Hunting Lizards in Romania

Abstract

During the communist regime, but particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, a significant portion of the critical discourse expressed in Romanian literature took the form of “lizards.” The lizard was a type of short, highly codified, oblique text, often humorous or ironic, “planted” in a seemingly innocuous literary piece. This article serves a double purpose. Its first half is an attempt at literary paleontology: an outline of the origins, evolution, and morphology of the Romanian lizard, particularly in relation to humor and satire. The second half is an illustration of the lizard “in its natural state,” so to speak—an analysis of 2084: A Space Epic and Planet of the Mediocres, two short satirical science fiction novels by the Romanian writer Ioan Groşan, both published shortly before 1989.