Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu- in search of the intimate diary from the beginning of the 19th century

Abstract

In the pioneering stage of the intimate diary, each author discovers the species on his own. The rules of diary writing are not difficult to follow, and foreign models offered the Romanian writer several alternatives to follow. Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu's diary does not summarize the facts, but obeys the law of narrative. The writer recounts a dramatic moment in his biography, the way he entered military service. Fiction is found in the text, although the events related have a factual basis. In this diary there is a gap between the time of experiencing the events and the time of recording them. Although the starting point of the diary is the events experienced by the author, it is not a conventional one, but a fragment of a picaresque novel. In a unique way, the text respects the "autobiographical pact" theorized by Philippe Lejeune, in the sense that there is a complete identity between the author, the narrator and the protagonist of the events presented. The writing proves important, as it contains one of the first meditations in Romanian literature on the poetics of the genre, the intimate diary sliding towards the autobiographical narrative.