The Boyarism is a literary manifesto and concurrently a razzia.

It’s the time to think and to write in a boyar’s style: with force, vigour, elegance, nobility and colour. We propose ourselves to till the poetic literarity and literality. We understand that we have to put good use on the enunciative poetry but also on the stylistic load one. What concerns us is the originality, the recipe’s renouncement, the manner’s wrecking. The writing based on assessed recipes, not even invented, has weeded the Romanian literature in the last fifteen years. We believe in rhythm burst, velocity, realism and transfiguration.

Enough with all this vassalage toward the American poetry, vassalage that is hardly sustained by the linguistic illiteracy, by twanging a poor American English rime and the absence of opening unto other foreign languages! We want to get back to the great European literature, to the western order and system and to the ontological pep of the eastern literature’s personage. It is necessarily the recovery of universal inspiration, the re-launching of aesthetic spirit – spirit able to detect the beautifulness, wherever it may hide. We need an art without minor artifices, without stylistic load present as lumber. The text is supposed to be the message support; the distance between significant and signified must be diminished. The construction of literary production must be strained through the dynamism of writing manner.

We want to see the sinews and poetry’s muscles. The sarcasm needs to be completed with humour and irony. We vote for irony, as it’s been theoretically developed by R. Rorty, aware of the fact that we live in an affinities’ world. Now is the moment of poetry’s renaissance, of lyricism, Eros, mysticism, charm, yarn and curse. Let’s sedate the schizophrenic art! We don’t want to get back to the hierarchic rigidity of the modernism. We recommend the annihilation of the chaos brought in the last period by postmodernism, by advancing from the periphery unto the centre. It’s been enough lingering in the periphery’s phlegm.

We approve the vitality of the suburb, not the peripheral unstrungness. Let’s sweep away the modernism’s illuminate illusions, through the disruption of the centre or through its multiplication. Without getting drunk with transmordernism’s cold water, we temporarily linger in a neutral area. Until we get out from chaos, at least let’s experience a monumental postmodernism! The ascending way of the volute is the one that arouses our artistic elements.

We don’t have mentors interested on the power of the cultural administration, which invent and put in circulation some names just because later these names to become their vassals, neither critics whose enthusiasm has roots in the notoriety complexes against their colleagues. We feel attached on the classic and contemporary Romanian literature; we don’t deny it just to draw somebody’s unhappy real attention on us. We are glad to have near some writers that are more or less frameable in three major generations, valuable authenticated, who we share the contemporaneity with, the generations of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Hereabout them we don’t sense any blight, neither any anxiety. The canon is our starting marker of value for tackling the innovation.

As a principle, when we’ll have to dispute something, we’ll keep in mind the actions, the ideas and the projects of that one that will determine us to do it. We’ll not dispute his cultural value, as nowadays is done to get out as easier possible from a legitimacy complex. This will happen only when we would contribute more than him at the Romanian literature’s patrimony.

The boyar’s art is a manorial, generous and massive one. Not the gang spirit, narrow and coward, represents us, but the respect for value, in any form it may be. The boyar is a knight, an aristocrat. His distinctive feature is trust, remarked as well by Nicholas Steinhardt at Jesus Christ, when He’s speaking about indulgence. The boyar imposes through its contempt about envy and flattery. What counts for us are the ideas of friendship, the faithfulness and detaching of the artistically made-up meanness. The boyar isn’t a dandy or a coxcomb climber. He is an agonistic being that is ready to die fighting for his persuasions and principles. The boyar is the one that has a strong writing manner, thinks freely and doesn’t suffer of any complex. He is nonchalant both in saloon and in suburb.

The time has come for the generation without access to their country to bust out. We are the last generation. We are the ones whose Revolution has been stolen, we know how to cherish the freedom because we fight and, chiefly, we’ll fight for it without asking privileges in turn. We don’t trade with the fundamental yearnings of a human condition. We’re looking for the cosmopolite and critical spirit of Junimea. We are agonists in an agonistic space – an arena for the fight against the cloyingness and brutishness. We don’t want to become charmed by the paunchy consumption of the late capitalism, that Habermas’ Spätkapitalismus. We call to join us: those that preceded us and those that will succeed us – all which suit themselves in our goals.

The art produced without cultural matureness is a whim. We want to exploit the Romanian language’s resources, to valorize the folklore, even the urban one. We wish for a culture “where the mediocre-utilitarian etymology and syntax won’t be suitable anymore”, a culture controlled by the “sky-scraper verb” (Ilarie Voronca). For fifteen years the town has been exploited only fractionary, in a phrenetic and unilateral manner. It’s time for imagination’s riot, for finding a way out from sewers, from filthy hostels and buses full of obsessional people.

We crave for an atticist, solid and pungent prose. Enough with the idiosyncratic, groping and schizophrenic Asian style! We’re wearied by the narcissism of the inexperienced authors, by the subcultural exhibitionism of the so-called novelists. We want to revive the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian, the briskness of the short story and short reel. The novel must be urgently taken to the intensive therapy and needs to be inoculated against the low linguistic budget pornography.
The firm word must be absorbed within the text; otherwise we have a delight in the spermatic-menstrual terribilism. From the underground stories, those from the “small alley”, written by Ion Creanga, the pornographic vocabulary has devolved to the commonest oath. The slang has been deformed by the lack of linguistic imagination, until it ended like a poor stiffened jargon. We have to regain the joy of storytelling, of building and testing. Let’s examine the puppeteer’s craftsmanship! Using a dynamic technique, able to transform the lecture into a mind’s performance, we will succeed to impose what we utter now. In these queer times we practice literature as an extreme sport. Enough with the ghetto brawl mess, enough with the whimpering authenticity!
We long for a complex, plausible authenticity sustained by a textual playfulness. Let’s explore the real and less the reality! Verisimilitude instead of mimesis! This was welcome after the 80’s intellectualism. Now, when we don’t have any complexes and shyness left, we are enabling to attack other themes as well. We want to broaden the horizon and to have an original approach. The youngsters must not supply, nor buy the second-hand art.

We aren’t necessarily integralists, but supporters of creation in its most dynamic and newest shapes. After avant-garde’s post-Decembrist mimicry, has come the time of experimenting. So far, this was predictable all the time. The major art will emerge as a normal sequel.

We must say “no” to the modernist functional art, “no” to the international style, “no” to the petty business manner and to the bootlicking. Let’s do an ecologic art! Let’s rush along the highways, and not to be afraid of the dusty country roads. Let’s drain the art’s frowsty air voyaging by sailing ship, by dirigible and supersonic jet!

To mimicked analysis we prefer the synthesis. We get back unto the syncretic origin of art. We’re wearied of bad pop, rap, hip-hop and house sonorities. We want our works to have symphonic tonalities, to be frisky like a bagatelle, inflaming as a bolero, rebel as a rock hit and subtle as a jazz tune.


Paul Bogdan
Radu Herinean
Felix Nicolau
Marius Marian Şolea