Aesthetic affinities and political divergences between Italian and Romanian Futurism

In the period 1909-1930, Romanian avant-garde literature was heavily influenced by Italian Futurism and responded to the Italian movement in a complex process of adaptation and critical reflection. This paper presents the main phases and some of the modalities, themes and products of Romanian avant-garde literature and assesses to what degree it was influenced by the aesthetic programme of Italian Futurism. The first part discusses Marinetti’s relations with the Romanian literary world between the years 1905 and 1909 and examines a number of texts, including the “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, that appeared in the Romanian national press in 1909. The second part presents a corpus of manifestos, essays, poems and reproduction of paintings that were published in Romanian literary reviews. A third section is dedicated to the birth of a Romanian avant-garde after 1924 and its “Integralist” project of fusing the foreign stimuli of Constructivism, Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism etc. into a typically Romanian ‘mélange’. The last part of the paper focusses on Marinetti’s visit to Bucharest in 1930 and shows how, despite the opposite political choices made by the Futurists and the Romanian avant-garde in the course of the 1920s, he was given a celebratory welcome and how he was praised in many laudatory articles as a distinguished writer with innovative skills in the aesthetic field.