75 YOUNG MAN GOGA Răzvan Pârâianu * Abstract About the end of the century, a generation of young people witnessed a series of cultural mutations that altered the traditional ways of thinking society. Modernity, urban life, social immobility, political corruption, populism, militant literature, cultural nationalism, revolutionary art, etc. were quite a few ingredients of their experience. Ready to challenge the world view inherited form their parents, eager to ask for a more prominent role and leadership, they enrolled themselves in new cultural currents and political movements disseminating an illiberal and eventually authoritarian ethos in the name of their people. This happened all over Europe in the last decades of nineteenth century. In Transylvania, this generation experienced a particularly painful experience due to the specific mixture of ethnic and social cleavages, of liberalism and corruption, of political passivism and cultural radicalism. This paper analysis the literary beginnings of Octavian Goga, an prominent figure of this generation who was considered a symbol of the new aspirations nurtured by the young people in the first years of the twentieth century. It argues that the enthusiasm of the young generation for new forms of expressing themselves about the current public issues of the time was deeply rooted in a crisis of identity, which was solved in a manner that offered the fertile soil for radical ideologies and extreme movements of the next decades. Keywords: psychohistory, crisis of identity, fin-de-siècle, anti-modern, modernity, nationalism, populism, militant literature. The story of Octavian Goga began in a village at the footstep of the Carpathians, near the Romanian border of the Habsburg Monarchy. There, the young Octavian, the son of Father Iosif, undertook his first literary attempts. He was doubtlessly encouraged by his mother, Aurelia, who had her own literary aspirations and published a number of poems in Familia. There was a lovely period of a happy childhood for the young Octavian. Unfortunately, it did not last. He was nine years old when he had to leave his village to attend the Hungarian school in Hermanstadt/Sibiu. Goga came from a cultivated family for which education had a long lasting tradition. Yet, why they chose for young Octavian the Hungarian school is not clear. Most probably, it was its proximity of Sibiu, for which Răşinari can be consider a part of its outskirts. At the same time, it is possible that Father Iosif had in mind a future career for his son. Knowing better the Hungarian language would offer the young Octavian a better chance for a higher social status. This moment from September 1890 seems to * Lector univ. dr., Universitatea „Petru Maior” din Târgu-Mureş.