From "Estetica Basmului" by George Călinescu. A translation

Abstract

Through the mastery of writing bibliographic anthologies about many Romanian authors such as Ion Creangă and Mihai Eminescu, Estetica Basmului (1965), George Călinescu’s structuralist work on the aesthetics of Romanian fairytales fashioned such a thorough exploration of common motifs that it earned him prestige among his peers. This type of literary analysis, while intended for a larger scholarly audience, also served as a type of personal communication between the author and the larger folkloric literary group he belonged to. In the preface to Estetica Basmului, Călinescu criticizes a wide array of scholars, from sociologists to stenographers alike, involved in folkloric studies as lacking a well rounded perspective. From the point of comparative literature, Estetica Basmului, employs a structuralist method to convey the universality of fairytale patterns and motifs. Despite its guise as a structuralist text, Estetica Basmului allows the reader to not only understand the importance of folklore in a pan-European literary sphere but also brings to light a genre that has been either mostly overlooked by other scholars or re-packaged so that its national roots has been thrown into ambivalence. Călinescu brings back nation into the analysis of fairytales and deems it as an obligatory study of contemporary life.