THE “NEW AUTOBIOGRAPHY” IN 1930S ROMANIA:
M. BLECHER, THE ILLUMINATED BURROW
(Abstract)

This paper discusses Blecher’s prose, especially his last book, The Illuminated Burrow (1971, written in 1937-1938), which brings forth a (comparatively) new conception of literature as the space where fiction and autobiography meet, pursuing a deeper commitment to the “truth” of confession and, in the process, elaborating a new vision of the human psyche. Blecher’s critique of the autobiographical discourse is presented in its main aspects and the type of narration it produces is analysed. Blecher’s autobiographic writing is then compared to other groundbreaking contemporary works (André Breton’s Nadja and Michel Leiris’s L’Âge d’homme), in an attempt to see how these autobiographies from the proximity of surrealism transformed the genre.

Keywords: autobiography, surrealism, literature of authenticity, “autobiografiction”.