Abstract: After recording a “syncope” during the first decade of transition, against the background of the inflation of memorial narratives, of the media explosion and of an “imaginary crisis” (J.-J. Wunenburger) closely related to political, social and economic crises, the Romanian prose (particularly the novel) achieves, during the first half of the 2000s, a significant revival. It is the moment of a true “return of the repressed” that reflects, within the obsessive themes of this prose, on the one hand, the “clash” of – both cultural and political – transitional utopias and, on the other hand, the conflict between this utopias and the post-communist “disenchanted” world. It is also the case of the “apocalyptic” novel of Bogdan Suceavă, ‚Coming from an Off-Key Time‘ (2011 [2004]), a parable about the failure of “the re-enchantment of the world” in the Romanian early 1990s, in which the author deconstructs the mechanisms of the transitional utopias, denouncing their inadequacy to reality, by means of both parody and anti-utopian satire.

Keywords: post-communism, imaginary crisis, political and cultural utopias, anti-utopian satire, parody