Aspecte şi direcţii literare

We are offered today, printed in volumes, the almost complete activity of N. Davidescu as a literary journalist, in which articles on general aesthetics and current cultural issues, public stances, literary chronicles, profiles of writers, tribute or commemorative articles, i.e. all the writings that are in one way or another related to literature, are collected. Through his presence and constancy, N. Davidescu established himself as a promoter of Romanian symbolism from "Noi simbolistii?" to "The Aesthetics of Symbolist Poetry". He brought Ştefan Petića to the fore by posthumously collecting his work in a volume; published portraits, medallions about Alexandru Macedonski, Iuliu Cezar Săvescu, D. Anghel; wrote welcome chronicles to "Plumb" and "Poems" by T. Stoika. In the same light journalistic style of a good connoisseur of French literature, he tried to impose on us the names of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Remy de Gourmont, Emil Verhaeren, Paul Verlaine, Jean Moréas. In "The Aesthetics of Symbolist Poetry" he is the first Romanian critic to note that symbolism is a "successor to idealism" with roots in post-Kantian philosophy and Fichte's thought, an idea that will be amply demonstrated in Albert Beguin's famous book, "The Romantic Soul and Dream" from 1936. He is the one who searched for "the underground current that forms the circulation basin of symbolic ideas" and attached it to this "basin", as a profound precursor, to Eminescu, in a way dethroning Alexandru Macedonski from this position of precursor and promoter, adhering only to the French formula, external however.