JOURNAL OF ROMANIAN LITERARY STUDIES Issue no.6/2015 108 VIRGIL DUDA – A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MATURE MAN Sorina CHIPER “Al. Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi Abstract: It is a rather regrettable fact that Romanian literature produced beyond the borders of Romania remains relatively unknown, unless it is supported and promoted by steady marketing efforts. This holds true for literature written by Israeli authors of Romanian origin who, despite their long presence in the so new and so old country of Israel, have chosen to write and publish in Romanian. Virgil Duda is probably the most prominent among the living authors of literature in Romanian, produced in Israel. This article aims to retrace his ars poetica, his portrait of a mature artist who has written himself, a la Flaubert, in the many writer-characters that he has created. Keywords: vocation, consciousness, rupture, intertextuality, writing. Introduction: the autobiography of a rupture In Alvis si Destinul (Alvis and Destiny), the main character argues that in every man’s life there is a moment of rupture which marks one for eternity (Duda 1993: 6). România, sfîrșit de decembrie (Romania, the End of December) (1991), Virgil Duda’s most autobiographical work, maps precisely this moment of breakage. Written at the recommendation of his brother, the literary critic Lucian Raicu, Romania, the End of December is the first book that Virgil Duda published after he settled in Israel, at the end of 1988, and it attempts to explain for, presumably, a foreign audience, how it was possible that Romanians had put up for so long with the Communist regime. On a first level of interpretation, the book documents the final years of Communism, the terror and tragedy of the everyday, the personal survival strategies that allowed some to have access to basic supplies such as hot water or food. Unlike other authors who put forth the idea that Romanians deserved, more or less, to suffer under communism because there was something in their DNA, as a nation, that made them obedient and compliant with perpetrators, Virgil Duda suggests that communism seeped through recent Romanian history and developed a whole system of terror and oppression that could not be shaken off easily. In his view, communism survived and grew so strong because it relied on an all-pervasive mechanism of lies, silences, threats and intimidations, ranging from the lack of public information about problems that citizens were faced with up to the terror techniques that party activists were using to extract information from unsuspecting suspects. As a system of intimidation and terror, communism was not a Romanian phenomenon; it could have settled in other countries as well, with similarly devastating consequences. Yet more than providing an autopsy of Romanian society just before the outbreak of the Revolution, Romania, the End of December retraces Virgil Duda’s own internal rupture,