Duty or/and freedom in Rodica Iulian's 'Le Repentir' and 'Les Hommes de Pavlov'

Like several other European countries, including Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, Romania was for many centuries deprived of independence, having fallen victim to the inter-continental colonialism of the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. After a brief spell of freedom, fully regained only in 1918, at the end of the Second World War Romania found itself once again under foreign domination, this time by being included in the Soviet zone of influence. Due to the link between the concepts of national and linguistic identity, championed by German philosophers such as Leibniz, Lessing, Herder or Fichte and later propagated by Romanticists throughout Europe, writers in countries deprived of political autonomy were traditionally perceived as responsible for kindling their compatriots' love of the native soil, tradition and language and were expected to play the foremost role in their nations' struggle for political, cultural and linguistic self-determination. The nineteenth-century legacy of utilitarian literature, in tandem with the politicised role of art under Communism, gave rise to the notion that artists, and writers in particular, ought to turn their work into a platform for combating repressive regimes.