volume depicts the disorientation and anguish of Emilia (Mica) Apostoae, an aging woman whose longing for the childhood and youth she spent under the communist regime make her block out negative memories of the period. According to Mihaela Ursa, the novel builds on two "extremely productive" sources, "literature about childhood (fed by the tremor of retrospection) and the literature of 'the innocent' (of picaresque extraction)." In Soviany's view, the text recalls the works of Moldovan author Vasile Ernu and elements from classic works in Romanian literature (from Ion Creangă's Childhood Memories to Marin Preda's Moromeții), while Axinte believes it a synthesis of Lungu's own narrative techniques, seeping into "a kind of discourse objectification that has rarely been frequented in recent times." Ciotloș places stress on the work's reworking of communist stereotypes. He argues that Emilia Apostoae's early biography, in particular her migration from village to urban center, assimilates a theme from socialist realism ("the prose works produced and expired during the 1950s"), while the aspects of narrative language incorporate the diverse avatars of speech under ideological pressure, from the "parental and always costly discussions" confronting politically appointed supervisors and their nonconformist employees to subversive forms of Romanian humor and the "wooden tongue" of official speeches. Spread out between these fragments of authentic speech are Lungu's own observations, which prompt Ciotloș to argue: "[...] this is where [the novel's] originality can be found, in the rare moments when he decides to intervene. When he blocks out the verbal stream to produce a funny remark, when he stretches a joke over several chapters, when, instead of diacritics, he places on the cover a majestic and Soviet five-cornered star."