The “competitive memory” of the Romanian Revolution, which engendered antagonistic narratives within both the political arenas and cultural field, is also reflected in a significant number of novels in which 1989 as lieu de mémoire has been almost obliterated, whereas the events of December have lost their tragic dimension, being painted in grotesque colors by means of satire and allegory or by those of the “miserable realism”. In contrast with these fictions, the novel of Bogdan Suceavă, The Night when someone died for you (2010) restores the dimension of human tragedy – even if it preserve the topics of the “chaotic bloodshed” – through a profound affective and ethical engagement in the “individualization of history”, the Revolution being here memorialized within an exemplary story, incorporated in an autobiographical narrative. It is the story of an “absent”, and yet one of the most “implicated subjects” in the tragic events (the departed): a young soldier, Cristi (the symbolic double of the narrator-protagonist), who died the night of December 23, killed by a stray bullet. From this viewpoint, the novel accomplish a similar function to those cultural artifacts in which is activated the “prosthetic memory” whose ability of generating “empathy and social responsibility” is crucial in connecting readers, and especially young people, with “painful pasts”. In The Night…, these affective-imaginative links are going beyond the level of the individualization of history, as the novel integrate, at the same time, like all the books of Suceavă, an intertextual dimension, connecting historical with cultural and especially literary memory. Finally, The Night… comprise a metatextual level in which the introspections of the hero-narrator, his memories of recent military experience (which constitutes a second diegetic layer, and a “mirror” for the “film” of the Revolution), and his dialogues with other “implicated subjects” are mobilized in a “post-ideological” meta-narrative regarding the “ideologization of memory”, and the politicization and moralization of contested pasts. By this complex architecture, the “novel of memory” constructed by Suceavă is acquiring an “agonistic”, “multidirectional” dimension, despite the limitations of the autobiographical form.

Keywords: Romanian Revolution of 1989, multidirectional and prosthetic memory, individualization of history, implicated subject, autobiographical novel